Probity in Public Life

The lack of morality in public life is endemic to India and it cuts across political parties . The recent case of human trafficking conclusively is probably the nadir of probity in public life. Violation of a moral code of conduct is rampant before any large election in India and as expected the media reported cases of use of money and muscle power in the run up to the UP elections . However in spite of bringing all of these into the public eye , nothing much has been achieved , and hence it would be fair to conclude that the people are becoming indifferent to these issues , which raises a very important concern for all of us – “ Does apolitical public activism in India have a place in its democratic process” .

The reasons for indifference could be many, the ones that come to my mind are :

a) Where do I get data on where the money comes from and how is it used. It’s an impossible task to get it from the governments records
b) What can I do? , and more importantly how does it matter
c) Things cannot be changed , so why bother

These responses do not augur well for the democracy, and while I am sensitive to the fact that data is incredibly hard to get in India, but in this post, I am trying to build a case for apolitical public activism against issues of transparency and corruption in public life.

In this context it would be interesting to learn from US, which uses a combination of websites to bring in this transparency

a) Opensecrets.org – A comprehensive website which reports the where the money is coming from, where it goes to, who gets the money, there is data on each state as well

b) Maplight.org –This website provides the connection between money and politics in the state of California

c) Congresspedia- A citizen’s encyclopedia on the Congress which anyone can edit

These new tools provide unprecedented levels of transparency, and also expose patterns of influence that otherwise would have remained invisible.

Most of us are aware that the US model cannot be replicated in India in its totality , because of legislative issues which do not ensure that data regarding funding gets recorded in a structured manner and collated at a national level , hence we maybe far away from implementing something like Opensecrets.org at this point in time . However if the judiciary can embark on a well meaning judicial activism and take the first steps towards ensuring that there are processes wherein every political party discloses its cash receipts and payments and then the data gets uploaded in a website , we would have started in our journey towards transparency .This could be followed by a detailed statement of expenses of the MP’s funds ….over time it possible to get the data in a central website like Opensecrets.org and then let the citizens use the data to make more informed electoral choices …