‘Doing away with regulation may not end corruption’

Regulation of access to scarce resources usually gives rise to corruption but this does not mean that doing away with regulation will end corruption, said Prof Pranab Bardhan while speaking on corruption in India on Monday. He said that regulation was sometimes necessary.

Bardhan, who is professor of Economics at University of California, Berkeley, was delivering the 4th Pravin Visaria Memorial Public

Lecture organised by Gujarat Institute of Development Research (GIDR) at Ahmedabad Management Association building. The topic of the lecture was 'Corruption in India: When piety is not enough'.

He said regulation and the corruption that it breeds are complex issues and differ from country to country. On a jocular note, he quoted an Indian businessman as telling him over dinner in London that a bribe in any other Asian country will get your work done but this cannot be said with confidence about India.

Bardhan talked about various dimensions of corruption and elaborated on different ways of curbing it. Explaining the distinction between the corrupt and the illegal, he said that what is illegal in India could be considered legal in the US.

"It depends on the law of the land. It can be said that corruption in the US is in the making of laws, whereas in India it is in breaking of laws," he said.

He touched upon the size of bribes or the number of transactions. "We see traffic cops taking bribe but the amount collected by thousands of such traffic cops would be far less than the amount involved in the corruption that takes place behind closed doors in defense deals," he said.

Explaining the rise in corruption after decades of liberalisation in India, Bardhan said public resources had shot up in their market value which is the result of economic growth. "Hence their political allocation generates more corruption," he said.

Siddarth Varadarajan, editor, The Hindu, was the guest of honor at the lecture.