Between You & Me

WHAT SHALL we talk about today, friends? Hansie Cronje's self- serving and mawkish 23-page statement in which he more or less states that he learnt corruption first from the sub- continent? Or the mysterious case of a huge hard currency gift to a prominent politician in which action well-known businessmen would seem to be involved? Or a senior official whose assets were found to be phenomenally out of proportion to his income? Or a low- level clerk in a Revenue Office (I think) who swindled the treasury of Rs. 47 lakhs in the course of three months?

The above is just a week's haul of possible financial misdeeds - I say possible just to be on the safe side.

Obviously it is time to search our souls and examine our ethical values, of which we don't seem to have any, despite our professed, in fact vaunted, claim to be a society which holds morality high, and personal integrity the yardstick by which we measure one another. The truth of the matter is we have always been a corrupt society. If one may dare say so, since and before Chanakya's days - he recommended bribery as an essential part of statecraft. Corruption varies only in degree, from the 10 rupees or whatever a peon in an office demands to take in one's chit, to the hundreds of thousands that change hands over a government contract. I can't give other examples of corruption since I am really not familiar with the Byzantine ramifications of the activity. I have had neither the occasion to give a bribe nor take a bribe - smug and self-righteous as it may sound, but a fact - so, while I can understand the peon, clerk, linesman demanding and getting anything from Rs. 10 to Rs. 200, I have not got the foggiest notion of how deals in crores take place. I am one of those people who have seen a crore in print only. Any way, I am wandering. A single week in which a foreigner gives us a testimony as being teachers of corruption, in which disclosures of corruption by our high and mighty have left us gasping, in which it was shown that if he sets his mind to it, a clerk can swindle the exchequer, will, one hopes help us shed our illusions, and view our public life realistically.

A COUPLE of weeks ago I had raised the question of bank charges, and the rationale behind them. I particularly wanted to know why the charges should differ depending on the amount of the cheque, and why different banks seem to have different rates of computing them. I have had some responses from readers but nothing official yet.

I shall wait for another week and then share the information available to me with readers.

While on the subject of banks, the column receives fairly regular complaints about them. Recent ones have been about computerisation in banks.

One set of complaints relates to the fact that the computers rarely work all right, because of the poor training given to the operators, and the other to the fact that while computerisation has been done, and the employees' working hours consequently extended, in actual practice most of the staff, though they are in the premises of the bank, seem to stick to their old working hours.

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LOTTERIES. A closed subject to me, but here is what a reader has to say, in part: `The lotteries conducted by the States like Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and West Bengal appear to be above board, and I am afraid I am not able to say the same about the ones conducted by the States in Eastern India, including Bhutan. There are as many as 50 draws of these States daily with Manipur leading with 13. Incidentally all these lotteries target Tamil Nadu as the nomenclature would indicate - Tamil Lakshmi, Tamil Lakshmi Gold etc.'

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A SEVENTY-PLUS old lady writes to say that her grandson had been considered for a job on compassionate grounds (since his mother had been a Government employee when she died) by the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board. This was in 1993. So far no action has been taken.

Her appeals to the Chief Minister obviously never reached him, and her attempts to meet the Chief Minister personally were ``foiled'' by security men.

I think that this is a good case for the Chief Minister's personal consideration, and I will be happy to provide the name and address if called upon to do so.

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A CONCESSION of 3 per cent reservation in Government jobs has been available since 1970 or so for physically handicapped candidates. Subsequently in 1989 the Central Government issued orders extending the reservation concession to promotions from lower cadres. This was done evidently to encourage disabled workers.

Unfortunately this order of the Central Government has not been given effect to in the Railways where many deserving disabled employees are serving in the lower cadres for many years. While obviously safety factors would inhibit putting the disabled in certain kinds of jobs, there are lakhs of jobs in the administrative area which the handicapped can easily fill.

The concession of reservation in promotion can easily be extended to such offices where the disabled are already working in lower cadres. This is a plea to the Minister for Railways to extend the concession to disabled railway workers.

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I WONDER if we have had this story before, Parthasarathy, but if we have, I would advise all those who remember it just to gnash their teeth and let it go at that, and not waste postage telling me that they have heard it before.

Well, one morning when it was feeling particularly good, the lion decided to take a stroll through the forest. Whenever it met another animal, it beat its breast, and demanded to know who was the king of the forest. The animals fawningly replied that the lion was. Finally the lion ran into an elephant and asked it the same question. The elephant looked at the lion for a moment, then picked it up by its trunk, swirled it around a couple of times, then smashed it to the ground. As the lion was trying to get its breath back, the elephant asked it: ``Well, who is the king of the forest?'' The lion said: ``Of course you are, but you didn't have to make such a point about it.''

S. KRISHNAN

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