The point is that its not any official but a Chief Minister( akin to Governor in the US) that is doing this. The message that he is putting across to all other Government officials is much more important than us being able to see if he is slacking off or not.
I think this is to score political brownie points, but it still an interesting idea. It comes in the wake of what has been a very eventful year in India against corruption[1] which included fasts by a prominent social activist to pass India's first ombudsman bill[2].
This is no political gimmick. I am from Kerala, where Oommen Chandy is CM, and can quite understand what he is trying to achieve. Mr. Chandy is a straight forward and no non-sense person who speaks his mind. And he has created enough enemies in doing so. Now there are quite a lot of people who blame him for corruption for no reason. This is his way to put an end to such blame game; way easier than denying all allegations against him.
To me the deeper point is that politicians are slowly waking up and responding to the will of the populace that votes them in. This may be a token gesture, but it is a huge step as a tacit admission that voter opinion matters to once-unaccountable officials.
Reminds me of when my friend got flagged by a cop and him being in a rush, just slowed down enough to pass a cash bill to the cop. The cop refused and asked my bud to pull over. When my friend asked what the problem was, cop goes "you wanna show this(bribing) to entire Mumbai? crazy guy." He proceeded to give my buddy a handshake through which money was passed.
It's just a trick to boost his "anti corruption" image, I presume.
You don't get bribes in the office, in a clear, visible way. It's sent through intermediaries, persons he trust. And even if you want to pay him in the office, which is never done, you could slip the money among papers or in so many ways which are not caught on camera.
I don't understand what we should expect to see.
A person who offers a big pack of money or a suitcase filled with dollars?
In India, it is known that officials in the government slack during office hours. Delaying of process for unworthy reasons. Numerous time-breaks and other infinite 'small' but aggregatively deterrent forms of behaviours in the office.
The camera moves the whole system a step forward. Transparency is more easily perceivable to the public now. The necessity of a sting operation in the office does not emerge. People can have a fresh perspective on the laws for the government officials.
Psychologically, this might build a better work environment. It has been shown that adding monitoring video cameras does add a certain form of placebo effect.
I hope the 'mantra' should be improvement, no matter how small it is. A complete revamp of the system is more like dreaming about humans taking over all the nine(eight eh?) planets, and that too in an year.
The corruption in India is a bit different. If you need a electricity connection for you home you need to pay a bribe. If you need water connection more bribe. If you want to run a hotel you need to take 375 permission and for each you have to pay a bribe (all these 375 permission need to be renewed every year, well most of them).
Even the poorest people who live less than $2 per day have to pay a bribe to get a certificate that says they are poor enabling them to take benefit of various social security schemes.
You don't get bribes in the office, in a clear, visible way.
This is almost certainly true, especially for major politicos. This is addressed later in the article in this snippet:
Sunil Abraham, the executive director of the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore, said he applauded Mr. Chandy’s webcams, even if the effort amounted to no more than tokenism.
“This type of tokenism is also quite useful,” said Mr. Abraham, predicting it might check the behavior of not only the chief minister, but also his underlings and the powerful executives and politicians who come to visit him.
Of course, he noted, if people are intent on paying bribes, they could probably still do it outside the office.
Mr. Abraham said webcams might be a far more powerful tool if installed in police stations, drivers’ licenses offices, welfare agencies and other places where Indians interact with officials who sometimes demand bribes to do routine work.
The last paragraph is especially interesting, but it would never fly. There would be widespread opposition on flimsy grounds, and even if it were implemented, the webcams would magically malfunction for no apparent reason.
Every single government-run agency I've been to for any sort of work, or any run-in with the cops - I've paid a bribe.
Drivers' license, certificate of domicile, Certificate of marriage, Passport office, Train ticket inspector, Stopped by cops on road. Each case has its own story about how I was being yanked around by the players in question, and a not-subtle-at-all culmination in how they'd essentially just stick their hands out and say, "You know what to do.".
I would think that a reasonable way to combat this is to just pay these officials well, but I'm not sure that carries any conviction any more. It's a sadly endemic evil that will only be tackled with a widespread name-and-shame campaign (the likes of http://www.ipaidabribe.com).
> You don't get bribes in the office, in a clear, visible way.
Actually, you do. Numerous undercover TV news stories like on 60 Minutes, 20/20, and Dateline, as well as police sting operations, show exactly that.
Another huge counterexample to the "you don't get bribes in the office, in a clear, visible way" is the case of Peruvian President's right-hand man, Vladimiro Montesinos, who secretly video-taped himself paying hundreds of MILLIONS in bribes in his office:
We are indeed talking about about briefcases full of cash, containing hundreds of thousands of dollars each, and counting them out on a table in his office. Imagine what he would have paid for a product like Deniable Video,
so that he could keep his transactions secret. This is opposite to the Indian official's objective, who wants openness, but my point is that big bribes--at least sometimes--work exactly the way that you say they don't.
Why so critical, even if it is just for offices it makes a huge difference to the ease of taking/offering bribe, simply because of the knowledge that you are being watched. That is why we have surveillance cameras in offices.
Even if it is for the image of the official, it's a good start, if you don't agree at least give another solution, or stop being critical.
It is similar to cheating in US colleges..nay idiot can copy/paste an assignment...the real cheaters are getting grades nto earned through other means than having an assignment copied/pasted..
Posting an official record of visitor logs, like what the White House currently does (though imperfectly), would probably be more useful than a webcam.
It may not be since it leaves interpretation of intention of the visit up to you. With the webcam, although the feed may be muted, you could still find out more.
A more important step would be to make each and every communication between government officials public on their respective website. A letter written, a order passed, a note on the file. Government officials generally scan and put the documents as PDF which makes it difficult to search.
On top of that, we would also require some kind of automated technology to scan through these public data (reports, documents, videos, etc.) and detect anomalies. Without such automated detection, at the rate any govt. produces data, manual detection would be very slow and it would be improbable to catch corrupt deals.
I'm not sure I understand how a program could be made that scans through reports and videos and reports possible instances of corruption, at least without a few huge steps forwards in AI and image processing.
Gimmicks. The same guy is releasing a corrupt ex-minister from jail citing age as an issue. The minster spent maybe 40 days in jail after being sentenced to an year of imprisonment on corruption charges. You watch Indian politics for a while you get fed up.
Black/corrupt/illegal money in foreign banks is coming back to India via Hawala/FDI/FII/NRI/PIO investments.
This money is used to create jobs in the economy.
Your anti-corrupt agitation will not create new jobs in India.
It is because of corruption and rent-seeking attitude of government we dont see more and more business rising up in our country. That is the reason if India can generate Y jobs every year currently it is generating on 0.1Y. Only when we have more transparent and thinner government we can expect to have more jobs.
Black money is not going into renewable energy, medical research, startup funding, education and so on. It is going into real estate, government tenders and so on.
