Saturday, October 22, 2005

How corrupt are we ?

Nation is about people and so i guess its about us.. How corrupt are we?

Transparency International has not one regular corruption index, but three. There is a Corruption Perception Index, a Global Corruption Barometer and a Bribe Payer's Index. What has just been published and reported in the media is the 2005 version of the CPI.

As TI makes clear, this is perception about corruption, as opposed to actual instances of corruption, captured in the GCB. Moreover, unlike the GCB, the CPI is not a public opinion survey. Responses are restricted to business people and country analysts. It is constructed such that scores range between 0 (highly corrupt) and 10 (highly clean). India obtains a score of 2.9, compared to 2.8 in 2004.

Incredible! Corruption in India is down

This gives India a mid-point rank of 88 among 159 countries; other countries bracketed with India are Armenia, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Gabon, Iran, Mali, Moldova, and Tanzania. Media reports have focused on the rank improvement from 90th in 2004 to 88th in 2005.

This must be seen in the context of only 146 countries being ranked in 2004. The other point to note is that TI has a threshold score of 3, and countries with scores lower than 3 (this includes India) are regarded as possessing serious corruption problems. About half the countries ranked have such problems.

Corruption has many angles. There is the big-ticket corruption associated with government procurement, including defence and elections. There is the smaller or petty variety of corruption associated with procedures and discretion at the petty functionary level.

The CPI's primary focus is the latter, particularly in the interface between enterprises and the government, with the interface between citizens and the government figuring more in the GCB. The positive correlation between corruption and economic development is obvious, although there may be debate about which is cause and which is effect.

In an earlier study on South Asia, TI estimated that if corruption levels in South Asia were to decline to the levels prevalent in the Nordic countries, the increment to GDP growth could be 1.5 percentage points. This may or may not be true, since many instances of corruption are transfer payments in national income accounting.

However, the fact that corruption imposes transaction costs and hurts the poor more, is obvious. A UN Convention against Corruption has been ratified and will enter into force in December 2005. This focuses more on cross-border issues.

Domestically, TI advocates public access to information about budgets, revenue and expenditure, increased resources for anti-corruption efforts, ratification of anti-corruption conventions, and civil society vigilance. These are desirable objectives, but implementation is fraught with problems.

Indeed, the UPA government's attempt to increase public expenditure, despite corruption and leakage, is defended by references to Right to Information Acts, decentralisation, and panchayat, as well as NGO involvement. True, there are some instances of success, including through e-governance.

But there is no obvious way to replicate and clone these throughout the country. And despite the UPA's talk of improved governance, little has materialised in terms of implementation.
The silver lining is the advent of information technology, which makes transparency, data analysis, and even plain access to documents and numbers much easier. In addition, IT has facilitated media attempts to capture corruption on film. The Indian score may well move to 3.0 in 2006.

Thanks to this article from Business Standard posted on rediff...
good one to read, i couldnt stop blogging it as i believe we the common people make the nation good or bad, so lets stop for a moment in our journey called life & think what we owe to the nation, if we want to make ourself proud for our nation, we need to take a step further & think about our contribution to it...

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Reading Article: H1-B bashing

Title: H1 -B Bashing

I reached home this evening early than i expected, i opted to browse the net as a pass time, to start with eweek.com was a good option,
while eyeballing through links & few articles published on eweek.com, i saw this link H1-B Bashing

Title looked compelling & i couldnt help myself diving into it, content was focussed on the H1-B bashing which is the news recently & i guess still is making the headlines on and off,seemingly debatable & a regular masala mix kinda article thought of blogging it for my avid readers :)

Pardon me readers, i wish not to be a judge this evening essentially on a sensitive topic like these, but yes since i have raised this up
i wish to publish my comments also, assuring self that this wont flare up any issues tonite...

Augmenting to the much awaited comments, i would be echoing Sivakumar, that As every good thing has bad thing in it, i would say reverse is also true...
i liked these lines from Sivkumar, where he tried putting his point..


"Consider the benefits due to these foreigners who came to the United States, many of them on H1-B visas: Sameer Bhatia, who founded Hotmail; Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google; Alfred S. Chuang, who founded BEA Systems; Vinod Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems; Vinod Dham, who designed the Pentium chip; Linus Torvalds, who invented Linux; Anders Hejlsberg, who architected the C# language; and James Gosling, who developed the Java language. Does Dobbs know the number of jobs that were created due to the efforts of these people?"

Sunday, October 16, 2005

Moments that fade away..

I am thinking of the moment that passed by...
moments faded in silence...staying away..away from all..

Its amazing to remain absent amidst the blabbering crowds...
just listening to the rhythmic tunes..lovely compositions..

Amazing to see the sight of loneliness..
liking the moments for solitude
moments..i spend for myself...its just for me..

stay aloof..even when i see the escape frm the haunting silence,
a choice to find the joy of reaching out..
but why cant i involve myself..
isnt it insanity to rejoice my solitude..
& its allowing me play to the tunes of joy...
whats pushing me to solitude.. wht inspires me...to be alone

questioning why i choose this way to spend the moments...
wht is it haunting me..not nostalgia...
nothing i could think of anything for the moment
whts keeping me aloof ..keeping me occupied...to myself
whts this silence of the moment all about....
i have no answer ..let it remain unanswered for this very moment......!!