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Would you manage to remain clean and not siphon off a buck?

Well, that’s a question that woke up the Indian in me and set me thinking, but then, I thought that was no excuse to become corrupt.

For instance, in countries like Sweden, the US and the UK, ministers pass billions of dollars of funds and still manage to stay clean and take the benefits to the people.

We in India tend to have a cavalier approach towards life and think that if we are not affected directly why raise our voice. After all, let corrupt governments and officials empty the coffers to meet their lavish needs, why bother?

Let Raja make the government of India lose Rs 1.76 lakh crore or let Suresh Kalmadi drain the government of Rs 70,000 crore during the Commonwealth Games. As long as my money is intact, life goes on as usual.

Or when Anna Hazare protests, let’s be there in our jeans and snazzy Tees to show our solidarity to his movement. That has largely been our approach to life.

But if we have to take on corruption, we must stop being self-centred because that’s the only way forward towards a corrupt-free India.

Another way forward is to bridge the burgeoning gap between Bharat and India (the rich and the poor). At the drawing board level, things may look hunky-dory: For instance, India’s per capita income (or the average income per person a year) stands at an impressive Rs 50,000.

That means, if every Indian earned the same amount, we would have all made Rs 4,500 a month. So, what makes our per capita income look so imposing?

Well our private sector has become on par with its counterparts around the globe and industrialists like Mukesh Ambani, LN Mittal, Sunil Bharti Mittal and Anil Ambani have surged ahead in the Forbes list of the world’s richest and this has jacked up our per capita income substantially. But the poor have remained poor.

The fallout of corruption is that while one section of people tends to get richer, there is another lot that finds it difficult to get emancipated from the clutches of poverty.

To take corruption head on, we need to come out selflessly to uplift the poor. Corporate houses should set aside funds for their development (Currently, in the name of corporate social responsibility or CSR, corporates keep meagre funds for the poor).

Like in the US, where Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and wife Melinda have a separate foundation to bring the poor to mainstream life and have also pledged their wealth to the poor, we in India need someone to replicate that. But our industrialists have largely remained mum.

To uplift the poor, the government should allow corporates to adopt villages and give them tax sops for doing so. Instead of paying money to the government, corporates can route funds directly for development of the poor.

However, corporates (and even individuals) pay tax to the government kitty only to find out that some minister has spent Rs 2 crore on his seven-day trip abroad or a Raja has paved the way for a loss of Rs 1.76 lakh crore to the government exchequer or even a Sheila Dikshit is not guilty of fund misuse during the Commonwealth Games.

We remain helpless, only ridicule the government and then erase these incidents from our mind.

When we get our newspaper every morning, after reading the actual news on the paper, we are so thrilled with the frivolous Section II that we are keen to know what Bunty and Harish wore in Babli’s party or whether actor Imran Khan was staying near Lady Shri Ram College on his visit to Delhi and get a kick out of all this.

So, what if unemployed people near a North Bengal tea garden ate rats because they hadn’t the money to buy food or children died in droves of Japanese encephalitis in UP’s Gorakhpur district, life goes on as normal even as the administration takes its own time to tackle the situation.

These are issues that show how our citizens are helpless as they await aid from the administration, which is unperturbed by their misery. Can’t people come together and lodge their protest on these issues.

May be not one, but a flurry of protests could surely wake our governments (states and the Centre) from their deep slumber.

We say things like A great country like India or I love India… this has almost become a cliché now, and while saying or hearing such hosannas about our nation, do we ask ourselves whether we really love our nation or not?

When asked this question, we all reply in the affirmative. But are we actually patriotic?

To love our nation, we need to love our people. That’s what we don’t. The day we do, the day Bharat and India unite to battle corruption, we can look forward to a corrupt-free India, largely.