The Republic of Kickbacks

From fake medicines to rigged exams, corruption in India is no longer an aberration but the operating system.

Edward Gibbon, the chronicler of Rome’s long decline, once observed in one of his endlessly quotable lines: “Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.” What Gibbon saw as a signal of liberty warped by excess has, in today’s India, come to feel like a sign of liberty abandoned altogether. Whilst hardly something new, corruption in India today has metastasised and now coils itself around the nation’s most vital organs, feeding on its lifeblood with astonishing impunity.

In a country where the Constitution guarantees liberty and justice, the reality is that these ideals often get sold to the highest bidder. Today, the abuse of public power for private gain is not hidden in shadows but carried out in broad daylight with the tacit assurance that no real consequences will follow. It is no longer confined to an occasional unscrupulous officer or rogue politician but is systemic, institutional and tragically, cultural.

Consider the corruption in the accreditation of educational institutions. This is no mere paperwork forgery. It is an assault on the aspirations of millions. In February this year, the Central Bureau of Investigation arrested members of the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) including its chairman for allegedly accepting bribes to award high ratings to institutions such as the Koneru Lakshmaiah Educational Foundation. What was bought was not just a favourable report but credibility and legitimacy - the very scaffolding upon which students build their future.

This perversion of merit extends into competitive examinations, India’s brittle gateway to economic mobility. The cancellation of the 2024 UGC-NET exam, following credible evidence of widespread malpractice, was not just a bureaucratic failure but a moral one. A cybercrime unit linked to the Ministry of Home Affairs unearthed a racket involving paper leaks, bribery and organized cheating. At stake was not merely a test, but a contract of trust between the state and its citizens.

And then there is the eternally unholy nexus between banks and real-estate developers. The Supreme Court last month had expressed serious concern over how banks disbursed housing loans directly to builders, many of whom then failed to deliver on promised homes, while forcing buyers to continue paying EMIs. This is a particularly cruel betrayal. For many middle-class Indians, home ownership is a symbol of stability and personal progress. To see that dream hijacked by collusion and callousness is a wound not easily healed.

Even the country’s poorest are not spared. The Public Distribution System (PDS), once conceived as a bulwark against hunger, has become a sieve of spectacular inefficiency. An ICRIER study revealed that nearly 29 percent of the grains supplied by the Food Corporation of India never reached intended beneficiaries, resulting in a loss of Rs. 69,108 crore. Far more than just a statistic, it is the difference between hunger and nourishment for millions. This is unforgivable, given how much the Centre tom-toms its schemes.

Then there’s the matter of fake medicines, a story so grotesque it veers into the surreal. A system meant to safeguard the lives of the poor and the dispossessed has, perversely, become complicit in their endangerment. In Maharashtra, a chargesheet filed by the Nagpur Rural Police reads like the outline of a grim novel: an inter-state racket allegedly funnelled counterfeit and dangerously substandard antibiotics into government hospitals. The conspiracy spanned across Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand, with the spurious drugs traced back to a veterinary pharmaceutical lab in Haridwar. The proceeds, suitably, were laundered through hawala channels. Such episodes underscore a more unsettling truth that the very mechanisms erected to protect the vulnerable can be so easily hollowed out, turned against the people they were designed to serve.

The environmental cost of corruption has been no less devastating. From illegal mining to fraudulent environmental clearances, regulatory authorities have repeatedly failed to uphold the laws they were designed to enforce. The result is not just loss of forest cover or polluted rivers; it is a betrayal of future generations, a silent undoing of the social contract.

What links these episodes is not simply theft or inefficiency, but the collapse of institutional ethics. Corruption in India today is not merely about illicit wealth. It is about the sanctioned desecration of public trust. It thrives because of opaque processes, weak enforcement, bureaucratic inertia, and the absence of real deterrence. More damningly, it persists because we have normalized it by shaking our heads, shrugging our shoulders and moving on.

The solutions are both structural and spiritual. Transparency must be engineered into the system through digitisation, time-bound service delivery and robust oversight. Whistleblowers must be protected, not punished. Laws must be enforced not just to punish, but to send a message: that accountability is not optional. But these technical fixes are not enough. What India needs most is a cultural reset, a renewed belief in fairness, in public service as a noble calling, not a private hustle.

Gibbon, in his magnum opus ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ saw corruption as a symptom of freedom gone unchecked. In India’s case, it may well be a symptom of freedom insufficiently defended. The dream of a just, modern, democratic nation cannot survive if its soul is daily bartered in the open market. To fight corruption is not to chase perfection but to insist that our institutions be worthy of the people they serve. And that is a fight still worth waging.

(The author is a retired Indian Naval Aviation Officer and a geo-political analyst. Views Personal.)