Despite political party leaders expressing loud intent from every rooftop to eliminate it, government corruption in the southern state of Karnataka is acquiring the momentum of a runaway train with the state set to emerge as the most venal countrywide.

This gloomy prediction is prompted by the experience of a dedicated housekeeper with over three decades of faithful service in your correspondent’s family home. Her good fortune of having inherited a small land parcel in a village on the outskirts of Bengaluru — the country’s premier hub of new ICT (information communications technology) industry — has been substantially vitiated by the necessity of having to pay Rs.20,000 as bribes to several government officials to transfer the title to her name.

Leftists and socialists who architectured post-independence India’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy and administrative system invariably dismiss such reports of fence consuming crop as anecdotal. Yet despite the previous BJP state government having suffered severe electoral damage after it was branded a ‘40 percent commission’ administration following an open revolt of the Karnataka Contractors’ Association (KCA), it’s business as usual under the new year-old Congress government. In a recent media release, KCA claimed that every payment clearance file has to “travel” across 40 government “tables”. Forced to pay large and small bribes, civic contractors are obliged to cut corners in project execution.

Over half a century ago in his monumental three-volume Asian Drama, economics Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal warned government and society against ignoring the “folklore of corruption”. Left-liberals paid little heed while like the old man who refused to get off Sindbad the Sailor’s back after the latter helped him cross a swollen stream, India’s 20 million-strong neta-babu brotherhood is also unlikely to get off the country’s back, even as governments come and go.

Also read: Karnataka: Mess & messier