The Hindu Business Line : <I>The impolitic stand at Singapore </I><I> </I>

The problem of international assistance provided to needy countries being used, not to ameliorate the conditions of the poor, but "to line the pockets and bank accounts of the corrupt and the powerful" (to quote the World Bank President, Mr Paul Wolfowitz), sometimes in collusion with the Bank personnel themselves, has of late been assuming grave proportions.

An investigative report published in the April 3 issue of The US News and World Report says, `kickbacks, payoffs, bribery, embezzlement and collusive bidding plague Bank-funded projects around the world" and adds that more than 20 per cent of the Bank loans (or $4 billion) are siphoned off every year through corrupt practices.

In the last 12 months alone, the World Bank had to cancel loans to Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chad, Congo, Indonesia, Kenya, Uzbekistan and Yemen for being impervious to canons of rectitude. That India too figures in this shameful list with the Bank holding up more than $1 billion in loans for health sector projects must come as an ugly and painful surprise to many.

The scourge of fraud and corruption is now perceived to be menacing enough to warrant stern measures that will leave no scope for evasion by member-Governments. This is the motive force for the spectacular coming together at Singapore last month, prior to the meeting of the Development Committee of the World Bank-IMF, of as many as seven major multilateral conglomerates (the African Development Bank Group, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, European Investment Bank Group, Inter-American Development Bank Group, IMF, and the World Bank Group) representing almost the entire world financial community in the business of official development assistance, to moot a master plan to intensify the war on corruption.

Its contents naturally dominated the deliberations of the Development Committee attended by the Finance Ministers of member-Governments. At the core of the plan was the proposal to make clean and transparent governance a condition of eligibility for financial assistance.

At the very least, Governments disciplined this way will be exposed in the eyes of the people. It will help distinguish failed and failing states from those which are willing and able to take corrective steps. Besides, the welling up of people's wrath at the belying of their expectations due to want of resources might force the rapacious rulers to revert to accepted norms of good governance and even make them face severe punishment.

The status of India, ostensibly doing better than most other developing countries, has been topsy-turvy. It has for years been within the top 20 in corruption perception index and the bottom 20 in human development index. Disappointingly in this context, the Finance Minister, Mr P.Chidambaram, in his speech to his counterparts from other countries, came through as one who was lukewarm about the wisdom of the whole exercise. He even raised the bogey of zero development becoming an inevitable outcome of insistence on zero tolerance of bad governance and corruption.

India could have made a great impression at Singapore by declaring its whole-hearted and unconditional support to the action plan. What a pity that it lost a great opportunity to impress on the world community in unmistakable terms its determination to root out corruption from the body politic, and thereby, to signal other member-nations to emulate its example!

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