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Eating Money: Corruption and its categorical ‘Other’ in the leaky Indian state

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2018

NAYANIKA MATHUR
NAYANIKA MATHUR*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, UK Email: nayanika.mathur@area.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article studies corruption in India through an ethnographic elaboration of practices that are colloquially discussed as the ‘eating of money’ (paisa khana) in northern India. It examines both the discourse and practice of eating money in the specific context of the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (NREGA). The article works through two central paradoxes that emerge in the study of corruption and the state. The first paradox relates to the corruption–transparency dyad. The ethnography presented shows clearly that the difficulties in the implementation of NREGA arose directly out of the transparency requirements of the statute, which were impeding the traditional eating of money. Instead of corruption being the villain it turns out that, in this particular context, it was its categorical Other—transparency—that was to blame. The second and related paradox emerges from an ethnographic examination of the processes and things through which development performance, corruption, and transparency are established and adjudged in the contemporary Indian state. Corrupt state practices and transparent state functioning are authoritatively proclaimed through an assessment of evidence—material proof in the form of paper—that is constructed by the Indian state itself. The push for transparency in India at the moment is not only leading to an excessive focus on the production of these paper truths but, more dangerously, is also deflecting attention away from what is described as the ‘real’ (asli) life of welfare programmes. Ultimately, this article contends that we need to eschew treating corruption as an explanatory trope for the failure of development in India. Instead of devising ever-more punitive auditing regimes to stem the leakages of the Indian state, this work suggests that we need a clearer understanding of what the state really is; how—and through which material substances—it functions and demonstrates evidence of its accomplishments.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 51 , Special Issue 6: Institutions and Economic Development in South Asia , November 2017 , pp. 1796 - 1817
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

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3 In addition to distinguishing corruption from non-corruption there has also been a move to establish gradations of corruption with attempts to establish where a particular practice might fall. The anthropology literature appears to have an inordinate focus on distinguishing between gifts and bribes, no doubt stemming from the discipline's historic concentration of the category of the gift. See, for instance, Adam Graycar and David Jancsics, ‘Gift Giving and Corruption’. International Journal of Public Administration, published online 7 June 2016. doi: 10.1080/01900692.2016.1177833; Ledeneva, A. V., ‘The Ambivalence of Blurred Boundaries: Where Informality Stops and Corruption Begins?’, Perspectives 12 (2014): pp. 19–22 Google Scholar; Rivkin-Fish, D., ‘Bribes, Gifts and Unofficial Payments: Rethinking Corruption in Post-Soviet Russian Health Care’, in Haller, D. and Shore, C. (eds), Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives (London: Pluto Press, 2005), pp. 47–64 Google Scholar.

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6 Interestingly, a parallel metaphor was in operation in nineteenth-century Siberian Russia discussed by Humphrey and Sneath where certain corrupt practices were described as ‘feeding’ (kormlenie). Humphrey, Caroline and Sneath, David, ‘Shanghaied by the Bureaucracy: Bribery and Post-Soviet Officialdom in Russia and Mongolia’, in Between Morality and the Law: Corruption, Anthropology, and Comparative Society (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 85–100, here p. 86Google Scholar.

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9 Anand also explores the leaky states of the municipal water infrastructure in Mumbai. The leaking out he studies is of the liquid resource of water. He notes the impossibility of ever being able to measure the loss of water. I too argue that it is impossible to measure the leakage of money out of the developmental state—and not, as in Anand's case with water, because of the quality of its substance. Anand, Nikhil, ‘Leaky States: Water Audits, Ignorance and the Politics of Infrastructure’. Public Culture 27, no. 2 (2015): pp. 305–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Parry, ‘“The Crisis of Corruption” and “the Idea of India”’.

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16 I am extremely grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for Modern Asian Studies who read the earlier draft version through the positing of two paradoxes. The positing of two paradoxes allows me, I hope, to make my argument clearer.

17 Mathur, Nayanika, ‘Transparent-Making Documents and the Crisis of Implementation: A Rural Employment Law and Development Bureaucracy in India’, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR) 35, no. 2 (2012): pp. 167–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mathur, Paper Tiger.

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22 Das, ‘Corruption and the Possibility of Life’.

23 Mathur, Paper Tiger.

24 Brennan, Lance, ‘The Development of the Indian Famine Code’, in Currey, Bruce and Hugo, Graeme (eds), Famine as a Geographical Phenomenon (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), pp. 91–112 Google Scholar; Mathur, Nayanika, ‘State Debt and the Rural: Two Historical Moments in India’, Anthropology News 54, no. 5 (2013): pp. e12–e21Google Scholar.

25 Surjit Bhalla, ‘Corruption with a Human Face’, Business Standard, 11 December 2004; Swapan Dasgupta, ‘Rename REGA as Corruption Guarantee Scheme’, Pioneer, 14 August 2005.

26 http://archivepmo.nic.in/drmanmohansingh/speech-details.php?nodeid=265, [accessed 17 July 2017]. The prime minister's speeches on the NREGA including the inaugural one on 2 February 2006.

27 The RTI provides that any citizen of India may request information from a ‘public authority’ or a ‘body of Government’ or ‘instrumentality of State’ with an injunction for an expeditious reply (maximum 30 days) from the government body. See http://righttoinformation.gov.in/, [accessed 17 July 2017].

28 Government of India, Ministry of Rural Development, Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), Third Edition (New Delhi: GoI, 2008). Social audit is understood to ‘be a continuous process of public vigilance’, or more specifically, ‘an ongoing process through which the potential beneficiaries and other stakeholders of an activity or project are involved at every stage: from the planning to the implementation, monitoring and evaluation’ (p. 61). Social audits are seen as ‘a means of promoting some basic norms in public matter’: transparency, participation, consultation and consent, accountability and redressal (pp. 61–2). Transparency, which figures as the first and key basic norm in public matter is described thus: ‘Complete transparency in the process of administration and decision making, with an obligation on the government to suo moto give people full access to all relevant information’ (p. 61).

29 Mathur, Paper Tiger.

30 Jean Dreze, ‘NREGA: Dismantling the Contractor Raj’, The Hindu, 20 November 2007.

31 www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOACPqOL4BQ, [accessed 17 July 2017].

32 Comptroller and Auditor General of India, Performance Audit of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Report No. 6 of 2013, ‘Executive Summary’, p. 7. http://cag.gov.in/content/report-no-6-2013-performance-audit-mahatma-gandhi-national-rural-employment-guarantee-scheme, [accessed 17 July 2017].

33 Aiyar, Yaminia and Mehta, S., ‘Spectators or Participants? Effects of Social Audits in Andhra Pradesh’, Economic and Political Weekly 50, no. 7 (2015): pp. 66–71 Google Scholar.

34 There is a story to be told of each so-called scam in India especially in the context of UPA II that has distinguished itself with a number of high profile corruption controversies. There is a complicated issue that emerges from these ‘scams’ though that hasn't been addressed yet. How is the complicity of a single actor—in India's hierarchical, rule-bound, paper-based, processual—bureaucracy established? In recent years allegations of scapegoating as well as implication of actors on dubious grounds have emerged even as the ‘real’ culprits have been said to go scot free. See, for a commentary on the Coal scam or ‘coalgate’, N. Mathur, ‘“Coalgate”: Corruption, an Honest Bureaucrat and a Deeper Malaise in India’, The Conversation, 22 August 2016. https://theconversation.com/coalgate-corruption-an-honest-bureaucrat-and-a-deeper-malaise-in-india-64209, [accessed 17 July 2017].