̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - corruption

Drowning in a paper sea: India’s welfare efforts failed by its peculiar bureaucracy

sjr81 — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 23:01:44 +0000

One of the world’s largest anti-poverty measures – a scheme designed to guarantee 100 days’ work to poor, rural households in India – has become bogged down in a bureaucratic quagmire, according to recently-published research.

̽��ֱ��Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MNREGA) is the subject of Paper Tiger by Cambridge anthropologist Nayanika Mathur. ̽��ֱ��Act covers all of India’s rural population (or about 70% of India’s 1.3 billion people) and is supposed to guarantee work for unskilled labourers at the minimum wage.

Launched amid huge fanfare in February 2006, MNREGA’s performance continues to be the object of strenuous debate in India. “MNREGA was put forward as a radical, progressive move, enshrining the right to work,” said Mathur. “This was a sophisticated legislation that potentially has a lot of promise. But I wanted to see first hand how a law authored by elites in New Delhi, in English, gets put into practice in one of the poorest parts of India.”

Mathur chose to study this welfarist statute through an innovative anthropological method: embedding herself within the development bureaucracy of the state in a remote and impoverished Himalayan district.

She spent a total of 18 months following the implementation of MNREGA through different levels of the Indian state. Almost a year was spent living in the town of Gopeshwar in Chamoli district, in the remote central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. With its high levels of poverty, unemployment and distress out-migration, Mathur chose to base her research in the Himalaya to see how MNREGA was – or wasn’t – being put into practice at a local level.

“ ̽��ֱ��locals thought I was very odd,” said Mathur. “They weren’t suspicious of me, but they couldn’t understand why I was there in the first place. ̽��ֱ��bureaucrats, in particular, didn’t think anything they do is of worth and feel very neglected and distant from the centre. It took months for the awkwardness to subside and for me to be accepted. But the surprise they felt at having someone take (what they consider) their dull, repetitive bureaucratic work seriously, never quite left them.”

As Mathur followed the MNREGA around the high Himalaya she was surprised to hear it described as an “unimplementable” programme. Despite the desperate need for employment opportunities in rural Himalaya, the welfare scheme was conspicuous by its absence. Paper Tiger, as it meticulously traces the implementation of the MNREGA, presents some surprising findings.

̽��ֱ��book argues that MNREGA has largely failed, not because of corruption (as is commonly assumed), but because of its anti-corruption measures. In her role as a participant-observer in small, crumbling government offices in Himalayan India, Mathur found that the legal requirement for transparent functioning had led to an exponential increase in the paperwork demanded of the state bureaucracy. Along with its sheer laboriousness and complexity, this paperwork was intervening in the traditional system of operation of welfare leading to a complete paralysis in welfare.

̽��ֱ��extreme reliance on paper, documents, and files in the Indian bureaucracy has a complicated history in India and can be traced back to the operations of the British colonial state in India. Mathur argues that the seemingly-new drive to hold the contemporary Indian state accountable to its citizenry is, in fact, aggravating the documentary foundations of its bureaucracy.

“Ironically, it is the requirements to render the Indian state transparent and accountable that introduced a crisis of implementation with MNREGA,” notes Mathur.

̽��ֱ��drive for transparency at a national level also produced problems specific to the region where Mathur conducted her research. In order to stem corruption, a directive was issued asking for all wages to be paid through bank accounts. This created huge problems in the Himalayas where there are very few bank branches, and those that do exist were located miles away from most villages.

Most problematically, women were at risk of losing control over their own wages as they became dependent either on middlemen or male relatives to operate bank accounts for them. Unwittingly, the push for financial transparency had ended up creating an anti-women system.

Despite its evident problems, Mathur believes the Act is a clever, canny piece of legislation. In Paper Tiger, she uses the crisis in the implementation of MNREGA as a case study that helps make broader arguments about the nature of the state – and what it means when welfare schemes are found not to be working as they should.

Added Mathur: “My study of the operations of the state in the Indian Himalaya, allows for an understanding of the failure of the developmental Indian state that is not predicated upon corruption, violence, incapacity, sloth, or simple dysfunction.”

“Rather, my attempt here is to make us understand what the welfare state in practice is. For it is only when we really get our heads round the very nature of the beast can we hope to ever reform it.”

India’s sophisticated laws and progressive policies fail with startling regularity. A new study locates a possible reason as to why in the convoluted bureaucratic system of the Indian state and its obsession with paper

I wanted to see first hand how a law authored by elites in New Delhi, in English, gets put into practice in one of the poorest parts of India.

Nayanika Mathur

A full-page newspaper advert used to promote MNREGA

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Opinion: ‘Vati-leaks 2’ scandal hinders attempts by Pope Francis to reform Catholic HQ

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 11:10:17 +0000

For the second time in four years, the Vatican has been plunged into crisis by the publication of books exposing not only the battles for power within its hallowed walls, but also the misbehaviour of staff members of the Roman curia, the governing bureaucracy of the Roman Catholic Church.

In his latest book, Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis’ Secret Battle Against Corruption in the Vatican, investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi lays bare the resistance which the Argentinian pope has encountered in his efforts to clean up not only the Vatican Bank (Istituto per le Opere di Religione) but also the wider financial mismanagement that has been endemic in the Vatican for years.

̽��ֱ��first claims about financial mismanagement, this time in the Vatican City of which the pope is head of state, came from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó who was head of its administration. After his claims were made public, Viganó was packed off to Washington as papal envoy to the US. But the “Vati-leaks” scandal really broke in January 2012 with programmes on Italian television that revealed the goings-on behind the scenes in the Vatican of Benedict XVI.

In May of the same year, Nuzzi published His Holiness: ̽��ֱ��Secret Papers of Benedict XVI, which further revealed the in-fighting around the ailing and ageing pope, including the existence of an alleged “gay lobby”. Eventually, the investigation by the Papal Gendarmerie, the Vatican police, identified the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, as the person who had removed the papers from Benedict’s private apartment. After being tried and spending a few months in the Vatican jail, Gabriele was eventually pardoned by the pope.

But the scandalous stories swirling around the Vatican in 2012 and early 2013 undoubtedly contributed to Benedict’s decision in February 2013 to resign, the first pope to do so since Celestine V in 1294 (in his case, after only a few months in office). Though in his resignation speech Benedict attributed his decision to age and infirmity, by then he felt that the Vatican was out of control and he clearly had little confidence in his “chief minister”, cardinal secretary Tarcisio Bertone against whom allegations of cronyism and incompetence have been made.

New broom

̽��ֱ��subsequent election of cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, less than a month after Benedict’s resignation, as the first non-European pope in hundreds of years, was the clearest indication that the cardinals of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church wanted change, a cleansing of the Augean Stables and a substantial reform of the Roman curia.

This is indeed the programme on which Francis I has embarked. So far, he has had notable success in making the Vatican Bank more accountable to both the Vatican and European financial authorities and ridding it of dubious accounts whose holders used them for the purposes of money-laundering and even, allegedly, sanctions busting.

But the latest Vati-leaks episode only confirms what has long been known, that resistance inside the Vatican to Francis’ reforms is strong and tenacious and that the bad habits long-established there die hard. Among his revelations are that a canonisation (the investigatory process leading to the declaration that someone is a saint) can cost over half a million pounds (US$755,000) and that costs remain out of control in some dicasteries (departments) of the Roman curia.

There has been unhappiness in Italy for years over the financial privileges and tax exemptions of the Roman curia and related organisations, not to mention the thousands of religious houses – some of which operate extremely profitable businesses throughout the peninsula. But these latest revelations once again cast the Vatican and its financial management in a bad light which, in the long term, will certainly affect the willingness of the Catholic faithful throughout the world to contribute to funding the headquarters of their church through the annual “Peter’s Pence” collections.

Feeling dog collars

̽��ֱ��Vatican of Francis I is no happier with the second Vati-leaks episode, than Benedict’s Vatican was with the first and so investigations have been carried out and arrests made. This time they involve a Spanish monsignor, Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, and an Italian PR expert, Francesca Chaouqui, both recent appointments to Francis’ reform commissions. ̽��ֱ��Nuzzi revelations are regarded as being hostile to Francis, but it could equally well be argued that they support his cause inasmuch as they demonstrate the strength of opposition to his reforms in the curia and potentially isolate his chief opponents there.

It can also be argued that all this is simply a case of chickens coming home to roost. ̽��ֱ��fact that the curial bureaucracy is located in a sovereign state, the Vatican City, or in “extra-territorial” buildings scattered through Rome, that it is the servant of an infallible religious leader – the pope – and that the Vatican Bank, in particular, has been virtually immune from effective oversight has inevitably led to mismanagement, cronyism and corruption.

It must also remain a matter of scandal to many Catholics that the curia is largely staffed by priests (and a few nuns) whereas there are many Catholic dioceses throughout the world desperately short of priests to say mass and administer the other sacraments, ironically enough, especially in Latin America.

John Pollard, Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Trinity Hall, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

John Pollard (Faculty of History) discusses the latest book exposing battles for power and misbehaviour in the Vatican.

Dennis Jarvis

̽��ֱ��Obelisk, St Peter's Square

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Mining for Corruption

fpjl2 — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 10:00:26 +0000

̽��ֱ��American economist Alan Greenspan once described corruption as “the way human nature functions”, it’s just that successful economies manage to keep it to a minimum. ̽��ֱ��question, of course, is how.

In the digital age, with its ‘freedom of information’, corrupt uses of public finance for political and corporate cronyism should have fewer dark corners to hide in.

Since the late 2000s, virtually all developed countries digitised and made available public procurement data. However, this data deluge can create the illusion of transparency, with a fog of information so vast as to seem impenetrable.

Previously, exposing corruption often relied on the diligence of journalists and campaigners to sift through data and make connections. Such investigations require time and luck, and can be biased.

But now a team of data-driven sociologists have created a new measurement system for detecting exploitation of public finance, designed to take advantage of the new data avalanche. It’s a system that is likely to rattle those profiting corruptly at the public’s expense (and give activists good cause to salivate).

̽��ֱ��team defined key ‘red flags’: contractual situations that suggest high risks of corrupt behaviour. By unleashing ‘creeper’ algorithms and sophisticated text-mining programs on public procurement data to sniff these flags out, the team can map levels of corruption risk at regional and national scale, track corrupt behaviour in tendering organisations, and pinpoint suppliers and even individual contracts that look fishy.

̽��ֱ��Corruption Risk Index (CRI) mines available information about expenditure of public finances for political collusion, competition rigging and crony capitalism, all with unrivalled speed and accuracy. Developed by Dr Mihály Fazekas and Professor Lawrence King from the Department of Sociology, it forms the basis of the Digital Whistleblower, or ‘DigiWhist’, led by Cambridge with a consortium of European institutes, and which has just secured €3 million of European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 funding.

“Corruption is probably the number one complaint about people in power, but there were no really objective ways to measure corruption,” explains King.

“Using our methodology, institutionalised corruption can be measured right down to the level of individual contracts and tenders in about 50 countries around the globe since 2008 to 2009 – opening up a whole universe of scientific and policy applications. We aim to make CRI available to citizens, civil society groups and journalists, to hold politicians and political parties accountable for corrupt behaviour.”

̽��ֱ��project began when Fazekas had a brainwave while working on his PhD with King. In many developed nations since 2007, whenever the government purchased something over around €20,000 (or equivalent), the contract and tender data were made digitally available. In many countries, this is around 7% of the GDP – a big chunk of the economy.

Fazekas spoke to experts on public procurement to uncover the box of tricks often employed to fleece the public purse. Cannily, he also talked to companies who had fallen out of favour since their country’s government changed, “so they were happy to tell me how it was back in the day”. This work eventually led to the CRI’s 13 ‘red flags’ of corruption.

For example: very short tender periods (“if a tender is issued on a Friday and awarded on a Monday – red flag”); very specific or suspiciously complex tenders compared with the field (“like writing a job description for a role you want your friend to get”); tender modifications leading to bigger contracts; inaccessible tender documents; very few bidders in highly competitive markets. Different scales and combinations of flags allow researchers to create the risk rankings of the CRI.

Using an initial EU grant, the team conducted a proof of principle with data from Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. They found that firms with a higher CRI score made more money: the final contract value frequently came in much higher than the original estimate. These companies are also more likely to have politicians involved – either managing or owning them – and be registered in tax havens.

Over the next three years, the team aims to do this for procurement data across 34 European countries and the EU institutions, creating a corruption ranking that ranges from national to contract level. “Previous corruption indicators tended to be very blunt instruments. We can analyse regions and sectors but also individual organisations and loan officers. It’s an enormously powerful and fine-grained tool,” adds King.

̽��ֱ��DigiWhist project will encompass four different data labs across Europe to collect and ‘clean’ data, and build databases. While their current mechanism has manual elements, the next version – developed by Dr Eiko Yoneki’s team in Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory – will have self-learning algorithms that recognise errors and link to existing solutions from the database. “After an initial teaching phase, it will kind of run on its own,” says Fazekas.

All their findings will be made publicly available, with downloadable databases that can be interrogated by academics, journalists and, indeed, anyone with an interest in what happens to public money and in holding businesses and political parties accountable for corrupt behaviour.

Fazekas believes their results could be married with public crowdsourcing to build a more complete picture of the consequences of siphoning public funds.

“Imagine a mobile app containing local CRI data, and a street that’s in bad need of repair. You can find out when public funds were allocated, who to, how the contract was awarded, how the company ranks for corruption. Then you can take a photo of the damaged street and add it to the database, tagging contracts and companies,” says Fazekas, who is already working with DigiWhist advisors on prototypes.

“ ̽��ֱ��idea that the public are going to be able to interrogate this data on a very localised basis and contribute to it themselves through things like smartphone apps is a compelling one!” Fazekas adds.

For King, health will be a big focus. “One of the big debates is around deregulation and privatisation of health, and whether it increases efficiency. But does it increase corruption?

“There’s been a lot of talk of big data for a while now but not much has come out of it… By having researchers like Mihály, who straddle both tech and social science, I think we’ll start to see the potential for big data to turn into important findings that really do make the world better,” says King.

Inset images: Raised (CC: Att-NC-SA); Professor Lawrence King and Dr Mihály Fazekas ( ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge).

Researchers have developed a new technique that trawls the enormous amounts of public procurement data now available across the EU to highlight unscrupulous uses of public funds: from national and regional levels to individual contracts, companies and politicians.

I think we’ll start to see the potential for big data to turn into important findings that really do make the world better

Lawrence King

Holly Occhipinti

Whistle while you work

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