Poor pay bribes for fundamental services

Source: Agencies  |   2008-6-30  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

ONE out of every three families living below the poverty line in India paid bribes last year for basic public services such as police, hospitals, water and electricity, according to a private research group.

The Center for Media Studies said poor people in India paid an estimated US$220 million in small bribes last year to police, postal workers, loan officers, school officials, hospital workers and more.

Indian officials and law makers are often caught accepting bribes, but a report released at the weekend by the group suggests that corruption is also pervasive at the lowest levels of government.

"The poor are disproportionately affected by corruption since they depend more on public services," said N. Bhaskara Rao, chairman of the group, which conducted the report with Transparency International India.

Indian Vice President Hamid Ansari released the report at a ceremony in New Delhi, where he called corruption "pervasive and cancerous."

"The level and extent of misgovernance is horrifying in legal and moral terms," Ansari said, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

The researchers surveyed 22,728 randomly selected poor homes between November and January. One-third of the families said they paid brides, with the total amounting to about US$11 million, the report said.

Reachers then extrapolated those findings to the entire poor population to reach the estimate of US$220 million in bribes paid by poor families.

Roughly 300 million people live below the poverty line of US$1 a day.