Urging Team Anna not to look for quick-fix solutions to corruption, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India Nandan Nilekani said that while the concerns and anger of the agitating public were legitimate, their methods and goal were not.
In an interview to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta for NDTV 24x7’s Walk the Talk programme, Nilekani said that the Lokpal Bill was not a “magic bullet” that would eliminate corruption in the country. It could, at best, serve as one of several measures needed to tackle corruption in a holistic manner.
“I am not a great believer that if you pass a law, corruption will miraculously vanish. Nor do I think that creating a huge army of policemen will reduce corruption. You have to go back and look at the systems. I have spent 30-35 years working on how to make large systems work. You have to fundamentally analyse and improve the systems themselves... This (Lokpal law) is just one of the many many things that we need to do. I don’t think that it (Lokpal) is the only thing we should be doing,” Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, said.
“I fully endorse the fact that they want to address the problem of corruption but I think they should look at it in a much more strategic holistic manner and not by just passing a law. This is absolutely uni-dimensional,” he said.
Efforts to undermine supremacy of Parliament and elected representatives in legislative matters were “extremely dangerous and completely wrong”, Nilekani said.
“I certainly would argue vehemently against it. I think we must give credit to them (MPs) and let them make a law. And I have complete faith that they would come to a right decision,” he said. Nilekani said he would be happy to sit down with Team Anna and help in finding possible solutions.
“My advice to them would be two-fold. Specifically on the Lokpal Bill, I will tell them please make all your arguments to the standing committee which is the appropriate authority for this. Let them debate it in Parliament and let them come up with a law and then abide by the law.
“And the broader thing would be that if you really want to address corruption, it is a very multi-dimensional mosaic of things. When you look at all the issues, you will find that the Lokpal Bill addresses just five per cent of the problem.
“Let’s not try to look for a solution by creating more and more complex laws and creating parallel bureaucracies, a super-powerful guy and expect him to be honest, and creating thousands of inspectors. And also think that this is some magic bullet that will solve all your problems. There is no quick-fix. This requires hard work...,” he said.
Nilekani said the Lokpal might not even be a very effective instrument to fight corruption. “You don’t fix problems by creating more layers of inspection. You fix problems by actually looking at the root causes,” he said.
A project like giving identity numbers to everyone would, on the other hand, go a long way to bring in transparency, and make the delivery of public services more streamlined and accessible.
“These things are fundamentally related to changing the relationship of the individual in terms of the public delivery he gets. And that is the kind of reform that we need today to really fix some of these larger issues,” he said.
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