Bribery is bribery.

The government is about to introduce changes in the Indian Penal Code to make bribing a public official a crime punishable by 7 years in prison. An employee of any private firm offering bribes as well as the management will be punishable under the act. There is no mention of punishment for the bribe taker. Surely any public official asking for and receiving a bribe should be punished more severely. At the very least he should be made to pay a fine at least 10 times the amount of bribe taken and be sacked from his job without any pension. But the greatest bribes are paid by politicians and that too openly. The Congress Party in Gujarat is promising Rs 1.5 million homes to poor urban women over 5 years if elected in elections to be held later this year. There has been a mad scramble by slum dwelling women to apply for such free dwellings. For the rural poor, who are landless, the Congress is promising 100 sq yards of land and a loan of Rs 100,000 to build a 30 sq meter house. The government will stand guarantor for the loans and pay 50% of the interest. TOI, 23 August. GPCC President, Arjun Modhwadia said that 3.1 million families live in one room houses and 334,000 families live in rented houses in rural areas and are expected to benefit from this scheme. The Congress also promises to reduce VAT on CNG, petrol, diesel and fertilisers to make them cheaper and to implement the enormous pay rises for useless civil servants as recommended by the Sixth Pay Commission. Nowhere is there any mention of where all this money is going to come from and whether other taxes will be increased to pay for this plunder of public money. This is exactly the same sort of crime the Congress committed to win the general elections in 2009 when they increased salaries of civil servants by 80%, forgave all loans to farmers, recruited 700,000 teachers for government schools and started the MNREGA scheme which pays the rural poor for 100 days per year to report for fictitious work. The result was double digit inflation, ballooning deficit, a diving rupee, massive increase in taxes on everything leading to decreased consumption and falling growth rate. That was done on the back of high growth due to policies of the BJP government. Unfortunately, the BJP did not adopt these policies early enough so the effects were not felt till after the elections of 2004 which the BJP lost. Gujarat, also with a BP government, is the fastest growing state in India with continuous electric supply, good roads and a large port. This has led to massive industrialisation, wealth creation and a booming middle class. Unfortunately, the uneducated have not benefited as much from this boom but given time everyone will benefit from increasing number of jobs in the skilled and unskilled sectors. The answer is to encourage the poor not to breed so that their numbers do not keep growing. The law to punish bribery must include severe punishment for politicians plundering taxpayer money to bribe the electorate. Sadly a freeloading press will not bring out the truth.