Corruption, is it a sociological problem?

Is Corruption mostly a sociological problem? To me it is, let me explain why.

There are:

• Huge scandals and scams impact our economy and hit revenues upside down,
• Petty Government corruption: If we consider the petty Government corruptions which are huge in numbers, and I think it is sociological problem.

Here I am writing about the latter problem.

Let us not consider those who take Petty Government bribes as criminals, but try to understand why do they do so? Does sociological study on this necessary for healthy growth of Indian society? Study the root cause to find healthy solutions for a healthy future India?

Example: This is just one small scenario:

Imagine a clerk who is not even a degree holder. He gets very meager salary. He has a family, children and his parents to look after. Just imagine he is living in a city like Bangalore. How can he take care of his family?

The answer to me is not very simple. We can see many problems in this family itself.

1)     He is not educated.

2)     His wife is not educated as well and let’s assumes she is not working.

3)     He has 3 children to whom he has to give education. If they are not educated, then they will be bribe takers in their times to hold up their respective families.

4)     No proper education may stop them from making family planning.

5)     On top of this, if he is from lower caste, then we cannot even imagine his plight.

I feel this is a very well entangled and vicious situation. This is just one family. Just imagine this happening in millions of families like this in India with its 1.2 billion and growing population with several problems such as poverty, bad education system, caste system and so on.

In India, we do not give importance or a damn to sociological studies and call it waste of time. But in order to understand the past, the present and to determine the future societies, there should be a study on the society as a whole and marketing it to the public and spreading awareness is also absolutely important.

The very well done study/survey/ statistics gives a trend of the society’s misgivings, happenings, good things, bad things and it gives a statistics of everything. This will help or should to give targets to the society to plan for the future society as a whole. Now it seems the society does not give a damn to what such statistics.

The other problem in India now is, such statistics are not very effective since it is usually not done by competitive person/groups (I say non competitive because if the people who are competitive then they would try to make some impact on the societies). These studies are incomplete and are done just to get a degree or “doctorate”.

I feel true citizens should start to look into the root cause of any problems. This will ensure that we understand the reason for a society to be the way it is.

Just giving authoritarian new laws (lok pal bill) which are un-understandable by uneducated common citizens/people will not help anything in long term.

Trying to attack the problem at the branch level will only make the issues at the root still to hold on tightly.