Our taxes and expenses—and therefore also cost of cars and fuels—could come down if corruption were reduced from our roads, explains Veeresh Malik

The Delhi Traffic Police are coming down on automobiles that carry symbols which otherwise belong to emergency and rescue vehicles. The Chinese government across the Himalayas has just announced a major shift in its policy on government cars. It has reduced the size of cars that their leaders are entitled to as well as removed the symbols of power. What do these two separate events have in common? Both are baby steps to remove efficiency and corruption from the roads of two most of the populous nations on earth.

The Chinese have been able to quantify the savings they will achieve, despite the fact that within their political system such misuse by those who rule can often be permitted. Closer home, the monetary savings can’t really be calculated, because the leakages are immense. In both cases, it is the taxpayers who bear the cost. In India, we have no justification for this outright larceny since the Indian Constitution is supposed to provide safeguards for misuse by those who should be governing, ostensibly in public interest.

But things are changing. Today, in Delhi, the Delhi Traffic Police encourages people to take photographs of government vehicles being misused, place them online or send them to the department, verifies these photographs, and then prosecutes the violators with the results being placed in the public domain, courtesy Facebook and Internet. Wrongly parked, being used for school transport, sporting beacons, driving rash, not wearing seat-belts, crude behaviour, eve-teasing—everything is captured on digital cameras, still and video, uploaded, and used as evidence. (That this has not filtered down to the diplomatic corps in Delhi, whose vehicles are still known by the designator ‘CD’ or ‘Careless Drivers’, is our fault. Based on the wrong premise that vehicles belonging to diplomats are above the law, our authorities do not challan them.)
The recent Auto Expo greatly emphasised public transport, by making it much easier to get anywhere and back by bus and Metro train. But we have a long way to go. In the rest of the civilised world, a display of power on the roads as we see in India is viewed as not just arrogance, but as a signal to the end of a regime that expects the people to suffer and pick up the tab. In India, we are sadly still in the durbar era, where those who rule have to display their misuse of power. This story tells you how blatant corruption has become an acceptable part of our lives every time we step on the roads, where our money is being spent by those who rule rather than govern, and what we can do to try and reduce our expenses and kill corruption at the same time. The first step, of course, is to lay these details out in public.

This article is about the taxes we pay and the expenses—and therefore also prices of new automobiles and the fuels used to operate them—that could come down if corruption were removed from our roads. Which is what, in this Age of Austerity staring us in our faces, we would really like to have seen at the ‘Green’ Auto Expo 2012. And we haven’t even started about the corrupt practices in road design and highway construction, which is a way in which government steals money from our pockets, and is a bigger racket than the 2G and civil aviation scams put together. Here is a list of the ways in which corruption occurs on the Indian roads.

1 Highway toll exemption:
As you approach a toll booth, you often spot a huge hoarding which provides you details of the amounts to pay. Next to these, you will see yet larger boards; these provide details of those who are exempted from paying these tolls. How these exemptions came about is a mystery. As per RTI (Right to Information) responses, there are no records of anybody having asked for such exemptions; the files on the subject cannot be found; or there is no information on the subject. However, the list of those exempted continues to grow, and has reached a point where private buses and trucks that belong to people who pay allegiance to those exempted are also often exempted.

The assumption is that exemptions are for people who are travelling on government duty. But then, people travel on government duty on airlines and railways too and also buy tickets and pay for fuel for their vehicles and they or their departments pay their dues, which are then reimbursed or otherwise accounted for. It is not known why roads are selected for such unhindered free rides, especially when it is known that these vehicles are often taken across toll booths and borders for personal work or are, in any case, not exempted but being shown as having been exempted.

In addition, some exemptions do not make any sense. Diplomats in other countries are not exempted from paying toll, for example; but here we grant them exemptions. Government vehicles being used for personal work surely do not deserve exemptions—stand at toll booths and see what goes on. The solution is simple—change the notifications so that nobody transits free, everybody pays, and those entitled take a reimbursement from his or her department or the toll operator. The only exceptions should be armed forces movement during wartime or emergency and rescue vehicles on specific missions which is the norm globally, in civilised countries.

2 Visible misuse of official vehicles:
 The bada babu comes to work in a car that has come all the way from his office to his home, and is then driven back to office. As soon as he gets to office, the car and driver are sent home again, for domestic shopping and other work. It then brings lunch for the bada babu, or he heads home for lunch and returns, and then the car returns to pick the children up from school, to be then used for afternoon work. How often have you and I seen this happen? The easiest way is to check out any high-end school anywhere in the country when the children are returning home, and see the number of government cars there. In the evening, the process is repeated, with a probable run to the club from where the babu would not wish to drink and drive, so the driver keeps waiting there.

How many people are there in India who have received driving lessons on government vehicles? As on date, the vast variety of cars available with the government means that you can often not make out if it is a private vehicle or one that belongs to the government. However, it is still easy to spot and differentiate if you look for the signs—like stickers on the windscreen, logbooks on the dashboard and that old give-away—the insolent government driver.

Worse, the other kids know which person is coming in a government car—teachers, spouses, children, even maidservants—and that’s very damaging for the moral fibre of the country. What sort of role models are being set is the big question here, when we talk about a drop in integrity levels of young people.

Not too long ago, this writer had filed multiple RTI applications with various departments of the Delhi government, seeking details on how logbooks for official vehicles were maintained, and copies of the three vehicles which incurred the highest running costs in each department. The responses were varied and, in some cases, almost hilarious, but across-the-board in many cases the running distances, fuel costs and maintenance numbers just didn’t match. In one discussion after these responses, I was told that vehicles would be fitted with tracking devices and analysed, just as they are in taxis and trucks.

Obviously, this proposal did not go too far, though the government does want to implement tracking devices on public transport. A simple solution proposed many years ago was to fit all sarkari cars with geographical tracking and what is known as ‘geo-locking’. This means, you know where these cars actually go, and you place a limit on how much they can be used for in a day and how far they can go. If auto-rickshaws can be fitted with tracking devices, so should government vehicles; the earlier the better. And, more importantly, with a time-delay of two-three days, the results of the tracking should be visible to the general public on the Internet. Let us analyse why some vehicle and someone went somewhere and at what time—and then we can ask more questions using RTI. After all, it was our money being used, right?

3 Buying big when small will do:
There was a time not too long ago when, top to bottom, everybody in the government (and many outside it too), used Ambassador cars or Mahindra jeeps, when on duty. They had become symbols of power; frankly, they didn’t need any extra decorations for people to know that the might of the sarkar had now arrived. This, however, is not to say that the same should have continued—far from it. Vehicles which are better, frugal in terms of fuel consumption and improved in terms of reliability, comfort and safety are certainly essential.

But now, across the board, a choice of cars from the best in luxury cars can be seen. The sales pitch that automobile manufacturers make to provide these automobiles to government departments has to be seen to be believed. The idea is to see how the discount can be adjusted upwards so that these vehicles will be sold at the list price.

But when and how did ‘better’ turn into ‘bigger’, especially when it is the people’s money that pays for it? For avid watchers, the first symbol of change was not the long wheelbase Mercedes acquired by the President’s Estate way back in the 1960s—people of India were aware that something better was needed when foreign visitors arrived. Nor was it when security-enhanced Ambassadors weighed down with bullet- and bomb-proof protection were seen on the roads. The real change happened when around the mid-1990s when the parking lot of Parliament House in Delhi started resembling an Auto Expo display—and friends who were camera-persons for TV news channels started sharing clips of who was driving what.

Right after that, lawmakers and others started going in for larger vehicles, as did surprisingly some other important law-abiding members of the pillars of democracy. It did not stop at that, and became a race for bigger, more powerful, and flashier vehicles and, obviously, costlier. It is about time some sort of checks and balances were introduced here, otherwise there is no limit to who will demand the really costly cars, and pass a resolution or law and get it.

4 The sarkari luxury vehicle:
Even costlier to purchase and operate are the luxury sports utility vehicles (SUVs), huge four-wheel drive mammoth juggernauts on wheels, fleets of them going past throwing dust at all and sundry, and scattering anything and everything that comes in the way. Political leaders being driven around in SUVs which have been paid for in some way or the other by the public exchequer is well known, But did you know that many of them are purchased by government departments under the guise of ‘ambulances’, and then used for other purposes? Or by ministries and PSUs for ‘rural’ use? And therein lies a tale.

Not very long ago, to try and curb this misuse, the Delhi government introduced a sub-series with the alpha-numeric chain ‘DLxAxxxx’, where ‘x’ stands for the numerals in question. These were supposed to be for ambulances. They also got a tax cut. Suddenly, a lot of Maruti Gypsies and other larger SUVs could be spotted all over the streets of Delhi, displaying these registration numbers—including police control room vehicles. In no time, the specific series of registration numbers was withdrawn, and vehicles purchased as ambulances went back to normal registration plates. But that’s not all, too.

Some of these SUVs are purchased by government departments for upcountry work, but are then transferred to the head office or zonal offices for city work. Often, also purchased for ‘security’ duty, they are used for anything but that. The situation is so amazing that the waiting list for these upmarket luxury SUVs now runs into months, while other smaller vehicles are available off the shelf. As for their off-road use they would climb the pavement near an ice-cream parlour or all-day happy hours kind of bar.

5 Security considerations:
Living in Delhi, there is no way you can avoid the security convoy that seems to precede and follow almost anybody with pretensions of power. Leave aside the president and prime minister and the others, even minor satraps and babus expect huge convoys in the name of security as a birthright. A trip to the airport or railway station reveals the real extent of this problem. It gets even worse in the state capitals and upcountry areas, where whole communities are held to ransom, as the leader of the day zooms past.



More than security, it is usually a bunch of hangers-on and cronies who form this cavalcade, while the security apparatus is there mainly for pomp and glory. In addition, there is the additional bunch of support services like cooks, secretaries, personal assistants and others who form the mainstay of these convoys. We have buses, which can do this job, and at the same speed as cars, an example is the Delhi-Lahore bus service which is easily operated with only police escort keeping up.

It is also often noticed that the security vehicles are really decrepit and cannot keep up with the main convoy, thereby getting stuck in traffic well after the people they are supposed to protect have gone past. What good this security does is not known, though it does attract more attention and place the protected person more at risk. Here, too, it is we who pay.

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