I was reading this post (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/15/india-corruption-telecoms-idUSL3E7FF0MC20110415?pageNumber=2) today about the government's case against the accused in the 2G telecom scam.
Certain telecom companies were awarded licenses at a low cost on a first come first served basis by the then telecom minister and there is an alleged kickback to the minister who is allegedly not related to the chief minister of one of the states.
Now this case, if the past is anything to go by, will drag on for years by which time the train will be buried six feed under. And like in the ISRO scandal (http://Calmisc.blogspot.com/2011/02/spend-more-time-undoing-than-doing.html), we will end up canceling the contract where other perhaps innocent parties would be affected.
If this keeps happening, investors would lose their trust in India. The need of the hour is to enable a speedy completion of the case and better still is to prevent such scams from occurring in the first place.
Where are the quality checks and audits? How come such scams against private sector are fewer in number? Sure we do have cases where a company in the non-government sector (example: Few months back an employee of Citibank used investor's money to invest in the stock market) also gets cheated. But how often does it happen?
How come we find that that the deals in government sector are more prone to scams? Where is effective governance in the government sector?
The primary issue is not that we make mistakes. The issue is that we don't fix the issues fast. I have seen youngsters saying that a RCA (Root cause analysis) cannot be done while in the middle of a project because they are busy with the delivery to customer. As a friend used to say this is akin to say you cannot fill in petrol in your car because you are already too late.
I can barely tolerate youngsters saying such things. What do you do when an entire government functions this way?
What is the point in doing an audit years later when the whole thing will only be of academic interest?
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