The latest public notice issued by Nagaland Police appealing the general public to report cases of corruption is a welcome development. As rightly mentioned in the said public notice, curbing corruption is not just the responsibility of any single agency but a collective responsibility.
Here, particularly in the context of Nagaland, the onus of checking corruption lies on the people, the general public. There are various mechanisms to check corruption but the people seldom resort to them. For instance, regardless of evidence that there is corruption, people simply do not proceed and make use of the anti-corruption mechanisms available at their disposal.
Often, people curse and whine but seldom do they take any concrete steps to actually expose the corruption. Unless there is someone who is brave enough to come forward and expose the corruption, the system will not act on its own.
It is like the car won’t start unless you ignite the engine! Whether there is enough fuel in the tank is another question but you just need to turn the key to start the engine but nobody wants to do that.
Corruption is a wide subject and in order to curb it, we need real people who walk the talk. People grumble, whine and resort to nitpicking without making any real effort to check the corruption, and therein lies the problem.
The difference between those who indulge in corruption and those who complain is that those engaging in corruption are actually ‘doing’ it while those complaining are only ‘talking’ without doing anything.
There is a difference between ‘doing’ and ‘talking’ and unless people started ‘doing’ against corruption, mere talk is not going to help. But what exactly are we to do to stop corruption? Case in point – make a phone call to the given number or write an email to the given email address, the ones just mentioned by Nagaland Police, about corrupt practices. As simple as that!
Yet, it is doubtful that people will even bother to ‘do’ that because ‘doing’ is something we are not used to. Of course, you cannot just go about hurling allegations of corruption at every government or public servant. You would need evidence to back up your allegations. The evidence is already there, we only need to gather them and report. That much we can do, can we?
Certainly, checking corruption is easier said than done. If it were easy, there would not have been so much corruption today. It has now become like a full blown cancerous disease slowly but surely killing our society. Almost all strata of our society are infected with the disease of corruption in one form or the other, right from the top down to the village level.
It is therefore very difficult to wriggle our way out of the cesspool of corruption we find ourselves in today. Yet, it only needs one person to spark the fire to burn down the house of corruption. Could that one person be you?