‘India needs regulation but a mountain of regulation is not necessarily better because it becomes almost impossible to enforce’

In this Walk The Talk on NDTV 24x7, Huguette Labelle, Chair, Board of Directors of Transparency International, talks to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on how India can fight corruption and improve its rankings on its Corruption Perceptions Index

I am on the outskirts of Davos, Switzerland, walking on a frozen lake and my guest today is a brilliant woman who fights corruption and who tells countries how to fix this one problem that has got millions and millions, in fact, billions of people angry around the world—Chair of the Board of Transparency International, Huguette Labelle. In rankings done by Transparency International, we (India) do about as badly as we do in cricket these days—3.1 out of 10.

There is quite a lot of room for improvement. And yet, India is such an important country, and increasingly so as an emerging country, that it has got to show the world what it can do.

But have you been disappointed by the way India has addressed corruption or are you encouraged by the way India has woken up?

I think that in the last couple of years India has done a number of things. Although it needs regulation and enforcement of regulation to protect people and to have a level playing field for industry, a mountain of regulation is not necessarily better, because then it becomes almost impossible to enforce. I think a lot of work has been done in this regard under the current administration. There is a lot of room now to do really significant governance reviews, improvement and make sure that the citizens are free of having to pay bribes in order to gain access to essential services.

What do you see as too much regulation?

Let me give you an example. If in order to build a simple structure you need several dozen permits, each time it opens the door for the possibility of asking for a bribe or of offering a bribe.

... contd.

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