Ethics and Integrity: Corruption in Private Bodies

The private sector is no more a victim of corruption in India. Instead, it is instrumental and hand-in-glove with public officers. The Global Corruption Report discusses the most promising tools to tackle corruption in business, identifies pressing areas for reform and outlines how companies, governments, investors, consumers and other stakeholders can contribute to raising corporate integrity and meeting the challenges that corruption poses to sustainable economic growth and development.

Collusive corruption, where officials from public sector undertakings join hands with the private sector, is greatly present in the Indian business environment, particularly in the power, mining and oil sectors.

Controlling Corruption in Private Sector

The government must (install) a strong deterrent tool to curb corruption in the private sector. TII has prepared the report to assess the impact of government departments adopting the organisation’s Integrity Pact (IP) to curb corruption in procurement.

The Competition Act was enacted by parliament in 2002 and it was amended later. In addition to its advocacy role, the Competition Commission also performs to check corporate malpractice and abuse, the misuse of dominant positions and cartelisation.

The report recommends that the private sector should embrace IP. An IP is a tool developed in the 1990s by TI to help governments, businesses and the civil society in combating corruption in the field of public contracting. The IP establishes mutual contractual rights and obligations to reduce the high cost and distorting effects of graft in public deals.

Private persons can be booked for corruption if they are caught making illegal payments to a government servant; the plan is to make bribes exchanged between private entities also a criminal offence. There is also a proposal to amend the Indian Penal Code to make bribery in the private sector an offence.