Revision summary
Poverty can pressure a petty bribe; it is not the law of corruption. The affluent steal more where tenders, banks, and impunity meet greed and status. Klitgaard’s monopoly plus discretion minus accountability is the core design cause. Norms of speed money, opaque politics, and punished whistle-blowers spread the habit. Examples run from an RTO tout to spectrum, coal, Satyam, and Nirav Modi — need and surplus both.
Model answer
Introduction
Poverty can make a bribe look like survival. Wealth can make a bribe look like a sport. Corruption is the sale of a trust, and its causes sit in opportunity, culture, and power — not in the size of a person’s house.
Body
Poverty as a pressure, not a complete law
- A constable on a thin salary at a nakabandi, or a clerk delaying a widow’s pension for a cut, may cite need; hunger is a real temptation.
- Need does not justify the act: the same poor person is the victim of the next desk.
- If poverty were the law, Kerala’s relatively better human-development belts would be angelic and every slum a den; neither is true in that simple way.
Why the affluent and powerful steal more rupees
- Opportunity: tenders, mining leases, defence offsets, and bank loans at scale; the 2G-spectrum controversy and coal-block allocations showed rent at the top, not at the tea stall.
- Impunity: lawyers, delays, and political cover; a street hawker is raided, a promoter is restructured.
- Status competition: a wedding, a foreign degree, a club membership priced as honour; Veblen’s conspicuous consumption becomes a motive to loot.
- Capture: the powerful write the exception, the amnesty, and the valuation — Satyam-style cooked books and Punjab National Bank–Nirav Modi loopholes are skill plus access.
- Psychological greed and habituation: after the first crore, shame dies; Kautilya already warned that officials sip like fish in water.
Main causes among people generally
- Monopoly plus discretion minus accountability (Klitgaard): a single window that can say no, with no speaking order.
- Weak detection: slow courts, hostile whistle-blowing, and transfers that punish honesty (the Ashok Khemka pattern as public memory of cost).
- Social norms: a “speed money” culture that treats a right as a favour; festivals as gift seasons for the controlling officer.
- Political funding opacity and patronage postings: the file becomes a party machine.
- Low moral development in Kohlberg’s sense: many stay at punishment-avoidance or loyalty-to-clan, never at universal principle.
- Digital and paper complexity that only a tout understands; complexity is a corrupt tax.
- Fear and learned helplessness: “everyone pays,” so the ethical minority feels futile — the exact fallacy the 2019 paper also named in another question.
Examples that separate need from greed
- Petty: a driving-licence tout outside an RTO; poverty of the client and of the clerk can both appear, but the design of queues is the cause.
- Grand: Commonwealth Games-era contracting scandals, or a mining baron funding a local militia, are surplus corruption.
- Hybrid: PDS leakage — a poor dealer and a rich miller can share the same stolen grain.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD P[Poverty pressure] --> T[Petty cut] G[Greed opportunity impunity] --> B[Grand corruption] M[Monopoly discretion] --> T M[M] --> B[B]
Conclusion
Poverty explains some petty cuts; it does not explain a stolen bank or a captured mine. The main causes are opportunity, impunity, greedy status, clan loyalty, and systems that hide the file. Design and punishment must follow the big fish as tightly as the small.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Is there any role of empathy in public services? Explain your views with a suitable example.
Next question in the 2019 paper (Q17). View answer →
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Would higher salaries end corruption?
They can reduce petty need. They do not end greed at the top; Singapore-style pay still needs detection and shame.
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Is a poor bribe-taker less guilty?
Mitigation in sentencing can notice compulsion. Ethically the citizen still lost a right; design should remove the counter that sells it.
Same topic · past papers
UPPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
More from this paper
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Q2 · UPSC Mains 2019 · UPGS4 · 8 marks · Solution
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Write short notes on: (A) Ethical responsibilities of public servant. (B) Public interest and the right to information.
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