Open Government Data for Tackling Corruption – A Perspective

Nidhi Rajashree, Biplav SrivastavaIBM Research – India

Semantic Cities Workshop @ AAAI, Toronto, CanadaJuly 2012

Outline

• Corruption– Good or Bad– Factors– Case Study

• Open Data for Corruption – Difference from economic growth focus– Call for Action

Corruption

“the misuse of public office for personal gains”

“as an act of bribery involving a public servant and a transfer of tangible resources”

“Corruption = Monopoly + Discretion – Accountability”

“An act x performed by an agent A is an act of institutional corruption if and only if:1. x has an effect, E1, of undermining, or contributing to the undermining of, some institutional process and/or purpose

of some institution, I, and/or an effect, Ec, of contributing to the despoiling of the moral character of some role occupant ofI, agent B, qua role occupant of I;

2. At least one of (a) or (b) is true:a) A is a role occupant of I, and in performing x, A intended or foresaw E1 and/or Ec, or A should have

foreseen E1and/or Ec;b) There is a role occupant of I, agent B, and B could have avoided Ec, if B had chosen to do so.[19]

Note that (2)(a) tells us that A is a corruptor and is, therefore, either (straightforwardly) morally responsible for the corrupt action, or A is not morally responsible for A's corrupt character and the corrupt action is an expression of A's corrupt character.”

Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/corruption/

Corruption Perception Index (2011)

* Source: http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/results/

Shades of Corruption• Bribery

– payment made in money or kind and can be initiated either by the public servant or the beneficiary. It can be extortionary, collusive or anticipatory

• Favoritism & Nepotism– a mechanism of power abuse implying privatization and highly

biased distribution of state resources, no matter how these resources have been accumulated in the first place.

• Embezzlement– theft of government property and resources by people who are

entrusted upon to take care of it.

Factor conducive for Corruption

• Lack of awareness• Lack of proper Service-Level Agreements • Lax supervision and monitoring of staff performance• Discretion• Absence of appropriate grievance redressal

mechanisms• Obsolete policies

Tackling Corruption• Lack of awareness

• can be removed by clearly specifying the guidelines and information about the services.

• Lack of proper SLAs • can be taken care by a time bound service can be easily tracked by the citizens

if the information is freely available hence empowering them to seek penalty when the SLA is missed.

• Lack of accountability, supervision• can be improved through institutional diagnostics such as periodic or social

auditing which can be facilitated by well documented information at disposal. • Discretion

• can also be kept under check if these subjective decisions are well documented and hence available for review.

• Grievance mechanisms and obsolete policies need to be directly addressed

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India: (Mahatma Gandhi) National Rural Employment Guarantee Program

• Indian job guarantee scheme, enacted by legislation on August 25, 2005. • NREGA is an Indian job guarantee scheme, enacted as law in 2005.• Designed as a safety net to reduce migration by rural poor households in

the lean period. – A hundred days of guaranteed unskilled manual labour provided when

demanded at minimum wage– works focused on water conservation, land development & drought proofing

• Finances– Statutory minimum wage of Rs 120 (US$2.39) per day at2009 prices.– The Central government outlay for scheme is 40,000 crore (US$7.98 billion) in FY 2010–11

• Mired in complaints of corruption

References• http://nrega.nic.in •http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi_National_Rural_Employment_Guarantee_Act

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NREGA Key Processes

Application for job card

Issue of job card

Demand for employment

Work allocation

Payment of wages

Selection of works

Approval of shelf of projects

Informing village PRI

Preparation of estimatesAnd approvals

Acknowledgement ofdemand

Maintenance of muster roll

VerificationProne to corruption

Prone to corruption

Prone to corruption

ICT based transparency

ICT based transparency

Adapted from deck: [PPT] NREGA Implementation [Presentation to NAC] nrega.nic.in/presentations/implement_NREGA.ppt

Open Government Data

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From Google Maps Local or regional governmental

authorities Local or regional private

initiatives Nationwide governmental

authorities Nationwide private initiatives Multilateral / Transnational

initiatives

* Source: World Map of Open Government Data Initiatives, Google Maps, the underlying world map is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 3.0 Austria) by Semantic Web Company (www.semantic-web.at) (accessed October 3, 2011)

Open Gov. Data for Economic Growth is Well Known (Initiatives Across the World)

Open Government Data policies would increase direct business activity by up to €40 billion per year (0.3% of EU's GDP) and overall benefit could be up to €200 billion per year (1.7% of GDP) Open data could generate £6 billion of added value to the UK economy

Open Government Data Helps Sustain Economic

Growth

By Reducing Corruption and Increasing Competitiveness

Open govt data leads to transparency

With transparency, it is easy to establish accountability

Both together help tackle corruption

• Corruption : “Monopoly + Discretion – Accountability” (Klitgaard, Robert E. Controlling corruption. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1988)

Call for Action

• Governments should – come out with data sharing/ disclosure policies, and

• Example: USA - US Executive Order 13556, Controlled Unclassified Information, At http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/2010/11/04/executive-order-controlled-unclassifiedinformation

• Example: India - National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) at http://dst.gov.in/NDSAP.pdf

– implement them!

• Industry and standardization bodies can help– by documenting best practices, – building necessary tools– using open standards, and – reporting case studies.