LONDON: It is now official - the government in India attracts corrupt youngsters like a magnet. Scientists have, for the first time, shown that students who are cheats in school are more likely to opt for a government job. This relationship does not appear to vary by ability, suggesting that screening on ability does not change the level of honesty of those chosen for a government service among the pool of applicants. Similar is the case with nurses working in India. Those found to be dishonest in a unique test were more prone to fraudulent absenteeism in the government sector. The results are part of a large scale study by Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania conducted among 662 students from seven large universities in Bangalore. The study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, set students a number of tasks, which were predictive of corrupt behaviour by real government workers. It was then found that cheating students are more likely to want a job in public service. The students who wanted to enter public service were also less likely to demonstrate behaviour intended to benefit other people or society as a whole. The author of the paper, Rema Hanna from Harvard University, conducted three separate tests to reach these conclusions. First, students in Bangalore were asked to roll a dice 42 times and report what numbers they got. The higher the numbers on the dice, which students had to report, the more they would get paid (around Rs 400 per session). Hanna and her co-author, Shing-Yi Wang from the University of Pennsylvania, discovered that cheating among the students was rampant with more than a third reporting numbers that were abnormally high. When measured against career preferences, students who cheated on the dice game were 6.3% more likely to want a government job. Government nurses from 333 primary health centres (PHC) across five districts in Karnataka were then made to undergo the same test. Researchers said bureaucratic absenteeism is an attractive form of corruption to study because one can measure whether the bureaucrat is fraudulently collecting a pay check for a day not worked. They carried out nine rounds of independent random checks of the primary health centre staff between July 2010 and November 2012. However, cheating wasn't that rampant among this group (only 9.1% scored the abnormally high results). However, amongst those who were thought to have cheated, absenteeism with false reasons was much higher. "Overall, we find that dishonest individuals - as measured by the dice task - prefer to enter government service," wrote Hanna. "Importantly, we show that cheating on this task is also predictive of fraudulent behaviours by real government officials," they added. According to Hanna, the study funded in part by Harvard Dean's Grant and the Russell Sage Foundation offers two key policy insights. First, the recruitment and screening process for bureaucrats in India may be improved by increasing the emphasis on characteristics other than ability. Second, while recent empirical papers have shown that reducing the returns to corrupt behaviour decreases the probability that bureaucrats engage in corruption, "our work suggests that these interventions may have had even broader effects by changing the composition of who might apply". Link
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Government jobs in India attract corrupt youngsters like a magnet: Study
LONDON: It is now official - the government in India attracts corrupt youngsters like a magnet. Scientists have, for the first time, shown that students who are cheats in school are more likely to opt for a government job. This relationship does not appear to vary by ability, suggesting that screening on ability does not change the level of honesty of those chosen for a government service among the pool of applicants. Similar is the case with nurses working in India. Those found to be dishonest in a unique test were more prone to fraudulent absenteeism in the government sector. The results are part of a large scale study by Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania conducted among 662 students from seven large universities in Bangalore. The study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, set students a number of tasks, which were predictive of corrupt behaviour by real government workers. It was then found that cheating students are more likely to want a job in public service. The students who wanted to enter public service were also less likely to demonstrate behaviour intended to benefit other people or society as a whole. The author of the paper, Rema Hanna from Harvard University, conducted three separate tests to reach these conclusions. First, students in Bangalore were asked to roll a dice 42 times and report what numbers they got. The higher the numbers on the dice, which students had to report, the more they would get paid (around Rs 400 per session). Hanna and her co-author, Shing-Yi Wang from the University of Pennsylvania, discovered that cheating among the students was rampant with more than a third reporting numbers that were abnormally high. When measured against career preferences, students who cheated on the dice game were 6.3% more likely to want a government job. Government nurses from 333 primary health centres (PHC) across five districts in Karnataka were then made to undergo the same test. Researchers said bureaucratic absenteeism is an attractive form of corruption to study because one can measure whether the bureaucrat is fraudulently collecting a pay check for a day not worked. They carried out nine rounds of independent random checks of the primary health centre staff between July 2010 and November 2012. However, cheating wasn't that rampant among this group (only 9.1% scored the abnormally high results). However, amongst those who were thought to have cheated, absenteeism with false reasons was much higher. "Overall, we find that dishonest individuals - as measured by the dice task - prefer to enter government service," wrote Hanna. "Importantly, we show that cheating on this task is also predictive of fraudulent behaviours by real government officials," they added. According to Hanna, the study funded in part by Harvard Dean's Grant and the Russell Sage Foundation offers two key policy insights. First, the recruitment and screening process for bureaucrats in India may be improved by increasing the emphasis on characteristics other than ability. Second, while recent empirical papers have shown that reducing the returns to corrupt behaviour decreases the probability that bureaucrats engage in corruption, "our work suggests that these interventions may have had even broader effects by changing the composition of who might apply". Link
Monday, September 3, 2012
Majority of India prefer arrange marriages and joint families
According NDTV mid term poll 74% Indians prefer arrange marriages and 89% Indians prefer joint families
.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Satyamev jayate and its effect on people
I am in no way Criticising Satyamev Jayate ..What Aamir Khan is doing is very good .But after visiting blogs and some sites a question comes to my mind,What is so special about satyamev jayate? Satyamev Jayatey is not the first show that is highlighting these social.There are Tv shows on Lok Sabha Tv and DD where several discussions do take place.There is also typical show like Satyamev Jayate on CNN IBN , Zindagi live which is running from past 4-5 years.The show is very similar to SMJT .But I have hardly or never seen any discussions taking place about these shows.Are we society where we need bollywood stars to tell what are our social problems? Only then we will discuss about these issues.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Income Taxes paid by Indians [Overview, Numbers & Graphs]
Do you know how many Indians pay Taxes and how much?
You would be surprised with some of the numbers. According to the report released by Indian Finance Ministry, estimated number of taxpayers for financial year 2011-12 stands at just 3.24 Crore people. That means, less than 3 people in 100 pay taxes
Out of these 3.25 Crore people, 89% pay taxes in the tax slab of 0 – 5 Lakh rupees, while on the other end of spectrum, only 1.3% of all tax payers have income about 20 Lakh!
Number of Tax Payers in India & their Slabs
| Slab | Number(in lakhs) | Percentage of taxpayers |
|---|---|---|
| 0-5 Lakh | 288.44 | 89% |
| 5-10 lakh | 17.88 | 5.5% |
| 10-20 lakh | 13.78 | 4.30 |
This next graph will show you further how much wealth is concentrated amongst only a miniscule few!
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Voice Of The People
link
http://www.the-nri.com/index.php/2012/05/voice-of-the-people/comment-page-1/#comment-11386
When the opinion of the unattractive sweaty Indian is less important than that of his better looking, English speaking, compatriot.
Diesel prices had gone up, and the input desk at NDTV in New Delhi had dispatched me to get reactions from customers at a gas station. Vox pop, they call it in the business, the voice of the people. I was interning in reporting that very hot month of June, so off I went. I picked up a memory chip for the camera from the video tape library, I arranged for a cameraperson, and I arranged for a car. We stopped outside a gas station at Nehru Place, and we decided to get reactions from the folks that would drive up to the diesel pump there. The red-and-gold OB van with NDTV written in huge letters on its sides that had accompanied us was parked right outside the gas station, and we’d uplink the footage back to the newsroom from there. Sounded simple enough.
Except that it was Saturday morning. Except this was diesel. Only a handful of people passed through the gas station for diesel that whole couple of hours, but I did speak to them and uplink their reactions back to the newsroom. The quiet cameraperson – a dark-skinned man with weather-beaten skin – and I had thought that we were done, but I received a call from the edit bay telling me that the reactions I had got were not good enough and that I’d have to get more. I can’t remember exactly what I was told was lacking in the footage, but I remember the gist of it: the people didn’t look good/educated enough for TV. They spoke Hindi too. There’s a word for that in India: ghhaati. Low class.
But it was a story about diesel. The only people who bought diesel at gas stations were truck drivers, autorickshaw drivers…and other people’s drivers in general. Weren’t these the people whose reactions you’d want in a story about diesel? They were the ones who’d be affected by the price rise, right? I didn’t understand the issue with the Hindi either. Sure, we were an English channel, but we subtitled non-English footage all the time. It was not a big deal, so what was so different this time? I’d tried explaining that to the person who’d called me from the newsroom, but I was very silkily asked to just get some English bites from better-looking people who weren’t uneducated drivers.
I got it. They wanted freshly-scrubbed white-collar reactions for the white-collar-catering Inglis channel. Didn’t matter if white-collar India didn’t care about diesel prices.
I hung up and looked at the quiet cameraman. Camerapeople remind me of Rambo sometimes with those huge machine-gun-like cameras resting on their shoulders. They also remind me of the boombox-carrying kids from the ghettoes of America. My cameraman looked bored, emotionally disconnected. Cynical even. He wore what camerapeople, who are mostly men, wear around India – loose trousers, a loose button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled-up, and heavy shoes. All of it eventually a strange shade of don’t-care. The colour of Delhi. “Kya karein (what do we do)?” I asked him. The newsroom wanted reactions from mall-going Indians. But that still didn’t change things on the ground. It was still Saturday morning, hardly anyone was coming through the gas station, and almost nobody was passing through for diesel. Nobody that was English-TV-worthy, that is.
The cameraman shrugged as much as he could shrug with Rambo’s machine gun on his shoulder, not completely unlike Jesus wincing under the weight of the crucifix on his back. He looked a bit cross. He suggested I go pull a customer from the petrol pump where all the nice sedans were rolling in with their upper-middle-class-and-higher clientele. The English-speakers of India. I felt a little ridiculous. My intelligence and integrity felt vaguely insulted, but I still went. I put my Hindi aside and put on my best American accent because I was representing an English news channel to the English-speaking persons of India. “Oh, NDTV!” they’d say with an appreciative smile, “of course, what do you need to know?” I got reactions in English from an elderly ex-army Sardar gentleman, a bearded intellectual type, and an outspoken clean-shaven polo-shirt-wearing man with a sharp haircut. I felt a bit empty standing there with my mic with the red NDTV muff on it, smiling and encouraging the people along on their performance. “Thankyousomuch,” I’d say before trotting off. I’m sure they were nice people, but that wasn’t what was bothering me. Only the previous month, when I was interning in the edit bay, had I been asked to edit vox pop footage that had come in from Kashmir about another price rise. I’d put the bites together, all of them in Hindi, and was then told by a young employee that they couldn’t put that footage on air. But why, I had asked, the bites had good content. The girl had laughed. “Have you seen their faces?” she had said, screwing up her pretty light-skinned nose at me, the poor newbie. “We can’t put such visuals on air.”
Such people? Dark-skinned people from lower-income families? But what about the content? That footage never made it on the air on our English channel, but our Hindi channel ran it all day long. So the English channel only showed the good-looking people of India? But what about content? What about what we had initially been told at NDTV about journalistic ethics and the real issues and how journalism was supposed to be a pillar of democracy, the voice of the people? Or was it the voice of certain sections of the people depending on the segment of India you were catering to? The unattractive sweaty Indian is also a part of India. In fact, he is about 90% of India. Doesn’t what he say also matter, even if he is not soothing enough to the eye of the English channel’s global audience? NDTV’s English channel is watched all over the world. At various points in my life, I have watched it in America, Canada, and Oman. The Indian diaspora feels proud to see India looking so dynamic and good on NDTV. “India is developing so fast,” they always say so proudly, “everyone speaks English so well now. It is not the India we left.” And then they proceed to daydream about a return to the homeland that never happens.
So what was this happening here??
That’s what was running through my mind at the gas station at Nehru Place that Saturday morning. Much later, after the footage had been uplinked to the newsroom (and happily approved), after we’d all returned, I was asked to isolate a short 10-second clip from the English reactions they’d decided to use. I’d been transcribing the footage, and the news editor asked me if there was anything with ‘punch’ that was said that could be used when the headlines rolled for the news bulletin. Something expressive, something emotionally-charged.
I did have something. “But does the guy look clean-cut and suave?” I was asked. I said yes. The bite was from the agitated man in the polo shirt and the short grey hair. An Indian Anderson Cooper. That’s suave, I guess. It was perfect, and his angry 10-second rant ran with the headlines all day.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So is this the reality of our english news channels who day and night conduct shows about equality but don't consider views of common indian not even worthy to be presented
http://www.the-nri.com/index.php/2012/05/voice-of-the-people/comment-page-1/#comment-11386
When the opinion of the unattractive sweaty Indian is less important than that of his better looking, English speaking, compatriot.
Diesel prices had gone up, and the input desk at NDTV in New Delhi had dispatched me to get reactions from customers at a gas station. Vox pop, they call it in the business, the voice of the people. I was interning in reporting that very hot month of June, so off I went. I picked up a memory chip for the camera from the video tape library, I arranged for a cameraperson, and I arranged for a car. We stopped outside a gas station at Nehru Place, and we decided to get reactions from the folks that would drive up to the diesel pump there. The red-and-gold OB van with NDTV written in huge letters on its sides that had accompanied us was parked right outside the gas station, and we’d uplink the footage back to the newsroom from there. Sounded simple enough.
Except that it was Saturday morning. Except this was diesel. Only a handful of people passed through the gas station for diesel that whole couple of hours, but I did speak to them and uplink their reactions back to the newsroom. The quiet cameraperson – a dark-skinned man with weather-beaten skin – and I had thought that we were done, but I received a call from the edit bay telling me that the reactions I had got were not good enough and that I’d have to get more. I can’t remember exactly what I was told was lacking in the footage, but I remember the gist of it: the people didn’t look good/educated enough for TV. They spoke Hindi too. There’s a word for that in India: ghhaati. Low class.
But it was a story about diesel. The only people who bought diesel at gas stations were truck drivers, autorickshaw drivers…and other people’s drivers in general. Weren’t these the people whose reactions you’d want in a story about diesel? They were the ones who’d be affected by the price rise, right? I didn’t understand the issue with the Hindi either. Sure, we were an English channel, but we subtitled non-English footage all the time. It was not a big deal, so what was so different this time? I’d tried explaining that to the person who’d called me from the newsroom, but I was very silkily asked to just get some English bites from better-looking people who weren’t uneducated drivers.
I got it. They wanted freshly-scrubbed white-collar reactions for the white-collar-catering Inglis channel. Didn’t matter if white-collar India didn’t care about diesel prices.
I hung up and looked at the quiet cameraman. Camerapeople remind me of Rambo sometimes with those huge machine-gun-like cameras resting on their shoulders. They also remind me of the boombox-carrying kids from the ghettoes of America. My cameraman looked bored, emotionally disconnected. Cynical even. He wore what camerapeople, who are mostly men, wear around India – loose trousers, a loose button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled-up, and heavy shoes. All of it eventually a strange shade of don’t-care. The colour of Delhi. “Kya karein (what do we do)?” I asked him. The newsroom wanted reactions from mall-going Indians. But that still didn’t change things on the ground. It was still Saturday morning, hardly anyone was coming through the gas station, and almost nobody was passing through for diesel. Nobody that was English-TV-worthy, that is.
The cameraman shrugged as much as he could shrug with Rambo’s machine gun on his shoulder, not completely unlike Jesus wincing under the weight of the crucifix on his back. He looked a bit cross. He suggested I go pull a customer from the petrol pump where all the nice sedans were rolling in with their upper-middle-class-and-higher clientele. The English-speakers of India. I felt a little ridiculous. My intelligence and integrity felt vaguely insulted, but I still went. I put my Hindi aside and put on my best American accent because I was representing an English news channel to the English-speaking persons of India. “Oh, NDTV!” they’d say with an appreciative smile, “of course, what do you need to know?” I got reactions in English from an elderly ex-army Sardar gentleman, a bearded intellectual type, and an outspoken clean-shaven polo-shirt-wearing man with a sharp haircut. I felt a bit empty standing there with my mic with the red NDTV muff on it, smiling and encouraging the people along on their performance. “Thankyousomuch,” I’d say before trotting off. I’m sure they were nice people, but that wasn’t what was bothering me. Only the previous month, when I was interning in the edit bay, had I been asked to edit vox pop footage that had come in from Kashmir about another price rise. I’d put the bites together, all of them in Hindi, and was then told by a young employee that they couldn’t put that footage on air. But why, I had asked, the bites had good content. The girl had laughed. “Have you seen their faces?” she had said, screwing up her pretty light-skinned nose at me, the poor newbie. “We can’t put such visuals on air.”
Such people? Dark-skinned people from lower-income families? But what about the content? That footage never made it on the air on our English channel, but our Hindi channel ran it all day long. So the English channel only showed the good-looking people of India? But what about content? What about what we had initially been told at NDTV about journalistic ethics and the real issues and how journalism was supposed to be a pillar of democracy, the voice of the people? Or was it the voice of certain sections of the people depending on the segment of India you were catering to? The unattractive sweaty Indian is also a part of India. In fact, he is about 90% of India. Doesn’t what he say also matter, even if he is not soothing enough to the eye of the English channel’s global audience? NDTV’s English channel is watched all over the world. At various points in my life, I have watched it in America, Canada, and Oman. The Indian diaspora feels proud to see India looking so dynamic and good on NDTV. “India is developing so fast,” they always say so proudly, “everyone speaks English so well now. It is not the India we left.” And then they proceed to daydream about a return to the homeland that never happens.
So what was this happening here??
That’s what was running through my mind at the gas station at Nehru Place that Saturday morning. Much later, after the footage had been uplinked to the newsroom (and happily approved), after we’d all returned, I was asked to isolate a short 10-second clip from the English reactions they’d decided to use. I’d been transcribing the footage, and the news editor asked me if there was anything with ‘punch’ that was said that could be used when the headlines rolled for the news bulletin. Something expressive, something emotionally-charged.
I did have something. “But does the guy look clean-cut and suave?” I was asked. I said yes. The bite was from the agitated man in the polo shirt and the short grey hair. An Indian Anderson Cooper. That’s suave, I guess. It was perfect, and his angry 10-second rant ran with the headlines all day.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So is this the reality of our english news channels who day and night conduct shows about equality but don't consider views of common indian not even worthy to be presented
Monday, May 14, 2012
Gurgaon the millenium city is now under suicide mania
Every 36 hours, someone in Gurgaon commits suicide
GURGAON: In past four months, Gurgaon which has recorded over 100 such incidents. At least one suicide, on an average, is taking place every 36 hours in the city as victims hang themselves, consume poison or jump from a height, according to police figures which show that 104 people have ended their lives in the first four months of 2012.
Besides the alarming trend of suicides, there has been a huge jump in the number of suicide attempts as well. Nearly 88 of the suicide victims since January were aged between 20 and 40 and a bulk of them were in their 20s. A total of 13 victims were aged 15-19 years, police data showed.
Hanging oneself, consuming poison and jumping from heights seemed to be the most preferred modes of committing suicide in Gurgaon, bordering the national capital, that is home to several high rise buildings with offices of multinational companies.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Headquarters) P.K. Mehta said they were willing to do every possible thing to prevent suicides. "But in case of harassment or property disputes, police can take action only if the victim approached them."
In the last four months, 51 people hanged themselves, 33 ended their lives by consuming poison and 17 jumped to death in Gurgaon, official figures showed.
These figures do not include cases in which people set themselves on fire, ended their lives by drowning, jumping in front of trains or resorted to some other way of committing suicide, an official said.
In January, six people, including a woman, hanged themselves, 12 people consumed poison while five died after jumping from high rises, say police.
,In February, the number of suicides due to hanging was 14, poison consumption seven and jumping from high buildings was eight. In March, the figures were 15, six and six respectively.
In April, there were 13 suicides due to hanging, six because of poison consumption and six due to falls from high rises.
The reasons for the suicide spurt in Gurgaon may be varied, but experts suspect depression could be the biggest killer.
Doctor Bhramdeep Sindhu, senior consultant clinical psychologist at the civil hospital here, said everyone occasionally felt the blues but these feelings were fleeting and passed away in a couple of days.
"When a person has a depression disorder, it interferes with daily life, normal functioning and causes distress to both the person with the disorder and those who care for him or her," he said.
"Depression is a common but serious illness and most who experience it need treatment to get better," he said, adding that daily almost 30-35 such patients with similar problems were consulting him.
The chief medical officer of a government hospital here told IANS: "Increasing suicidal tendency is a social as well as medical problem. We are ready to provide psychologists at special camps if some NGO takes the initiative.",,,,,,,,
Another woman kills self
A 45-year-old woman was found dead in Rajiv Nagar colony on Friday night. According to police, the victim, a native of Bihar, committed suicide after a fight with her husband. The body of victim has been returned to the family after postmortem
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-05-13/gurgaon/31689204_1_suicide-spurt-suicidal-tendency-suicide-victims
Human nature always surprises me ,The place where there is mass poverty ,starvation does not have high suicide rate but a city like gurgaon is going through mass suicide hysteria
Every 36 hours, someone in Gurgaon commits suicide
GURGAON: In past four months, Gurgaon which has recorded over 100 such incidents. At least one suicide, on an average, is taking place every 36 hours in the city as victims hang themselves, consume poison or jump from a height, according to police figures which show that 104 people have ended their lives in the first four months of 2012.
Besides the alarming trend of suicides, there has been a huge jump in the number of suicide attempts as well. Nearly 88 of the suicide victims since January were aged between 20 and 40 and a bulk of them were in their 20s. A total of 13 victims were aged 15-19 years, police data showed.
Hanging oneself, consuming poison and jumping from heights seemed to be the most preferred modes of committing suicide in Gurgaon, bordering the national capital, that is home to several high rise buildings with offices of multinational companies.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Headquarters) P.K. Mehta said they were willing to do every possible thing to prevent suicides. "But in case of harassment or property disputes, police can take action only if the victim approached them."
In the last four months, 51 people hanged themselves, 33 ended their lives by consuming poison and 17 jumped to death in Gurgaon, official figures showed.
These figures do not include cases in which people set themselves on fire, ended their lives by drowning, jumping in front of trains or resorted to some other way of committing suicide, an official said.
In January, six people, including a woman, hanged themselves, 12 people consumed poison while five died after jumping from high rises, say police.
,In February, the number of suicides due to hanging was 14, poison consumption seven and jumping from high buildings was eight. In March, the figures were 15, six and six respectively.
In April, there were 13 suicides due to hanging, six because of poison consumption and six due to falls from high rises.
The reasons for the suicide spurt in Gurgaon may be varied, but experts suspect depression could be the biggest killer.
Doctor Bhramdeep Sindhu, senior consultant clinical psychologist at the civil hospital here, said everyone occasionally felt the blues but these feelings were fleeting and passed away in a couple of days.
"When a person has a depression disorder, it interferes with daily life, normal functioning and causes distress to both the person with the disorder and those who care for him or her," he said.
"Depression is a common but serious illness and most who experience it need treatment to get better," he said, adding that daily almost 30-35 such patients with similar problems were consulting him.
The chief medical officer of a government hospital here told IANS: "Increasing suicidal tendency is a social as well as medical problem. We are ready to provide psychologists at special camps if some NGO takes the initiative.",,,,,,,,
Another woman kills self
A 45-year-old woman was found dead in Rajiv Nagar colony on Friday night. According to police, the victim, a native of Bihar, committed suicide after a fight with her husband. The body of victim has been returned to the family after postmortem
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-05-13/gurgaon/31689204_1_suicide-spurt-suicidal-tendency-suicide-victims
Human nature always surprises me ,The place where there is mass poverty ,starvation does not have high suicide rate but a city like gurgaon is going through mass suicide hysteria
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