On corrupt “Desis”

​I was at a small gathering with friends recently when the conversation took a turn into wheelchairs. Someone brought up how many people “abuse” wheelchair assistance at airports.

“Half of them are faking it,” one person said.
“Just charge them a big fee and see how many still need help.”
Heads nodded. A few more creative punishments were suggested.

Then the topic widened. From airport wheelchairs, we jumped to bribing at government offices in India and tricks people use for H-1B visas in the US. Finally, someone shrugged and said: “Come on, desis do this all the time. Our people will always find a shortcut.”

That line stayed with me.
It sounds like common sense. If you’ve dealt with a village office or tried to get something done at an RTO, it feels true. The file doesn’t move. The clerk is “very busy.” Until an “agent” appears, and things suddenly move faster. After a few rounds of this, it’s easy to conclude: this is just how our people are.

But that sounds like too simple of an explanation.

The same “our people” who pay bribes in one setting stand quietly in line at the US DMV. The same person who needs an agent for a driving license test in India follows every boring instruction on a government website in the US. They show up with the right documents. They wait two hours. No envelope under the counter.

Did their character change on the flight?
Did their DNA reset at immigration?
Or did something else change?

What changed was the system.

Imagine a simple experiment. Take one honest, rule-following American and drop him into the worst local office you know in India. Long lines. No clear instructions. The official can always find one more missing form. If he follows the “proper” process, he may lose days of work and still not get the thing done.

Then quietly offer him a shortcut.
“Sir, if you pay this much, you can finish today.”
How long before this very honest person starts to think about it?

Now reverse it. Take a “typical corrupt desi” and drop them into a system where the rules are clear, the website actually works, and the officer could lose their job for taking a bribe. In that world, they simply follow the process. There is no other path. They becomes the person who posts online about how “the system works so well here.”

This doesn’t mean people are angels. But it does suggest something uncomfortable: much of what we label as “Indian corruption” is people trying to survive bad systems.

Consider a small licensing office where one clerk controls dozens of approvals. His pay barely covers living costs. Even where pay has improved over time, discretion remains high and accountability weak. The rules are vague enough that he can always delay a file “legitimately.” There’s no real audit trail, and almost no risk of punishment. In that setup, refusing a bribe is costly. Taking one is rewarded. That’s not a moral question. It’s how the system is set up.

If a system is slow, confusing, and full of small officials with big discretionary power, bribes become the oil that makes the machine move. If the system is digital, trackable, and risky for the person taking the bribe, the same human being behaves very differently. This doesn’t make bribery okay. And it doesn’t make the pain of the honest person standing in that line any less real. 

But it changes the question we ask.
Instead of:
“What is wrong with desis?”
we can ask:
“What is wrong with the way this system is built and run?”

Many parts of our bureaucracy were never designed to serve citizens in the first place. They were built to control and extract. After independence, the flag changed, the leaders changed, and many laws changed. But much of the structure remained: centralized authority, endless permissions, and layers of signatures at every step. Later governments piled more rules on top, often with good intentions.

Low pay. High discretion. Weak accountability. Put those together, and corruption is not surprising. It’s predictable. When we say “desis are corrupt,” we skip over all of that. We take history, bad design, and political choices and collapse them into a story about moral character. About us. It feels like brutal honesty. But it does something else too: it makes us numb to people’s struggles.

The shop owner who pays to get a license faster because a delay will kill his business.
The student who pays an agent because everyone tells her nothing moves without one.

This is not to excuse it. It’s to understand it. If we want less corruption, shouting “we are bad people” is not a strategy.

So the next time we’re tempted to say, “Desis are corrupt,”.  Corrupt compared to whom? Inside which system?  Are we even willing to let go of the easy story (desis are corrupt) we tell about ourselves? 
​
Teaser for Part 2
At that same get-together, the conversation didn’t stop with corruption. Someone asked, half-joking and half-serious:
“Okay, fine, maybe it’s systems. But how long are we going to blame the British? In the last hundred years, who made all the big inventions?” That question pulls us much further back—into farms, ships, empires, and who got to build the first big labs. That’s where I’ll go next.

​Back to all posts