Yesterday I wrote my letter to Baba Ramdev, who is raising his voice against corruption. And indeed, corruption is one of India’s biggest problems. In nearly every field you will find people who ask you for a bribe for getting your work done and you can buy nearly everything and pay for nearly everything.
In the last weeks four pilots of different airlines have been arrested for flying passenger planes with licenses that were not actually forged but still wrong: they had bought them instead of passing the exams and tests usually necessary for obtaining them. There are now investigations against a big number of Indian pilots in order to find out whether their pilot licenses are legitimate or not.
The whole case started when a plane landed unusually hard on a runway in Goa. The following investigations showed that the female pilot had forged documents to obtain her license. Further investigations on other pilots produced another three pilots with similar stories of forged documents and one of them is said to have given 1.2 million rupees for obtaining his license.
Now can you imagine sitting in a plane and getting to know that your pilot is just as much a pilot as you, just with some more experience? If you have a plane ticket with Air India or another Indian airline in the next days, just as we have, and are looking forward to your journey, I hope you can take it with good spirit!
And at the root of those incidents there this one problem: corruption in India. It is everywhere. You can buy degrees, licenses and even fly planes with hundreds of people in them if you find the right person to give money to. And obviously, if there are some cases in which pilots bought their licenses, there are millions of car drivers who have bought their license. I would actually say, it is the normal thing to do here.
In India there are, except maybe in big cities, hardly any driving schools, training facilities, driving teachers and certified testers. Some people pay for a forged driving license but most people pay for getting their legitimate driving license without any test drive.
The result is that India is the country with the highest rate of deaths in road accidents. According to a 2008 study, 14 people die each hour in road accidents in India. If you read this number, it may only be a number to you, if you have never lost anybody in an accident. Having lost my only sister in a car accident, I know the pain that hundreds and thousands families feel when they see such statistics. How many parents and siblings will be crying each day, grieving the death of a loved one.
The drivers of trucks, lorries, motorbikes and cars on highways and in cities are un-trained and often fully unqualified. They don’t know what the road signs mean, they have not learned about traffic rules and many of them cannot even read or write. They are illiterate, have never been to school and would never have been able to pass a written driving test about rules and regulations.
This does not mean however that there are no qualified or trained drivers in India! There are many people with good driving skills who know the signs and with whom you can feel safe on the road. The difference is that they learned from their own experience of driving. It was and is an easy process to get a license. Being a good driver requires something more than that.
I often listen to my friends in Germany when they tell how difficult and expensive it was for them to do the training for the driving license and how they sometimes even failed in the exam. I never heard this kind of story in India.
I can only request young people in India to please learn driving properly and see the responsibilities you take when you enter a vehicle as a driver. The government should also become more active, create a proper body to control how people get licenses and keep their eyes open to detect corruption among those who issue licenses against bribes.
The reason is clear: If it is this easy to get a car license, why would you not get a pilot license in this way, too?
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Corruption in religious and spiritual Business – 24 Aug 11
An Appeal to those who oppose Anna Hazare and his Campaign against Corruption – 22 Aug 11
Anna Hazare – Keep up your Fight against Corruption without political or religious Influence – 17 Aug 11
Anna Hazare arrested – Game of Politics and Corruption – 16 Aug 11
Personal Responsibility in Fighting Corruption: No Payments for Comfort anymore – 15 Apr 11
Is the average Indian criminal? – Legalizing Bribe-Giving in Fight against Corruption – 14 Apr 11
Indian traffic has always been scary for me and this view now just made it even more scary. Especially in the night when you only see cars with the headlights turned up, so actually you only see blinding lights. I think nobody ever taught them that this is not good for the person coming from front! But I love the country, so I take care to use trains more than buses!
But the point is that you don’t need to panic now! Now they know about it, now they will work against fake pilots. It was worse before, when nobody thought about that but still those people were flying!So the danger was always there and knowing about it does not really make flying more dangerous.
I know what you mean with the lights and I always try to tell our driver only to drive with normal light. It is however so much in their habit that it is difficult to change. And why would they, everybody does it and nobody taught them not to!And although the traffic is scary it is in a way more relaxed – at least in our town – as you have to often wait for cows to cross the street 🙂
I don’t see how people could have the right mind to help others with this kind of corruption. Even if you get money out of it, by helping others to obtain fake licenses, you endanger yourself every time you travel. It is feeding into a system that sabotages your life and your society. I understand that people are hungry and poor… but at the cost of others lives? They should find better ways to make a living.