Corruption

Corruption is a disease, a cancer that eats society culturally, politically and economically, and destroys the functioning of vital organs. In the words of Transparency International, Corruption is one of the greatest challenges of the contemporary world. It undermines good government, fundamentally distorts public policy, leads to the misallocation of resources, harms the private sector and private sector development and particularly hurts the poor. Corruption also defined as 'the abuse of public power for personal ends' - has always existed. During recent decades, however, it has grown both in terms of geographic extent and intensity. Since the mid 1970s, it has infiltrated virtually every country in the world. Corruption is found almost everywhere, it is deep rooted in many of the newly industrialised countries, and it is reaching alarming proportions in several of the post-communist countries. Corruption has been the subject of a substantial amount of the rising and empirical research over the last 30 years, and this has produced a bewildering array of alternative explanations, typologies and remedies. However, as an extensively applied notion in both politics and social sciences, corruption is being used rather haphazardly. Corruption is understood as everything from the paying of bribes to civil servants in return for some favour and the theft of public purses, to a wide range of dubious economic and political practices in which politicians and bureaucrats enrich themselves and any abusive use of public power to a personal end. Besides, corruption is in itself a manyfaceted phenomenon and the concept of corruption contains too many connotations to be analytically functional without a closer definition. The main cause of occur corruption in Malaysia is government tend to earn more

money. Since the ultimate source of rent-seeking behaviour is the availability of rents, corruption is likely to occur where restrictions and government intervention lead to the presence of such excessive profits. Examples include trade restrictions (such as tariffs and import quotas), industrial policies (such as subsidies and tax deductions), price controls, multiple exchange rate practices and foreign exchange allocation schemes, and government-controlled provision of credit. Some rents may arise in the absence of government intervention, as in the case of natural resources, such as oil, whose supply is limited by nature and whose extraction cost is far lower than its market price. Since abnormal profits are available to those who extract oil, officials who allocate extraction rights are likely to be offered bribes. Finally, one would expect that corruption is more likely to take place when civil servants are paid very low wages and often must resort to collecting bribes in order to feed their families. Nowadays we see corruption in every field of life. In our society there is no any department which is totally free from corruption. Every affected person comments that he does not like corruption and wants to remove the corruption from the society. In order to remove the corruption from the society we should know the causes of corruption. Whenever we dont know the causes of corruption, we will not finish this lame duck from our society. There are many causes of corruption; one of the causes of corruption is poverty. Poverty is very common factor of corruption. Poverty insists a poor man towards corruption. We all know that a poor man lives from hand to mouth. In this modern age dearness is increasing day by day. In order to fulfill his family demands, he does corruption. Mostly it has been seen that rich people get benefited through poor. They pay a handsome amount of money to the needy people for doing wrong deed.

Corruption produces a very bad effect on the society. It destroys the ethics and the values of the society. Corruption makes the people to do every type of bad thing. Due to corruption people do not perform their duty well. There are many examples of corruptions lying in our society. We often see, when a common citizen violate a law, police arrest him. But as he offers bribe to the officer, he immediately release him after taking the bribe from him. This shows that the police officer is corrupt and he not performing his duty well. Like wise our courts are not fulfilling their duty in a well manner. If you have money, you can make the judge take decision in your favor. In this way the innocent is punished

and the culprit released. Our politicians, doctors, engineers, journalists, teacher etc are doing corruption in their fields. In these circumstances what do you expect with our society? The answer is just corruption. When a common man sees corruption in every field of life, he also makes himself a corrupt man.

Others effect of corruption in Malaysia is reduced public trust in government increase vulnerability of the poor. Corruption that reduces governance capacity also may inflict critical collateral damage: reduced public trust in government institutions. A declines, research has shown that vulnerability of the poor increases as their economic productivity is affected. The concept of social capital refers to social structures that enable people to work collectively for the good of the group.20 One of the most important and widely discussed elements of social capital is trust, both interpersonal trust and trust in institutions of governments trust -- an important element of social capital --Recent research on social capital suggests that there is a relationship between corruption, trust and poverty. The proposition is that corruption destroys peoples trust in government and other institutions. This effect is most salient for the lowest income groups

and low social capital affects peoples willingness and ability to engage in productive activity.

Corruption is an intractable problem. It is like diabetes, can only be controlled, but not totally eliminated. It may not be possible to root out corruption completely at all levels but it is possible to contain it within tolerable limits. Honest and dedicated persons in public life, control over electoral expenses could be the most important prescriptions to combat corruption. Corruption has a corrosive impact on our economy. It worsens our image in international market and leads to loss of overseas opportunities. Corruption is a global problem that all countries of the world have to confront, solutions, however, can only be home grown. We have tolerated corruption for so long. The time has now come to root it out from its roots.