War On Corruption: Demonetise the Babus

So long as bureaucratic and political venality is ignored, the war on corruption will remain a sham.

- Akhil Gupta

WHEN THAT ICON of the Non-Aligned Movement, Fidel Castro, passed away recently, he was remembered fondly by an older generation of Cubans. Among them were people who had been illiterate adults when the revolution occurred in 1959. Two years later, when the government declared ‘the year of education’, the illiteracy rate fell from around 40 per cent to less than 4 per cent. Cuba went from being a poor country with low levels of rural literacy to universal literacy. It did this with few economic resources and without the steel frame of a permanent, well-functioning bureaucracy. Moreover, some of Cuba’s best educated people had fled and it was faced with a shortage of trained teachers and educators.

I invoke Cuba’s experience with radical change in order to put into context a plan like demonetisation. What might we learn from other government-led plans that were actually successful in bringing about change in a short time? How did Cuba manage to eradicate illiteracy, especially adult illiteracy, so quickly? The secret was societal mobilisation. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary, literate people, from schoolchildren to teachers and workers, were motivated to act. Urban people, who otherwise had little contact with rural areas, learnt first-hand about the lives of their poor compatriots. Unlike many other initiatives of the Cuban government that relied on force or fear and did not leave an enduring legacy, this initiative called upon the idealism of its people to change the country forever. Reflecting on the literacy campaign 55 years later, it is clear that for many Cubans, this act alone gave Castro’s government life-long legitimacy. The political payoff of such an initiative is incalculable.