Corruption is such a huge problem. Could even say that while corruption is not the biggest problem in the world, as Laurence Lessig posits, it may be one of the first. This answer to corruption, and in particular bribery, just made me smile. Vijay Anand, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, came up with this as a sign of protest to bribery in India and has distributed a million so far.
One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen.
I want to mail a big bag of these to Congress.
4 Notes. Permalink. Wed, Jan 27th 2010, 3:57 PM (∞). Available in higher resolution.
