Does a culture of mis-trust encourage and reinforce corrupt behaviour?

The current fraud at Punjab National Bank highlighted the fact that Public Sector bank employees are typically transferred after 3 years and that did not happen in this case. The message is clear that there must have been collusion even if no one will ever be able to prove it.

I have felt that the policy of transferring was counter-productive. It is nice to go to a branch and be recognised and there is a comfort in dealing with familiar faces.

It does not matter that much anymore as I hardly visit the branch and prefer an email response to any query I may have.

However, it seems to be a part of our (Indian) corporate culture as well that we mistrust employees. There is no issue in having checks. However, should the first impression be that it is assumed that an employee will misuse any privilege given and that must be prevented? Isn't the message we are giving to each young, new employee that misuse the privilege but in a way as not to be detected?

I used to feel that software folks will change our culture. The working environment in these companies was so much better and my hope had been that once the older folks were replaced by the younger ones, who had a lot more exposure to working with US/European clients, we will keep getting better.

From what I can gather, that has not happened. Processes have become more like in the rest of the companies, except with greater reliance on tech-tools.

It is unfortunate as a culture of trust would have helped create software companies that could have been the seeds of a new Indian work culture and a hope for a better future for our children.

I just can't get over the failure of our generation to create processes that we trust you unless proven otherwise. How hard should it have been?

I believe very hard in a society convinced of and obsessed by presumptive and notional losses. So, it is a delight to read the likely winding up of the board for

advising the government on enforcing “a code of conduct and ethics for managerial personnel” in these banks, will expire at the end of March. It is unlikely the government will look for a successor to Rai,

Harassed life - the problems of paying by cheque

My car insurance may be cancelled because the cheque was returned for 'Signatures not matching'. I have spent the last hour trying to overcome and prevent any complication.

I regret my mistake of having signed the cheque. My hand involuntarily shakes at times and the banks have a problem with tallying my signatures. Normally, I ask my wife to sign if I cannot pay by card or online.

I have had problems with my telephone bill some years ago - bsnl would not accept a cheque payment from me after that! Mobile phone company charged me a absurd penalty for cheque bouncing. In each of these cases, I had a hard time finding a problem in my signature. For all I know, the clerk may have been looking at the wrong record.

Does it have to be so? Is there any risk in payment of bills? What could possibly go wrong, which cannot be corrected?

Should we not assume that a cheque is valid unless it has been reported as stolen or there are some serious problems with it?

I think our society has complicated our rules and, hence, our lives just because the correction process is a problem. For example,

.Justice T S Thakur ... blamed “lack of governance” and “officials’ inability to take decisions” as prime reasons behind the deluge of cases choking the justice delivery system

... the top court of the country was compelled to spend a lot of time on cases involving bounced cheques ...

In the early days at the branch level, sometimes a helpful staff member would call and check before rejecting a cheque. However, now the clearing is happening in the back office in Mumbai and the branch staff is helpless.

I am hoping that soon either mobile payments will make cheques obsolete or robots will make the verifying clerks obsolete. The robots can easily send an sms or call us to confirm whether the cheque is valid and bring back a degree of personalization in an increasingly impersonal world.

Who is really harassing the pensioners?

It is really painful when I come across news like this:

Don't Harass Pensioners: Government Tells Bank

Even a moment's reflection makes it obvious that the only person who CAN be held accountable in this whole process is the bank officer who signs off. If the bank official is fearful and excessively cautious, it is hard to blame him/her.

We as a society are so absorbed by the process of submitting forms that we never think of them as being redundant, pointless, wasteful, etc. etc.

Obviously, far fewer pensioner die each year than not. So, efficiency would suggest that the government get certificates from the people who are dead. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy has not found a way to do that. So, the rest of us have to prove that we are alive.

Even searching for a pensioner's record on a supercomputer and entering a 'y' in one field takes time. However, in our process, it is far worse as the bank has to collect the papers. Very likely the bank catalogs them to make sure that they have proof of having sent them. Recipient clerk will need to make an entry for having received them and forwarded them to the correct department, which in turn, ... (I have to find out where did my life certificate disappear or just give another and hope that it doesn't get lost again.)

Trust the pensioners and their families instead. I can't imagine any person(other than brain-dead) waking up enthusiastically every morning to work on life certificates! Focus the effort and energies of the bank officials and government staff freed from this dumb work to detect frauds. As this example illustrates, such frauds can only exist only because the staff is too busy doing dumb work to notice. If it is corruption and collusion, how on earth do life certificates help?

International missed calls a fraud?

I had once returned a call only to find out that I was calling some place in Africa with an absurd calling rate. It wasn't a pay per minute type of a call. The person who picked up the phone was an Indian and seemed as confused by my call as I was.

I now look at the country code before responding. Though once I almost made a mistake but the Indian telecom authority cautioned me that I was making an international call.

Yesterday, I got a call with an Indian voice saying that she couldn't hear me. Today, a missed call from the same or similar number. Being a little smarter, I didn't call back Tanzania.

I suspect that it is not an accidental wrong number call but a deliberate racket. However, I keep wondering, who makes the money on such calls?