A zero rupee banknote to stop bribery

အိႏၵိယက အက်င္ ့ပ်က္လာဘ္စားမွဳတုိက္ဖ်က္ေရးေၿခလွမ္းသစ္တစ္ခု....

ဒီလုိ သုညရူပီေငြစကၠဴ ကုိေပးလိုက္တာပါပဲ...

အိႏၵိယနုိင္ငံတြင္ အက်င္ ့ပ်က္လာဘ္စားမွဳမ်ား ပေပ်ာက္ေရးအတြက္ ထိန္းသိမ္းႀကပ္မတ္နုိင္ရန္အတြက္ သုညရူပီ ေငြစကၠဴမ်ားကုိ လာဘ္စားသူအစုိးရအမွဳထမ္းမ်ားအားေပးအပ္ေရးလွဳံ့ေဆာ္မွဳတစ္ခုစတင္ၿပဳလုပ္

ခဲ ့ေႀကာင္းသိရပါသည္...

အိႏၵိယနုိင္ငံတြင္ လက္ရွိသံုးစဲြေနေသာ ၅၀ ရူပီတန္ ေငြစကၠဴႏွင္ ့ပံုသ႑ာန္အလားတူေသာ မဟတၱမ

ဂႏၵီ၏ရုပ္ပံုႏွင္ ့အိႏၵိယဗဟုိဘဏ္၏ သႏၵိဌာန္ေဆာင္ပုဒ္ၿဖစ္ေသာ၀န္ထမ္းအဆင္ ့အားလံုးလာဘ္စားမွဳပ

ေပ်ာက္ေစရန္တုိက္ဖ်က္ႀက ဟူေသာ လံွဳ ့ေဆာ္ခ်က္ စာတမ္းအစားအဆုိပါသုညရူပီေငြစကၠဴေပၚတြင္ 

မည္သည္ ့လာဘ္ေပး၊လာဘ္ယူမွဳမွ်မၿပဳလုပ္ရန္ ကတိၿပဳပါသည္ ဟူေသာစာတန္းကုိ အစားထုိးရုိက္ႏွိပ္

ထားပါသည္..

အဆုိပါလွဳံေဆာ္မွဳစီမံခ်က္၏အဓိကေထာက္ပံ ့သည္ ့အဖဲြ ့အစည္းၿဖစ္ေသာ ၀ါရွင္တန္အေၿခစုိက္ပဥၼ မမ႑ဳိင္ အမည္ရွိ အစုိးရမဟုတ္သာ အဖဲြ ့အစည္းတစ္ခုက ယခုကဲ ့သုိ ့သုညရူပီေငြစကၠဴမ်ားထုတ္ေ၀

ကာ လာဘ္စားသူအမွဳထမ္းမ်ားကုိေပးၿခင္းသည္ ထုိလာဘ္ေတာင္းသူအစုိးရအမွုဳထမ္းကုိအရွက္ရေစ

ရုံမွ်မက ဘယ္လုိအေၿခအေနမ်ဴိးမွာပင္ အိႏိၵယနုိင္ငံသားတစ္ေယာက္အေနၿဖင္ ့လာဘ္ေပးရန္မလုိအပ္ပါ ဟူေသာ သတင္းစကားလည္း ပညာေပးပ်ံ ့ႏွံ ့သြားၿပီးၿဖစ္ေစမည္ဟုဆုိပါသည္...

ယခုၿပဳလုပ္တဲ ့ယခင္ကနဲ ့မတူ၊ဆန္းသစ္သည္ ့သုညရူပီစီမံကိန္းဟာ လက္မွတ္စစ္မ်ား ရဲအဖဲြ ့၀င္မ်ား

နွင္ ့့အၿခားေသာ အစုိးရအမွုဳထမ္းမ်ားအက်င္ ့ပ်က္လာဘ္စားမွဳကုိတုိက္ဖ်က္ရာတြင္ အလြန္ေအာင္ၿမင္

ခဲ ့သည္ ဟုအဆုိပါ အဖဲြ ့ဥကၠဌ ဗီေဂ်းအနန္ က အိႏိၵယနုိင္ငံ၏အဖဲြ ့ရုံးစုိက္ရာ ေခ်နုိင္း ၿမဳိ ့တြင္ေၿပာႀကား

ခဲ ့ပါတယ္..
” မႀကာေသးခင္က ညတစ္ညမွာစက္တပ္ဆုိက္ကားဆရာကုိရဲသားတစ္ဦးကတားၿပီးေငြေတာင္းပါတယ္...

ထုိဆုိက္ကားေမာင္းသူကတစ္ကယ္ ့ေငြစကၠဴအစား သုညရူပီေငြစကၠဴကိုထုတ္ေပးခဲ ့ပါတယ္...ရဲသားဟာ အံ ့အားသင္ ့သြားၿပီး၊ ၿပဳံုးလုိက္ကာ ဆုိက္ကားဆရာကုိ သြားခြင္ ့ၿပဳလိုက္ပါတယ္...” လို ့မစၥတာ အနန္က

ဆုိပါတယ္...
ထုိအဖဲြ ့ရဲ ့အဖဲြ ့၀င္တစ္ဦးမီးရထားၿဖင္ ့ခရီးသြားခဲ ့ရာမွာလည္း လက္မွတ္စစ္တစ္ဦးက အိပ္စင္အတြက္ လာဘ္ေတာင္းခဲ ့ရာမွာ အဆုိပါ သုညရူပီေငြစကၠဴကုိ ထုတ္ေပးခဲ ့လုိ ့လက္မွတ္စစ္မွာ အရွက္ရကာလာဘ္

မယူရဲေတာ ့ပဲ အိပ္စင္ကုိထုိသူအား ေနရာေပးခဲ ့ရပါတယ္..

အခုဆုိယင္ အဆုိပါအဖဲြ ့ဟာ ထုိ သုညရူပီးေငြစကၠဴေတြကုိ တစ္သန္းအထိရုိက္ႏွိပ္ၿပီး နုိင္ငံအႏွံ ့ၿဖန္ ့ေ၀

ေနပါတယ္...

ေငြစကၠဴမ်ားကုိ တမီးလ္၊ တာဂလူ၊ ကန္နဒါနဲ ့မာလယလမ္ ဘာသာမ်ားနဲ ့ပါရုိက္ႏွိပ္ၿဖန္ ့ခ်ီေနတာၿဖစ္ပါ

တယ္...
ဒါေပမယ္ ့သူတုိ ့အဖြဲ ့ရဲ ့အက်င္ ့ပ်က္လာဘ္စားမွဳတုိက္ဖ်က္ေရးလုပ္ေဆာင္ႀကဳိးပမ္းမွဳမ်ားကုိ တားဆီး

ေႏွာက္ယွက္တာေတြလည္းရွိခဲ ့ပါတယ္..
လြန္ခဲ ့တဲ ့လအနည္းငယ္က တမီလ္နာဒူးၿပည္နယ္က ေက်းရြာအုပ္ခ်ဴပ္ေရးအရာရွိတစ္ဦးကုိ လာဘ္ယူေန

စဥ္လက္ပူးလက္ႀကပ္ဖမ္းမိခဲ ့တဲ ့အဆုိပါအဖဲြ ့၀င္ လုပ္အားေပးသူတစ္ဦးကုိ အၿပင္းအထန္ရုိက္ႏွက္ခဲ ့ႀက

ပါတယ္..
” အကယ္၍တစ္စံုတစ္ေယာက္ကသာ လာဘ္ေပးဖုိ ့ေတာင္းဆုိလာခဲ ့ယင္သုညရူပီေငြစကၠဴကိုသာေပး

လုိက္ပါ...ဒီလုိလုပ္ၿခင္းအားၿဖင္ ့သင္ ့အေနနဲ ့ဥပေဒအရ တာ၀န္ထမ္းေဆာင္ရမယ္ ့လုပ္ငန္းတစ္ခုအ

တြက္ တရားမ၀င္ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးဖုိ ့လာဘ္ေပးလာဘ္ယူဖုိ ့လက္မခံပဲၿငင္းဆန္တယ္ဆုိတာ တစ္ၿခားသူ

ေတြကုိ သိေစမွာၿဖစ္ပါတယ္...” လုိ ့အဆုိပါ ပဥၥမမ႑ဳိင္အဖဲြ ့ရဲ ့ေႀကၿငာခ်က္မွာေဖာ္ၿပပါရွိပါတယ္...

အစုိးရအမွဳထမ္း၊ အရာထမ္းမ်ားနဲ ့အဆက္အသြယ္မရွိသူ အိႏၵိယနုိင္ငံသားအမ်ားစု၊သာမာန္ၿပည္သူ

မ်ားအေနနဲ ့သူတုိ ့ရဲ ့ ကေလးငယ္မ်ားေက်ာင္းအပ္တာ၊ တယ္လီဖံုးနဲ ့လွ်ပ္စစ္မီးသြယ္တာေတြအၿပင္နိုင္

ငံရဲ ့အာမခံဌာနမ်ားမွေလွ်ာ္ေႀကး၊ နစ္နာေႀကးမ်ားေတာင္းခံေလွ်ာက္ထားရာမွာေတာင္ ေငြေႀကးလက္

ေဆာင္ လာဘ္ေပးၿပီးၿပဳလုပ္ေနရတာ ေန ့စဥ္ဘ၀အစိတ္အပုိင္းတစ္ခုၿဖစ္ေနပါတယ္...
အိႏိၵယနုိင္ငံတစ္၀ွမ္း လက္မွတ္စစ္မ်ား၊ ရဲတပ္ဖဲြ ့၀င္မ်ား၊ ၿပည္သူ ့၀န္ထမ္းမ်ား၊ နုိင္ငံေရးသမားမ်ားအပါ

အ၀င္ အၿခားေသာ ပံုစံမ်ဴိးစံုလာဘ္ေပးလာဘ္ယူမွဳဟာ ႏွစ္စဥ္ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၄.၈ ဘီလီယံ အထိ

ရွိေႀကာင္း ပဥၥမ မ႑ဳိင္အဖဲြ ့ကခန္ ့မွန္းေၿပာဆုိထားၿပီး အမ်ားစုကေတာ ့ ထုိပမာဏထက္

မ်ားစြာပုိလိမ္ ့မယ္လုိ ့ယံုႀကည္ႀကပါတယ္...

ဘာလင္အေၿခစုိက္ လာဘ္ေပးလာဘ္ယူေစာင္ ့ႀကည္ ့ေလ ့လာေရးအဖဲြ ့တစ္ခုၿဖစ္တဲ ့အစိုးရလုပ္ငန္းအ

ဖဲြ ့အစည္းမ်ားရဲ ့အၿပည္ၿပည္ဆုိင္ရာလြတ္လပ္ေသာထင္သာၿမင္သာရွိမွဳအဖဲြ ့အိႏိၵယ ရဲ ့၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္ နိ

၀င္ဘာလကေန ၂၀၀၈ ခုႏွစ္ ဇန္န၀ါရီလအထိသံုးလႀကာၿပဳလုပ္ခဲ ့တဲ ့ေအာက္ေၿခအဆင္ ့၀န္ထမ္းမ်ား

လာဘ္စားမွဳေလ ့လာေရးစစ္တမ္းအရ ရဲတပ္ဖဲြ ့၀င္မ်ားက အက်င္ ့ပ်က္လာဘ္စားမွဳအမ်ားဆံုးၿဖစ္ၿပီး ၿပည္
သူငါးဦးမွာ ႏွစ္ဦးကေတာ ့သူတုိ ့ရဲတပ္ဖဲြ ့ကုိအကူအညီေတာင္းရာမွာ အဓမၼလာဘ္ေပးေစခဲ ့ပါတယ္...
အဆုိပါေလ ့လာဆန္းစစ္မွဳအရပဲ အိႏၵိယနုိင္ငံရဲ ့ဆင္းရဲမဲြေတေသာေဒသမွာေနထုိင္သူ၊ လူဆင္းရဲမ်ားက ထုိသံုးလမွ်ေသာကာလအတြင္း ေအာက္ေၿခၿပည္သူ ့၀န္ထမ္းမ်ားကုိ လာဘ္္ေငြ ၉ ဘီလီယံရူပီ (အေမရိ

ကန္ ေဒၚလာ ၁၉၅ သန္း ) နီးပါေပးခဲ ့ရေႀကာင္းဆုိပါတယ္...
အၿပည္ၿပည္ဆုိင္ရာ လြတ္လပ္ေသာထင္သာၿမင္သာရွိမွဳအဖဲြ ့အစည္းရဲ ့နုိ၀င္ဘာလမွာေနာက္ဆံုးထုတ္

ၿပန္ခဲ ့တဲ ့ညႊန္းကိန္းအရအိႏိၵယနုိင္ငံဟာ နုိင္ငံေပါင္း၁၈၀ မွာ ၈၄ နုိင္ငံေၿမာက္ ၿပည္သူ ့၀န္ထမ္းဌာနမ်ား

ဆုိင္ရာ လာဘ္စားမွဳအမ်ားဆံုးနုိင္ငံၿဖစ္ပါတယ္..

မူရင္းသတင္းပါ...

KOLKATA // A corruption monitor has launched a campaign challenging India’s culture of bribery by issuing “zero rupee” banknotes that activists are handing out to corrupt government employees.

The zero rupee note, which closely resembles the Indian 50-rupee note, including the image of Mohandas Gandhi, carries the slogan “eliminate corruption at all levels”, with the usual promise of redemption by the Reserve Bank of India being replaced by the pledge, “I promise to neither accept nor give bribe”.

The Fifth Pillar, the non-governmental organisation based in Washington that is behind the campaign, said that by offering the zero rupee notes, apart from embarrassing bribe-seeking officials, the group aims to popularise the message that in no situation will Indians pay bribes.

“The zero rupee note has proven to be very successful in challenging corrupt ‘bakshish-demanding’ train ticket examiners, police officers and other public service officials in our novel anti-bribe campaign involving the people,” said Vijay Anand, the president of Fifth Pillar’s Indian headquarters in Chennai.

“On one recent night, virtually for no reason, one auto-rickshaw was stopped by a policeman who sought some amount of bribe to let him go. The driver quickly handed out a zero rupee note instead. The policeman was taken aback, but smiled and let the auto-rickshaw driver go,” Mr Anand said.
Rajesh Chandran, 38, a software programmer in Chennai and Fifth Pillar activist, said when he was recently travelling to Chennai from Madurai by train and a train ticket examiner asked for a bribe to allot a berth, he was amazed by the effect of the zero rupee note.

“There were several empty berths in the coach, but the [examiner] did not want to allot one to me. He hinted that he would get me a berth only if I paid a bribe. I handed out a zero rupee note from my wallet and stared in his eyes, signalling that I would not pay a bribe. He looked somewhat shaken or embarrassed and within a few seconds he allotted me a berth,” Mr Chandran said.

“In Bangalore, Delhi and Kolkata I have friends who carry zero rupee notes in their wallets.”

Fifth Pillar has circulated one million zero rupee notes countrywide, but mostly in the Chennai region, as part of its nationwide mission to weed out corruption across society. The notes have been printed in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and English.

Unsurprisingly, Fifth Pillar’s zero rupee campaign has faced resistance. A few months ago, field volunteers were severely beaten for catching a village administrative officer red-handed while he accepted a bribe in Tamil Nadu. Mr Anand said such attacks have only strengthened his resolve to fight corruption.

“Next time someone asks you for a bribe, just take your country’s zero currency note and hand it to them. This will let the other person know that you refuse to give or take any money in order to perform services required by law or to give or take money to do something illegal,” said a statement from the Fifth Pillar.

Corruption is a daily part of life in India, where ordinary citizens who have no connections in the country’s vast bureaucracy are forced to pay cash bribes for such basic services as phone and electricity connections, enrolling children in school or even collecting compensation from state insurance agents.

Fifth Pillar claims that every year, Indians pay corrupt train ticket inspectors, police, civil servants, politicians and others bribes amounting to US$4.8 billion (Dh18bn), an estimate many believe should actually be much higher.

Transparency International India (TII), the Indian chapter of the Berlin-based corruption watchdog, following its three-month survey of low-level corruption conducted between November 2007 and January 2008, found that the police were the most corrupt group, with two out of every five citizens seeking its help forced to pay bribes.

The survey also found that 26 per cent of Indians living in poverty had paid nearly nine billion rupees (Dh718million) in bribes during those three months to avail basic public utility services.

In Transparency International’s latest annual index, published in November, India was ranked 84 out of 180 countries in terms of corruption in the public sector.