CHANDIGARH: Bribery, long a way of life in India, is being threatened by a new fraud: Bribes in Punjab and other northern Indian states are now being paid with counterfeit notes.

Recently, a police officer in Punjab state paid close to $100,000 in bribes to ensure that his daughter secured a job in the government, coveted mainly because of the access it provides to more bribe money.

But the beneficiaries, who ensured her enrolment by hyping up her grades in the entrance examination, were soon to discover that they had been paid in counterfeit money.

A senior minister in Punjab who received a large sum of money for services rendered found that a bank in the state’s capital of Chandigarh refused to accept the cash for the same reason — it was counterfeit.

The corrupt in Punjab and other north Indian cities are in a fix these days, as enterprising criminal syndicates on either side of the porous Pakistani frontier are redefining the unwritten but well-accepted rules of graft.

It seems that bribe givers, resigned to a well-entrenched system of graft, are now trying to minimise their losses by purchasing cheap, available counterfeit currency to ensure their work gets done.

In neighbouring Nepal, where Indian currency is valid, 500 rupee notes ($40) have been banned because of the large number of fake notes of that denomination discovered to be in circulation there.

The ban was part of measures taken by Nepal following the hijack of an Indian airliner with 150 passengers on board from Kathmandu to Kandahar in December 1999 by “jihadist’ radicals based in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, an 18-month long search for one honest government employee in Punjab some years ago proved futile, but led to uncovering nearly 300 corrupt officials.

Punjab failed to find any official worthy of the 100,000 rupee ($2,080) award for the “most honest officer” announced by former chief minister Prakash Singh Badal.

But in its search, the state Vigilance Department paid out 660 million rupees ($1.37 million) in rewards to informers who tipped them off about corrupt officers. But the informers, after collecting their rewards, refused to depose as witnesses to ensure convictions.

A federal home ministry report compiled by senior officials, including heads of India’s internal and external security agencies and tabled in parliament, declared that corruption across the country was “endemic”.—Dawn/InterPress Service.