Accountability Must Flow Both Ways

An open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, from an ordinary citizen who believed, and still wants to

Why I am writing this

When I moved back to my small hometown in coastal Karnataka just before COVID to build a sustainable farm stay, I thought the hard part would be the land, the building and finding guests. I was wrong. The hard part was the paperwork.

Until then, I had spent years working in cities, entirely in the digital world. I had rarely stood at a government counter. Setting up the farm stay was my first real experience of licences, permissions and approvals, and of how slowly a file can move when someone wants it to.

Since then, through my digital marketing work, I have helped many small businesses and entrepreneurs set up and grow. Every business is different, but I keep hearing the same story: unclear procedures, repeated visits to offices, documents that are never quite "complete," and the quiet expectation of something extra.

I am not a politician or a journalist. I am someone who chose to come home and build. This letter is not written by an opponent. It is written by someone who wants this government to succeed, and who is worried that it is missing what is happening on the ground.

Tired, not angry

Something has shifted in India's mood. It isn't anger, and it isn't rejection. It's tiredness.

We should be honest about what has been achieved. Ayodhya, Article 370, toilets in villages that never had them, digital payments in the hands of vegetable vendors. For decades, these were called impossible. They are now facts.

But a problem once solved stays in our hearts and leaves our attention. Attention moves to the problem in front of us today. A citizen can be grateful for Ayodhya and still be exhausted by the queue at the taluk office. Both are true at once.

The world is uncertain. Wars, oil prices and a slowing job market are pressures no government fully controls. But for most Indians, the government doesn't live in national headlines. It lives in the panchayat office, the police station, the RTO and the registrar's counter. That is exactly where the frustration is building.

Corruption: the cancer inside the system

Corruption in India is no longer a scandal. It is an atmosphere, and it has spread into ordinary moments of a citizen's life.

In too many places, a family needs a birth certificate for a newborn, and someone asks for money. A son needs a death certificate for his father, and someone asks again. A small business owner files every return on time and is still treated like a suspect.

The government has become smarter. It now uses technology and data to track tax, GST and compliance at a scale India has never seen. That is genuinely impressive. But the citizen has not been brought along. Rules change faster than people can learn them, portals fail, and notices arrive with no explanation. Too often, the bureaucracy behaves like a loan recovery agency: efficient at collecting, slow at serving.

The weight of rules alone is enormous. A 2022 study by the Observer Research Foundation, Jailed for Doing Business, counted 1,536 laws and 69,233 compliances that govern business in India. Of those compliances, 26,134 carry the threat of jail. The Jan Vishwas Act of 2023 was a welcome start in reducing this, but for a small entrepreneur, the maze is still vast.

Every one of those rules is a door, and at too many doors there is an officer waiting. The file doesn't move. Documents are "incomplete." Come back next week, and then the week after. The message is never spoken, but everyone understands it: the papers will sit until you are tired enough to pay.

By the time the paperwork is done, months or years have passed. In a world that changes every few months, that delay can kill an idea completely. Young Indians want to experiment with new businesses that today's laws never imagined, and they are the ones who suffer most.

Not every officer is corrupt. Many are honest and overworked. But when even a fraction of the officials serving crores of people are corrupt, the damage reaches millions.

The worst result is who wins. The thick-skinned and well-connected find their jugaad and get things done. The honest and the helpless keep waiting. Some give up their principles because they see no other way. Many talented Indians simply leave the country, not because they don't love India, but because nothing moves easily here. A country cannot become great if it keeps punishing the very people trying to build it.

The honest officers deserve credit too

It would be unfair to write all of this without speaking about the good ones. They exist, in every department and every district, and they deserve to be named in the same breath as the problem.

The village accountant who explains every step without being asked. The clerk who stays back to finish a file so a farmer doesn't have to make one more trip. The police officer who helps a stranger at night and expects nothing in return. The engineer who refuses to sign off on a bad road, even under pressure from above. These people quietly hold the system together, every single day.

But the system gives them almost nothing for it. There is little recognition, rarely a faster promotion, and sometimes not even a word of thanks. An honest officer is often transferred, sidelined or mocked by colleagues, while the one who "adjusts" gets along comfortably. In too many offices, honesty feels less like a virtue and more like a punishment.

The same is true for ordinary citizens. The person who refuses to pay a bribe waits longer. The business owner who follows every rule pays more and moves slower than the one who cuts corners. Nobody around them says "well done." After years of this, even good people begin to ask themselves why they bother.

When doing the right thing brings no reward, and doing the wrong thing brings no punishment, we cannot expect people to keep choosing what is right. The honest need to be seen, thanked and protected. That alone would begin to change the culture of our offices.

Accountability must flow both ways

The single biggest missing piece in India's governance is accountability for the people who run the system.

The government has become aggressive in making citizens accountable. Every rupee is tracked, every return is matched, and every missed deadline brings a penalty. That discipline is not wrong. But it flows in only one direction.

A road is built, and it breaks in the first monsoon. Who is answerable? Too often, no one. A file sits for eight months. Who is penalised? Rarely anyone. A citizen is harassed for a bribe. What happens to the officer? In too many cases, nothing.

Corruption at the top is serious, but it is often distant from daily life. Corruption at the bottom of the pyramid touches every individual directly: at the counter, at the checkpost, at the inspection. That is where trust is being lost.

Countries like Singapore show another way. Public servants are paid very well, so they have little reason to be tempted, and punishment for corruption is swift and severe, so few dare to try. A government job in India should come with respect and a good salary. It should also come with the clear understanding that misusing that power will end a career.

And accountability must include reward, not only punishment. A system that only ever notices the corrupt, and never the honest, teaches everyone the wrong lesson.

India will not fix this by sugar-coating it. We have to name the flaws honestly. Only then can they be repaired.

Why it hurts so deeply

Generations of Indians grew up with shortage: of food, of jobs, of opportunity. Colonial rule taught us to obey and to fight for even the smallest gain. We are wired to feel scarcity.

This government was given a rare gift: public trust strong enough to move at record speed. But when targets are pushed down into a system that is still corrupt and unaccountable, the weight lands on the weakest person in the chain, the common citizen.

You can now see that pressure on any Indian road. People fight over a scratch on a bumper, a parking spot, a few seconds at a signal. Everyone is trying to push ahead of someone else. When the system teaches that only the pushy and the connected get served, people learn to push.

That is a deep loss for a civilisation like ours. The Indian values we speak of with pride are respect for each other, truth, and fairness even when no one is watching. They are not disappearing because people have changed at heart. They are being worn down by a daily life that rewards the opposite. Protecting Indian culture is not only about temples and traditions. It is also about restoring everyday decency, and a fair system is how that begins.

Climate: the war nobody has prepared for

And the pressure is about to grow. Climate change is no longer a future problem, and it does not care which party is in power.

Around the world, extreme weather is breaking supply chains, destroying crops and pushing up the price of food, fuel and insurance. When a flood shuts a port or a drought fails a harvest in one country, prices rise everywhere. Every economy will feel this disruption, and the countries with the thinnest safety nets will feel it hardest.

India is among the most exposed nations on earth. Our summers are getting hotter and longer. Our monsoons are less predictable, with long dry spells followed by sudden, violent rain. Cities flood after a single downpour. Hillsides in Kerala, Uttarakhand and Himachal collapse into landslides. Here on the coast of Karnataka, we watch the sea eat into the shore a little more every year.

We have learned some lessons. Early warnings and mass evacuations now save thousands of lives when cyclones strike Odisha. That shows what our system can do when it is focused. But most of our preparation is still about responding after a disaster, not preventing the damage before it comes. A large share of India's workforce still depends on farming, and most of that farming depends on the monsoon. Our drains, water storage, building rules and town planning were designed for a climate that no longer exists.

Climate change will not hurt everyone equally. A wealthy family can buy an air conditioner, move away from a flood zone, or absorb a jump in food prices. A daily wage worker, a small farmer or a street vendor cannot. Every flood, drought and heatwave will push the poor further behind while the comfortable recover. Quietly, climate change will become one of India's biggest drivers of inequality.

And corruption makes it worse. A drain never cleaned, a lake encroached with an official's blessing, a road built with half the promised material: in a normal year, these are scandals. In a climate crisis, they become disasters. A corrupt system cannot protect its people from a changing climate.

A heads-up, respectfully

Mr. Prime Minister, you won the hearts of this country by talking about basic things. You spoke about toilets from the Red Fort. You said the government has no business being in business. You promised ease of living, not just ease of doing business. That is the campaign India needs again.

We know the system can change. Not long ago, getting a passport meant agents, delays and bribes. Today, most Indians find the process quick and predictable. That happened because leadership decided it must. The same will can transform every counter in the country.

Start by listening. Run a serious, anonymous, nationwide survey of real people: farmers, shopkeepers, students, small business owners and first-time founders. Don't rely on reports prepared by the same offices that are part of the problem. Ask one simple question: where does the system hurt you, and who asked you for money? The answers will be uncomfortable, and that is exactly why they are needed.

Then act:

1. Pay well, punish hard. Raise salaries for frontline officials so honesty is affordable, and make consequences for corruption fast, strict and public.

2. Reward the honest, loudly. Recognise good officers publicly, every year, in every district, with real promotions and not just certificates. Protect them from punishment transfers. Let citizens nominate the officers who helped them.

3. Enforce the service deadlines we already have. Karnataka's Sakala Act and similar Right to Services laws in many states already promise time-bound services. Make them real: when a deadline is missed, the officer pays the price, not the citizen.

4. Make every public project answerable. Every road, bridge and building should display the names of its contractor and responsible engineer, and failures within a set period should be repaired at their cost.

This will not make headlines like a summit abroad. But it will be felt in every home, every shop and every young founder's heart.

Do not let this issue sleep. Left alone, it will quietly erase the momentum of everything this government has achieved.

Before someone says it

• "Things have already improved." True. The Jan Vishwas Act, faceless tax assessment and DigiLocker are real progress. But the counter is still where most people meet the government, and that has not changed enough.

• "The problem is deeper than implementation." Perhaps. But fixing the counter is where trust begins.

• "Most of this is the states' responsibility." Partly true. But the Centre sets the tone, and the Prime Minister's voice moves every state.

• "Singapore is small. Its model won't work here." Agreed, we cannot copy it. But we can copy the principle: pay well, punish hard, and keep the watchdog truly independent.

Declare war on the system

India dreams of becoming a Vishwaguru, a teacher to the world. But to be a true guru to the world, we first need true gurus in positions of power at home: people with the integrity to enforce the law and the courage to protect ordinary citizens.

People are hurting, sir. This is not a complaint from an opponent. It is a warning from people who believed in you, and still want to.

Declare war on the system. Your people will stand with you, just as they did before.

Your turn

If the government won't run that survey yet, let's start it ourselves. In the comments below, share one experience where the system slowed you down or someone asked you for money. Don't name individual officers. Just tell us which service it was, which state, and how long it took.

And if you have met an honest officer who went out of their way to help you, share that too. They deserve to be thanked in public.

If this letter speaks for you, share it. The more voices it carries, the harder it becomes to ignore.

Anudeep Hegde

Seasoned Internet Marketing Specialist and Hotel Marketing Expert with over 12+ years of experience helping brands grow and succeed online.

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