Corruption is not just the act of some people looking to gain more influence and wealth, it is a force majeure that emulsifies the fabric of society itself, and the recent pandemic of covid-19 has increased it if anything. While the lives of millions of people were at stake, people misused these facts to consolidate more power.
According to official statistics, 4.6 million doses of covid-19 vaccines have been wasted in India, this is a surprising total and the causes are even more surprising, these wasted vaccines have mostly been used to vaccinate people which were under the legal age group. Many minors, for whom the vaccine was not permitted, are vaccinated. I will not necessarily say that it was all corruption, some wastage was also caused due to the presence of unfavourable storage conditions.
In India, there was a programme of rationing food material for over 80 crore people, that’s about 60% of India’s population. They were given free food for many months during the pandemic, much of this grain was hoarded by the people, and many sufficient and able people resorted to this petty form of burglary, instead of distributing the grain, they stashed it in their houses!
It is my severe discomfort to tell you that in many hospitals, patients were culprits of ‘favouritism,’ even after paying, the whole fee, people were denied treatment because of a shortage of medical supplies which was caused due by the severe crisis caused by the second wave of Covid- 19 in India. Many influential people secured treatment at the cost of the rest, as they paid higher sums of money and already treatment-receiving people were asked to leave, there have also been scams when organizations calling themselves ‘charity’ amassed huge sums of money from unaware people ‘for the good of the poor covid-19 patients’ and then they just vanished without any sign of their ‘help’.
Corruption is an act that is old as time itself but that does not give us a free hand to do whatever we want. We need to have a basic sense of humanity, not only for our near and dears but also for everyone on this planet to live as a worldwide civilization.