Theft and fraud

It is part of common life. There was a store room and the scrap material was dumped into that room. This room was open door and no roof arrangement. a night watchman used to take care of this store room. one day a thief entered that room in the late night hours and started collecting some scrap material. The watchman saw this and he hit the man using a heavy article. That man escaped. Many useful things related to line work were available there. This system of store keeping was good as long as there is no theft. But it was a weak point. People were busy in their day to day works.

On a fine day some of the line wires were recovered from the field and dumped in the store room. Next Day those things could not be traced. It was embarrassing situation. We did not understand what to do. The whole office building was rented one.

The store room itself was managed without a door and roof. We kept mum. Had it been reported to boss, he may insist for police complaint, and the problem of chowkidar will arise.

When someone is deeply involved in a particular action at constant thought, he may miss some other aspects of the act, probably the theft. Theft is to be anticipated and a precaution be taken so that you are at no risk. Once a person goes to a bank and withdraws lot of cash and some thief monitors the act and pulls the cash bag and escapes. It becomes an embarrassing situation.

Department of telecom was owned by the Central Govt of india. Information transmission has strategic importance. It was a monopoly institute. Providing communication at affordable rate to the general public was the main activity and goal of the unit called DOT.

As the modernization started, the demand also increased all over the nation. I was a part of the modernization activity. Around 1980, it was still primitive. Most of the things were manual. Once the electronic systems were available, the rapidity of development and giving new connections on demand was the motto of the government.

The workload increased. Additional buildings were taken on rent basis for housing the new offices needed to house additional offices. This time i was working as SDE Phones from a rented building. People used to visit this office for their needs.

Occasionally, another type of people started visiting these offices. Probably the same people might have visited the state govt offices where they might have seen the corrupt activities and many times they fetch a part of corrupt money from officers. Some dalit youths used to do this activity of Dadagiri. I was new to such atmosfere.

One day a team of “dalit dadas” entered into my room. They asked money, stating that there was a political meeting at Bhalki and they intend to attend to that meet and they need money as their petrol expenditure to reach that spot. They were asking about one thousand rupees. I was stunned. There was no such provision in my department. If at all it was to be done i had to pay from my pocket. Or i have to do some wrong thing to show false expenditure through bogus voture. I was quite like a fish out of water.

People expect illegal money. Most of the politicians are corrupt. They force the officers to do money adjustments. It happens in public offices. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That is why we are fools. Do we have integrity and national patriotism?

We say one thing and do the other. Here we suffer as a nation. When doing and saying match, there is no fear of any body. And that is the nationalism and patriotism.