Anti-Corruption Workshop on India Summary

Is India at a tipping point in the fight against corruption? Public interest in changing the status quo around corruption has never been higher. The legal and regulatory framework for addressing the problem of corruption in India is well developed. However, lack of enforcement is often cited as a major impediment to promoting real change, especially in the business environment. Moreover, lack of coordination and conflicting mandates between the different actors – business, government, civil society – reduce the effectiveness of anti-corruption and transparency measures. Additional key anti-corruption legislation has been held up for years, sometimes decades, leading to a perceived lack of political will to tackle corruption at its highest levels. As a result, business development is impeded and economic growth weakened. Corruption, appropriately viewed as a strategic business risk, calls for a coordinated “architecture” to improve effectiveness of anticorruption initiatives and engender transformational change in both business and government.It was against this backdrop that the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with the OECD, the United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime (UNODC), Transparency International and the United Nations Global Compact, organized an Anti-Corruption Workshop on India in New Delhi on 12 April 2013. The workshop provided a unique opportunity for participants to engage with peers from around the world and across industries – in a non-attribution working environment – to address anticorruption challenges of mutual interest and to exchange views on the most important steps that business, government and civil society can take together to promote an action-oriented anticorruption agenda.