How often have you heard stories of hundred-rupee notes surreptitiously slipped into the inside flap of the folder slid across the table to that greasy-palmed government official in that dank office? And you have, no doubt, wondered if you will ever live to see the system change… For those of you who read the city pages of your daily newspaper carefully enough, will recall those three-centimeter, one column, stories of our investigative agency’s hunts, of many a guilty sarkari serpent, in flagrante delicto. Here is one such tale, from the hallowed corridors (at least for us IP-types) of the Trade Mark Registry in Chennai.An officer of the Trade Mark Registry was caught red-handed accepting a bribe of Rs 10,000 from a lawyer who had applied for trademark registration. On receiving a complaint from the lawyer, the Anti Corruption Bureau of the CBI arranged for the currency notes intended as bribe to be smeared with chemicals, so as to make them easily traceable. The CBI-ACB officials followed the lawyer to the Registry office, where the official accepted the money and “approved” the necessary documents; upon which the cops swooped in, and made their arrest.
Read the whole story in TOI here.
To enter into discussion about corruption among frontline workers in the Indian bureaucracy is redundant, so I shall not. Call me insensitive, but I could only wonder if the cop who made the arrest was anything like Inspector Ghote…
As an aside, and for the interested among you, do take a look at the official site of the CBI, which has a fascinating masthead, if nothing else: where else would you find, all in one place, a Buddha statue, a microscope, a camera, a hand imprint, a DNA strand, a thumbprint, a weighing scale, and a pair of glasses, swathed in the colours of the Indian flag (very good trivia question, don’t you think?).
This arrest is just the tip of the iceberg in IP offices.Most amusing fact is that the Chennai office is considered to be the “cleanest” among the five trademark offices in India.