Where a Cuddle With Your Baby Requires a Bribe

NYT reports Bangalore, India - Just as the painful ordeal of childbirth finally ended and Nesam Velankanni waited for a nurse to lay her squalling newborn on her chest, the maternity hospital's ritual of extortion began. Before she even glimpsed her baby, she said, a nurse whisked the infant away and an attendant demanded a bribe. If you want to see your child, families are told, the price is $12 for a boy and $7 for a girl, a lot of money for slum dwellers scraping by on a dollar a day. The practice is common here in the city, surveys confirm. Mrs. Velankanni was penniless, and her mother-in-law had to pawn gold earrings that had been a precious marriage gift so she could give the money to the attendant, or ayah. Mrs. Velankanni, a migrant to Bangalore who had been unprepared for the demand, wept in frustration. "The ayah told my mother-in-law to pay up fast because the night duty doctor was leaving at 8 a.m. and wanted a share," she recalled.

The bribes vary from place to place and in the services affected, but stretch from cradle to grave, according to surveys and anticorruption investigators. People pay to give birth, and to collect their loved ones' bodies from mortuaries, and for everything in between: garbage collection, clean water, medicines, admission to public schools. Even policemen double as shakedown artists. Such petty bribery acts as a hidden regressive tax, according to research financed by the World Bank Institute, the bank's educational and research arm. In Zambia, for example, poor people paid 17 percent of their incomes in bribes for medical care, while the middle class paid only 3 percent. The comparable figures for Paraguay were 7 percent for the poor and only 1 percent for the middle class.

Nagaratna Hanumanthu, 23, and her husband, Hanumanthu, 28, a sugar-cane-juice vendor with a single name, lost their first baby to a raging fever just two days after he was born. Their anxieties were high last November when their daughter was born at Austin Town. The moment the baby emerged, the nurses took her away and demanded $7, the parents said. But Mr. Hanumanthu, a tall, imposing man, said he pretended he knew important people and threatened to complain. The nurses backed down, he said. But then his fears grew that the staff might hurt the baby. "We had already lost one child, and we were worried we would lose this child, too," he said. Mr. Hanumanthu, who earns about $1 a day, turned to his mother, who makes $11 a month sweeping floors and washing dishes. She gave him money for the bribe.

Stories like these are terrible. Some brain damaged liberals will say we should just pour more money into these countries, but more money will do nothing to stop greedy people who have power over their fellow citizens.