“Transparency and accountability in governance are not about controlling corruption but about creating the trust of stakeholders in the policy process by following the Rule of Law and Participatory Governance.” Comment.

Introduction

The statement is right, and the correction it makes is not semantic. If transparency and accountability exist only to catch corruption, they are audit functions and can be measured in prosecutions. If they exist to build stakeholder trust in how decisions are made, they are constitutive of legitimacy — and then a policy can be entirely honest and still fail the test.

Why the narrow framing fails

• Corruption control is retrospective: it acts after the decision. Trust is built prospectively, in how the decision is reached.
• A clean but opaque decision still produces resistance. Land acquisition disputes are rarely about bribery; they are about people finding out after the fact.
• Measuring success by prosecutions creates perverse incentives — risk aversion, file-pushing and decision paralysis in the bureaucracy.
• Trust is what allows the state to govern by compliance rather than coercion, which is cheaper and more durable.

Rule of law as the first pillar

• Non-arbitrariness. E. P. Royappa and Maneka Gandhi read Article 14 as a guarantee against arbitrary state action, so a reasoned decision is a legal requirement, not a courtesy.
• Predictability. Published criteria let a citizen know the rule before acting.
• Reasoned orders and appeal. A decision a person can contest is a decision a person can accept.
• Equality of application. Rules applied selectively destroy trust faster than rules that are simply strict.

Participation as the second pillar

• Pre-legislative consultation policy (2014) requires draft laws to be published for comment — honoured inconsistently.
• Gram Sabha and ward committees under the 73rd and 74th Amendments, and Article 243ZD planning committees that mostly remain unconstituted.
• Social audit under MGNREGA converts accountability from an inspection into a public hearing.
• Citizen charters and grievance systems such as CPGRAMS, covered in our note on citizen charters.

Where India stands

• The RTI Act, 2005 is the strongest transparency instrument, but the 2019 amendment made Information Commissioners' tenure and salary executive-determined, and vacancies have crippled throughput — the problem set out in our note on the CIC vacancy crisis.
• E-governance and DBT improved process transparency and traceability.
• Institutional gaps persist: the Lokpal's slow start, delayed CAG report tabling, and the absence of a whistleblower protection regime in force.
• The DPDP Act, 2023 amended Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act, widening the personal-information exemption — a live concern for transparency advocates.

Conclusion

Comment accepted, with one addition. Trust is not an alternative to corruption control; it is the larger frame inside which corruption control is one instrument. A state that publishes its reasons, applies its rules evenly and consults before deciding will catch less corruption per rupee spent and need to catch less of it. That is the argument for reading transparency as a governance principle rather than as a policing tool.