ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the processes through which the ideals of ‘anti-corruption’ gathered pace through the war years and in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence. This phase was critical to the rapidly transforming idea of ‘corruption’ as the previous chapter has shown, and it coincided with the growth of the civil services and police force, and in the rapid multiplication of the functions of the local state. In particular, the 1940s was the first period in which governments in India began to have a very extensive impact on the everyday lives of vast swathes of the urban population, in areas which most directly affected them: food provisioning and control, and the control and rationing of other goods. In an effort to direct Indian resources towards war, and while facing off a series of political challenges and rebellions from anti-colonial organisations, the UP government, like other provinces, passed orders which were designed to establish security at all levels. These policies necessitated both increased work and influence for bureaucrats at the level of the local state, and the creation of new cadres. In particular, the posts of Rationing Officer (Town Rationing Officer, or District Rationing Officer, hereafter TRO/DRO), and the new cadres of civil servants involved after 1947 in the rehabilitation and relief of refugees were the intermediaries between the government rationing and provisioning efforts and the rights of the public to rationing cards or permits for the sale of controlled goods. Considering the rapid development and expansion of the blackmarket in controlled goods, these officers were quickly implicated in scandals which linked them to powerful urban business interests and local politicians. They were also in close contact with a wide cross-section of the population, as well as the district bureaucracy, which was connected to the rationing policies. In this sense, their careers contained some of the same pressures and concerns of other executive and non-executive cadres already explored in this book.
