Every family in the country should have at least one member to fight against corruption to rid the evil, Team Anna member and retired IPS officer Kiran Bedi said here on Wednesday.
In an informal chat with The Hindu , the noted social activist who was on a visit to the city nearly half a century after her maiden visit, said it couldn't be an agitation all the time. The seeds had been sown in the minds of the people and Team Anna would continue to raise awareness on the issue. “Every family should have an Anna Hazare to root out corruption,” she said.
Asked about what she thought of Andhra Pradesh, Ms. Bedi said the situation was not any different here. “You have politics of corruption and violence, politics of divisiveness, dismal-administration and political transfers,” she said referring to how upright officers fighting against liquor mafia in the State were penalised with transfers even while bureaucrats were arrested by CBI. They had always been talking out the politician-bureaucrat nexus. Unfortunately, though such bureaucrats were in a minority, gave a bad name.
“That is why we want Lok Pal. They (the bureaucrats) are the ones not allowing effective Lok Ayuktha and Lok Pal to come,” she remarked.
On jail reforms, Ms. Bedi said the prisoner has to pay for his imprisonment and not the society. He or she should be made to pay for education inside the prison and work.
“When he leaves, he is a skilled, literate person and productive maker of the society who has not wasted his time,” she pointed out.
About the port-cum-steel city, she said the place had changed a lot since Waltair was renamed as Visakhapatnam.
“I go more often to Hyderabad as the national police academy is located there. Urbanisation has taken place since I was here in 1966 as Kiran Peshavya along with my sister Rita Peshavya to play the all-India inter-university women's tennis final.
And we won the title defeating the defending champion Karnataka,” she recalled.
Ms. Bedi said she had won the Asian tennis title in the year 1972 and was a top tennis star in the country along with Nirupama Vasant (Mankad) those days.
