Lonely Officer Challenges India Passport Scam : Corruption: Immigration policeman receives little support for complaints about sale of doctored documents.

Indian immigration officials say it’s a scam that stretches all the way from India to the airports of North America.

It works like this, they say: An Indian legally in the United States or Canada “loses” his passport and replaces it at his country’s consulate. He sells the original document to a broker in his native land.

The broker then finds someone in need of a passport with a valid foreign visa and sells the doctored document at a cost of up to $20,000.

To smooth the client’s journey, bribes are then paid to airline counter personnel and the blue-uniformed police who check the passports and visas of everyone leaving the country.

This scheme, and the widespread corruption of those paid to control the flow of people into and out of India, is an open secret in India’s equivalent of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

One junior police officer, Anil Kumar, 26, has been petitioning his superiors to abolish the scam, risking his own career in the process.

For two years, the shy, lanky Kumar has checked the passports and visas of comers and goers at Indira Gandhi International Airport here. Since he began complaining about official corruption to Indians and foreigners in March, he has been suspended and has received telephone threats.

“I am being victimized by senior officials to suppress the dissent that I have been voicing against their corrupt and anti-national activities,” Kumar complained in writing to the head of the New Delhi branch of the Foreigners Regional Registration Office, the police agency that serves as the immigration police in India’s capital.

Some of his colleagues laud his efforts but think they are doomed to failure.

“Corruption is all over India. But in immigration, it’s in very large quantities,” a three-year veteran of the service said. “Senior officials are always happy with people who clear forged documents because they get a share.”

Whistle-blowers are beloved in few countries, and India is hardly an exception. But Kumar’s solo campaign reveals much about the deep and hardy roots of corruption in India and indicates that plenty of government workers consider payoffs merely a perk of their poorly compensated jobs.

India, after all, is where Somnath Batabyal, an undercover reporter for the Pioneer newspaper, was able to get a driver’s license last month in the name of the country’s vice president, Kocheril Raman Narayanan, complete with his official residential address, by paying $55 to an agent who knew crooked functionaries at the State Transport Authority.

To pass the driving test, all the journalist had to do was sit in a car while an inspector drove it a few inches.

In this case, heads rolled after people in the office of the vice president, a noted author and a former ambassador to Washington, read about the case in the newspaper. Sixteen officials in the Delhi Transportation Department were suspended.

A five-year veteran of the Foreigners Regional Registration Office estimates that half of his colleagues are corrupt, while the three-year veteran says it’s more like 90%.

Such shady deals can be the golden lining in a government job that pays someone with the rank of police sub-inspector less than $200 a month.

“If I’m honest and not accepting money, I can tell if a passport is forged just by looking at it with UV [ultraviolet] light,” Kumar said. “If I clear it, I get 20,000 rupees,” about $650.

The same payoffs appear to apply on the receiving end too. Indians who are caught with phony documents overseas and are deported can avoid prosecution by paying off police at the airport on arrival, the immigration officials report.

Kumar’s problems began in late March, when he believes he was detected by superiors as he was trying to document some of his allegations. On three successive days, Kumar’s supervisors accused him of professional lapses as he checked the papers of travelers at Indira Gandhi airport.

On April 2, when Kumar barred a British-born Sikh from leaving India because he hadn’t registered with police during his nine-month stay, as the law requires, his supervisor suspended him.

The Foreigners Regional Registration Office chief in New Delhi, S.K. Jain, didn’t seem certain that he had heard of Kumar’s case or had seen the 20-page petition the police officer had sent him.

“He may have come into my office. Maybe it’s possible. Action on this must be on the way,” Jain said in a telephone interview last week. He then accused Kumar of making the accusations to excuse his own official negligence.

“It is a normal thing in India,” Jain said. “Whenever you want to punish a wrongdoer, he sends in a petition in his defense.”

Kumar said he and Jain had a face-to-face meeting at Jain’s office and that Jain offered to reinstate him if he withdrew his allegations of corruption. Kumar said he refused.

Indications are that Kumar has an overblown idea of the traffic in phony documents when he claims that 100,000 people travel to the United States from India on forged documents each year. But U.S. Consul General Edwin Cubbison confirms that the trade exists.

Indians have admitted to U.S. consular personnel that they paid up to $19,500 for a packet of phony documents intended to secure an American visa, Cubbison said.

“There’s a lot of fiddling with the Indian passport, lifting out the photo and putting in another,” said Cubbison, whose New Delhi staff processed 46,000 non-immigrant visa applications last year and rejected about 30%.

Machine-readable visas and India-based INS staff that check U.S.-bound passengers’ documents at the airport have reduced the chances that someone with a phony passport can go undetected, Cubbison said. But the system is not foolproof.

“Enough of them get through,” he said, “to make it something that’s a favorable product.”