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The outgoing chief economic advisor, Kaushik Basu, on Tuesday said corruption is an issue of major concern, and added that the government needs to instill confidence in the hearts of the common people so that they can genuinely seek help from the officials. "I do believe that corruption is a major problem that we have to work towards it, eradication will never happen so lets be realistic, its not happened anywhere. But a vast decrease in the level of corruption is possible and we have to work towards that," said Basu. "But even here, I have a great sympathy with the activists and people who get very upset about corruption in India, I get very upset about corruption in India, ordinary people if they get into trouble should feel comfortable calling up the police instead of worrying, when they cal up the police they should feel comfortable calling up the police because they should feel these are the guardians of the law," he added. Basu said the people should feel comfortable coming up to a civil servant, a bureaucrat asking for help. He said the need of the hour is to work on administrative and governance reforms to combat corruption in India . "If you create another layer of bureaucracy to get rid of corruption you create another layer of corruption. Corruption like the management of inflation, like the management of growth is a deep economic problem that needs a lot of professionalism and design, good design to get rid of that," said Basu. "We need to put our minds to that so I like the passion of civil society and the activists who asked for this but with that unless we combine professionalism in the design of governance in the design of administration we will not achieve that and we ought to work towards that. India deserves cleaner environment much less corruption than we have," he added. Basu further said that there will be fluctuation in the inflation in the near future. He said that the economy will go below seven percent in September this year and will revive later in the year. " India is very precariously balanced right now. Our growth is down, much lower than what it was certainly from 2005-2008. But even over the last couple of years growth is down. Our inflation has come down from in fact I remember my first weeks and months when food inflation was over 20 percent its now down to around 10 percent, but still far too high," said Basu. "The future as we are looking at, my expectation is that inflation in the month of September will go below 7 percent but after that it will again rise above 7 percent. So you are going to see a drop in inflation and a pick up in inflation, a drop in September and a pick up again after that," he added.

'I do believe corruption is major problem': Kaushik Basu