NEW DELHI (AFP) - Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has promised anyone found guilty in the countrys giant telecom corruption scandal will be punished, but anti-graft campaigners are not so sure. They point to the countrys dismal record of bringing corrupt senior public officials to justice due to timid police investigations and Indias notoriously slow courts that are exploited by defendants. In six decades, only one senior politician, Rao Shiv Bahadur Singh, has been convicted of graft and served a jail term - for taking a bribe of 25,000 rupees back in 1949. If there was any political will at all to address corruption, we would have seen it at work earlier, said Anupama Jha, executive director of the India chapter of Transparency International, the global anti-graft body. India has been rocked by a succession of corruption scandals in recent months, starting with the Delhi Commonwealth Games and culminating with an alleged telecom scam that exploded in November. The telecom ministry, headed by former minister A. Raja, is accused of selling second-generation (2G) mobile phone licences for a fraction of their value in 2008, a decision that may have cost India up to 40 billion dollars. In other cases, executives from leading state banks have been arrested in a suspected bribes-for-loans racket, while a housing scam in Mumbai led the state chief minister to resign. In each case, the government and ruling Congress party has promised to bring any errant public figures to justice, but Indias track record is unconvincing, say observers. The first hurdle in tackling corruption involving elected officials or civil servants is that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is very reluctant to go after powerful people, Prashant Bhushan from the Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Judicial Reforms told AFP. In a sign of this, the federal police force is yet to question Raja over his role in the alleged telecom scam during its one-year investigation, leading the Supreme Court to accuse it of beating around the bush. Secondly, even if police do decide to investigate, the next problem is getting the accused bureaucrat or politician to court, which can only happen if the government approves the prosecution. Critics have lambasted this conflict of interest, with Bhushan arguing that most corruption cases dont take off because the government denies sanctions to prosecutors. Some graft campaigners say the rule is necessary, however, because it protects civil servants from deliberate false accusations from opponents. There have been efforts to reform the law, notably a December 2006 Supreme Court ruling that government approval is not necessary if the public official has either left office or been demoted. The third hurdle that must be cleared for a successful prosecution - after the police investigate and the government gives its approval - is Indias notoriously slow court process. Once officials are taken to court, trials take years if not decades, owing to a gaping shortage of judges and the lengthy appeal process. The shortfall in judges means it takes a long time to deliver justice, Jha told AFP. Each time when allegations are made against prominent politicians, when people see that no one faces prompt justice, they just lose faith in the system. India has only 12.5 judges for every million citizens, compared with 104 judges per million in the United States. Prime Minister Singh himself has said that everyday corruption at all levels of life in India threatens to hold back the countrys overall economic development. India ranks 87th on Transparency Internationals corruption perception index, which lists countries in order of their cleanliness. It stands 10 places below China, with a 3.3-point rating, out of a best possible score of 10. A senior civil servant who served for 34 years told AFP how he had witnessed bribes of 500 million rupees (11 million dollars) being paid to high-ranking cabinet members by firms seeking to secure a contract. He had refused to sign off on the deal because of the graft, but was then bypassed when a colleague was pressured into signing in his place. It is in no-ones interest anymore to stem corruption. Besides, public memory is short, by the time one scam is exposed, another is on the way, he said.