What Vyapam tells us is that the whole state is criminalised. It is true in every state. After all, we are fighting the exact same scam here in KA too - jobs in government being sold by members of the Public Service Commission. Over the years, ten of thousands, possibly lakhs of people in every state have got their job by paying for it. One part of the response is - and should be - on the crooks who made money out of all this, in the bureaucracy and in selection commissions and even in the legislatures of many states. But the other part of the focus has to be on asking - how will the appointees behave once they are in government?
Is it not conceivable that many of them will try to 'recover' their money? This is the lasting damage from the PSC scams. We have a very large cadre in government that simply 'invested' in its jobs, and will inevitably look for returns on that investment. That means all sorts of people - from clerks to engineers to cops to planners to doctors to academics to ... pretty much every sphere where appointments are made by the government - is now a big family.
Fooling others one at a time, we have in the end fooled ourselves the most.