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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Political will missing in the fight against black money by Mythili Bhusnurmath

Political will missing in the fight against black money by Mythili Bhusnurmath

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published Published on Jun 6, 2011   modified Modified on Jun 6, 2011
If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it,' quipped Charles F Kettering , the famous American engineer and inventor of the electric starter. Well, the government has done just that! It has appointed an eight-member committee to examine ways to tackle black money. Perhaps that is too cynical! After all, the flurry of activity (the committee is only one of a series of moves) comes after months, nay years, of inactivity by successive governments . So, can the ordinary citizen hope for concrete action and more importantly , results? Unfortunately, no! Not if past experience is any indication .

Read the two seminal works on the subject: the voluminous Wanchoo Committee Report of 1971 and the 1985 National Institute of Public Finance and Policy report (Aspects of the Black Economy in India) authored by Shankar Acharya and his team and the overwhelming sense is one of deja vu. If the Wanchoo Committee bemoaned the 'discretionary power' of government officials that gave rise to speed money first and then to hush money to hush up violations, the Shankar Acharya committee pointed to how the scope for making black money through 'kickbacks, cuts and commissions on government projects and purchases had grown dramatically' and political involvement in such transactions had grown enormously.

That was almost 30 years ago when we were nowhere near the one trillion-dollar economy we are today, the size of the government's budget was a fraction of what it is now and more importantly, the grip of black money in the economy was far less pervasive. Despite this, there has been no official study on the black economy after 1985. Arun Kumar's book (The Black Economy in India, 2002) goes a long way to bridge the gap, but officially there has been silence. Part of the reason is everyone within the government, and many without, know what needs to be done.

The two reports quoted above and a host of other committees on related subjects have made a number of suggestions as there is hardly any aspect of the Indian economy that is untouched by the phenomenon of black money today. Many of these suggestions have also been implemented. Thus, the pervasive system of controls has been disbanded with the scrapping of industrial licensing, the peak personal income tax rate of little over 30% is a far cry from the high of 97.5% under Mrs Indira Gandhi, foreign exchange is no longer a scarce commodity and while we are not exactly a land of plenty, many of the crippling shortages of the past are history. Despite this the share of the black economy has increased from the Wanchoo Committee's estimate of 7% in the early 1970s to 21% according to the Shankar Archarya Committee to almost 50%, according to the latest Global Integrity Report and Arun Kumar's own estimates.

Why? The reason is even as some avenues,like hawala, have become less lucrative, others like the Mauritius route have been opened. And despite the disbanding of industrial licensing , the government still retains enormous discretionary power as evidenced in the 2G spectrum scam. Sporadic efforts like the Voluntary Disclosure Scheme have had little effect. As with the great poverty debate where more policy time and mind-space is spent attacking the accuracy of poverty estimates and less on tackling poverty, so too we seem to forget that the central point in our fight against black economy is not whether it is 50% or 60% but of tackling it before it destroys the economy and the social fabric.

There is no rocket science to this. All it needs is a modicum of political courage. It is here that the government is wanting. If it really wants to convince people that this time it means business, it should not await submission of the reports before cracking the whip. There are a number of simple things it can do. To begin with, it can close or drastically tighten the Mauritius route for investments in India. As with Participatory Notes (PNs) where there was a hue and cry when the government first mooted tightening but scarcely a ripple when it finally suited action to words, fears of the fallout from outlawing the Mauritius route are overdone. Unfortunately , successive governments have dragged their feet on the matter, lending credence to the belief that the Mauritius route was deliberately created to facilitate round-tripping of funds.

In the interim, the Mauritian government can be prevailed upon to provide more information. If the information sought by the CBI in the 2G spectrum allocation scam can be obtained from Mauritius, there is no reason why similar information cannot be obtained on other investments routed through that country. The same applies to investments through other tax havens. The next step is to identify sectors such as real estate, international trade, education and politics, especially political funding, where black money is rampant and put in place a proper system of reporting with stiff penalties for failure to do so.

The present practice of insistence by the judiciary on mens rea (intention to cheat) as a precondition to conviction even where search and seizure operations have unearthed black money must give way to a more realistic interpretation of the law. Remember, Al Capone , the notorious US gangster who was wanted in many murders was finally put behind bars on charges of tax evasion! When was the last time anyone in India went to jail on similar charges?

The Economic Times, 6 June, 2011, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/mythili-bhusnurmath/political-will-missing-in-the-fight-against-black-money/articleshow/8742677.cms


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