Illegality in India today touches almost every economic activity. It is both systemic and systematic. The Indian ruling class faced its severest crisis of credibility in 2010. Its past caught up with it and skeletons and scams were spilling out of its closets. The scams have a symbiotic relationship with the black economy. The number of scams is growing and so is the size of the black economy, which has reached...

Somalia is the world's most corrupt nation, according to Transparency International's 2010 Corruption Perception Index. The 2010 CPI shows that nearly three quarters of the 178 countries in the index score below five, on a scale from 0 (perceived to be highly corrupt) to 10 (perceived to have low levels of corruption), indicating a serious corruption problem. New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore are the least corrupt countries in the world, according...

Estimating black money has been a long time preoccupation of economists and tax collectors in India. Several books have been written and several government reports prepared. It is possible to suggest that the policy disincentives that may have contributed to black money generation, like high tax rates, have been moderated, if not eliminated, and that the incentive to declare income has gone up since the beginning of tax and policy...

The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the government to widen the scope of its action on black money beyond the issue of tax evasion, questioning why it had not gone after those who had stashed huge amounts of money abroad or inquired about the source of the siphoned funds. The Centre explained the difficulty in revealing the names of foreign bank account holders who were in the zone of suspicion for...

Jammu and Kashmir is all set to get its first Information Commission after a high-power committee cleared the name of a senior Indian Revenue Service Officer for the post of Chief Information Commissioner. Official sources told The Hindu that the committee, headed by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah with Deputy Chief Minister Tara Chand and Leader of the Opposition Mehbooba Mufti as members, met in Jammu on Thursday and cleared the name...