$462,00,00,00,000...that is $462 bn..! Mother of all black money figures...

ZEROING IN ON BLACK MONEY

$462000000000
India Drained Of 20 Lakh cr During 1948-2001: Study
Binoy Prabhakar NEW DELHI
IN A season of swindles, kickbacks and scams, here is some more on the mother of them all. Black money — the popular moniker given to the billions seeded by dirty deals and whisked away abroad from the taxman’s prying eyes — has received much attention in recent years.
The opposition never tires of screaming foul at the government. The government, for its part, is at pains to say it is doing all it can to track down the illegal stash.
Despite the cacophony, an estimate of the scads of black money in secret bank vaults overseas has long been one big unknown, resulting in a great deal of speculation and glib talk around the subject. Finally, some help is at hand.
A new study by an international watchdog on the illicit flight of money from the country, perhaps the first ever attempt at shedding light on a subject steeped in secrecy, concludes that India has been drained of $462 billion ( 20,556,848,000,000 or over 20 lakh crore) between 1948 and 2008. The amount is nearly 40% of India’s gross domestic product, and nearly 12 times the size of the estimated loss to the government because of the 2G spectrum scam. The study has been authored by Dev Kar, a lead economist with the US-based Global Financial Integrity, a non-profit research body that has long crusaded against illegal capital flight.
Mr Kar, a former senior economist with the International Monetary Fund, says illicit financial flows out of India have grown at 11.5% a year, debunking a popular notion that economic reforms that began nearly two decades ago had tempered the creation and stashing away of black money overseas.
Outflows accelerated after reforms
IF CAPITAL outflows were a child of the independence era, the problem came of age in the years after the reforms kicked in. Nearly 50% of the total illegal outflows occurred since 1991. Around a third of the money exited the country between 2000 and 2008.
“It shows that reforms seem to have accelerated the transfer of black money abroad,” says Mr Kar, whose study titled ‘The Drivers and Dynamics of Illicit Financial Flows from India: 1948-2008’ sifts through piles of data on the issue over a period of 61 years. The study, which Mr Kar says is the most comprehensive one yet on illicit financial flows from India, will be made public on Thursday.
His report comes amid a renewed government push in recent months to pursue black money stashed abroad. In late August, the government signed an agreement with Switzerland — its banks top a list of usual suspects — that will enable exchange of information on tax evaders. New Delhi is also in talks with at least 20 tax havens, particularly Mauritius, to extract similar information.
The government is also attempting to gain a measure of the total unaccounted money circulating in the economy. The finance ministry last week approached the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy to get a fix on such money.
But M Govinda Rao, director of the institute, says his think-tank is yet to decide on going ahead with the exercise because it is not an easy task. “A study on this subject is a huge challenge because one is dealing with a very big problem that covers hordes of money from many sectors,” he says.
Black money turned into an election issue during the 2009 general elections, with the BJP harping on the issue throughout its campaign. Its leader LK Advani has been the most vocal critic of the government on this issue, time and again questioning the government’s resolve to chase illegal funds. Mr Advani recently urged the government to publish a white paper on the issue.
While Mr Advani was unavailable for comment, the government’s detractors on this issue say there is more talk than action to address this issue.
“Everybody knows about the gravity of the problem, but the government has not shown the political will to bring the money back to India,” says Prakash Karat, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
The government has, however, received praise from Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which has been at the forefront of the fight against tax evasion. OECD, whose relentless offensive is largely credited with lifting the veil of secrecy over umpteen tax havens, hailed India’s efforts to crack down on tax evasion and sign information exchange agreements earlier this year.
These are but short-lived answers, say experts, adding that an overhaul in the global financial system is central to a lasting solution. New tax havens will spring forth when pressure mounts on existing ones.
That is not to say there are only a few tax havens out there. Indeed, at least 91 such hotspots flourish across the globe. Asian countries, particularly Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau, too are emerging as new destinations for parking illicit funds.
Besides Switzerland and Mauritius, Indian money is also said to end up in Seychelles and Macau. Due to the illicit nature of these deposits, pinpointing the journey’s end of the bulk of India’s black money is tenuous at best.
The GFI study gives a measure of the amount of money that the government is chasing, but it is only a fraction of the $1.4 trillion that the BJP claims is the illegal stash.
GFI acknowledges as much, saying its figure is conservative and hasn’t taken into account smuggling and certain types of trade mischief. It also admits to gaps in available statistics, lamenting the lack of data on the consolidated fiscal balance with the government, which has hampered research. If these indicators were counted, India’s total illicit outflows would well be half a trillion dollars.
But Mr Kar says the $1.4 trillion figure was an “estimate”, while the numbers in the latest report are based on real data.
Still, GFI says that by no stretch of imagination is its calculation insignificant, more so when viewed against the country’s existing external debt at nearly $230 billion.
“It means India could not only have contracted less debt or even paid it off, but another half would also have been left over for poverty alleviation and economic development,” says Mr Kar. “There is no question that this huge loss of capital has set India back in its struggle to eradicate poverty and illiteracy.”
The study has based its findings on the World Bank Residual Model that tracks illicit outflows by measuring the disparity in a country’s recorded source and use of funds. It also delves into IMF’s ‘trade-mispricing’ model that compares a country’s recorded imports to what the world says it exported to the country as well as the recorded exports against its global imports. The gaps tell the story.
The perpetrators of illicit outflows, says the study, are wealthy individuals and private companies. Black money is also abetted by the existence of an ’underground’ economy that emerged out of illegal activities and assets spawned by such activities.
The unabated growth of slush funds is borne out of a growing affinity of culprits for offshore financial centres, or tax havens, at the expense of banks in developed countries such as the US, France and the United Kingdom. The study finds that the share of deposits in offshore tax havens grew to 54.2% in 2009 from 36.4% in 1995.
The study is as much an indictment of feckless government action as it is about shedding a light on the nature of illicit financial flows. “The sharp rise in illicit flows means that tax evasion (which is part and parcel of such flows) is also increasing sharply,” says Mr Kar.
“In the absence of good governance and poor institutional oversight, the desire for the hidden accumulation of wealth drives more of such transfers,” he adds.
Though India cannot end its black money problem alone, there are challenges it must address by itself, says the study. Legal institutions and procedures need to be strengthened and streamlined. The guilty should be punished --the architects of the Commonwealth Games scam, for example -- swiftly. And tax policies must be rationalised.
“Sure, black money is there in most countries but if it worsens poverty, robs human rights and drives centrifugal forces such as naxals, it becomes a problem that can no longer be ignored,” says Mr Kar.


And this is another Clip:A Raja still allotting Spectrum overruling Ministry Decision! What an aduacity!And Congress is unable to deal with anything!.........making money doing nothing at its BEST........Madhu Koda( 900 cr CASH in Bank), Sharad Power ( Sugarcane scam)and now A Raja....

ON TROUBLED WAVES

Raja’s kingdom of spectrum ran till his last days
Ex-Minister Tried To Allot Airwaves To 3 Telcos, Overruling Ministry Decision ( Uski himmant dekho, see his courage.....he is not at all bothered of anything......)
Joji Thomas Philip & Rohini Singh NEW DELHI
IN THE midst of the 2G spectrum controversy, and just days before his resignation, the telecom ministry (DoT) under A Raja was pushing for the allocation of airwaves to three companies — Tata Teleservices, Uninor and Videocon—in Delhi, overruling its own decision of not issuing fresh 2G spectrum until a new allocation methodology was finalised.
The move to allot spectrum to these companies also contradicted sector regulator Trai’s recommendation that airwaves be given first to existing operators in a circle, and companies that don’t have operations in a city should be the last in the queue for getting spectrum. Trai’s recommendations were endorsed by DoT’s legal wing as late as last month.
But documents accessed by ET show that on November 10, the telecom department was pushing for awarding airwaves to Tata Teleservices, Uninor and Videocon. “Since defence has released 8 MHz of spectrum recently ..., we may allot initial 4.4 MHz to Tata Teleservices in Delhi… Since total available spectrum is 11.6 MHz in this service area, including already available spectrum of 3.6 MHz, we may consider allotment of 4.4 MHz to Datacom (Videocon) and balance 2.8 MHz to Uninor, subject to acceptance of the same by Uninor,” the telecom department’s assistant wireless advisor said in an internal note endorsed by top ministry officials on November 10.
Uninor and Videocon were among the new companies that were controversially granted mobile permits by Mr Raja in 2008. Tata Teleservices is awaiting GSM airwaves in Delhi and many other circles. The telecom department had so far been unable to award start-up GSM airwaves in Delhi, the most lucrative circle in the country, to these three companies as it had exhausted all spectrum in the National Capital Region. Following the recent vacation of airwaves by the armed forces, the government now has about 11.6 MHz to allot in Delhi, but existing operators such as Reliance Communications, Bharti, Vodafone Essar and Idea have first preference over this resource, as per Trai recommendations. The government is yet to take a call on Trai’s recommendations, as the empowered group of ministers headed by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee has not met on this issue. In June, the Prime Minister’s Office had asked the telecom ministry to refer all issues related to Trai’s proposals, including the methodology for addition of 2G airwaves, to the EGoM.
DoT’s earlier attempt failed
THIS is not the first time the telecom department has tried to allot spectrum to new entrants, despite the freeze on spectrum allocation. In September, DoT had sought to place new entrants such as Tata DoCoMo and Uninor, which are yet to receive start-up airwaves in many circles, first in queue for airwaves, but the move failed since the department’s own legal advisor refused to endorse it.
Mr Raja, who was at the centre of the 2G spectrum allocation scam, resigned on Sunday night. On Tuesday, India’s chief auditor, in its report tabled in Parliament, said Mr Raja flouted almost every rule in the book, ignored advice from the prime minister down and indulged in blatant favouritism while awarding mobile licences to mostly undeserving companies, causing a loss of nearly 1,77,000 crore to the government.




My Comments:
Now what is the meaning of this?$462 bn! That is HUGE Amt and I just read in ET that A Raja still went on as seen in today ET which I have pasted here........
WHAT THESE POLITICIANS ARE GOING TO DO WITH THE COUNTRY? WILL SOMEONE ASK THEM?........YE SAB KAHAN TAK JAYEGA?....WILL THERE BE ANY END TO THIS OR NOT?
These money are need to go to the POOR people of India.These are their money.These money needs to be used for electricity and water and canals in distant villages where there is no electricy and no water for miles togather.Woman has to go to 4-5 miles OR EVEN MORE to fill a pot of water on head and come back to home and then cook something.
These are the money that are to be used for poor people residing in rural part and very interior part of India where the India growth story has not reached.In the remote area people are starving without FOOD and dying and these politicians are having field day.
CBI needs to check all a/c of their friends , relatives of all politicians.The questions still arises how much INDIA  can depend on CBI as well?
What is the meaning of helps and grants we get from the Philanthropic Institution like Bill Gates?Bill Gates need to tell INDIA  that untill INDIA  don't bring down corruption there can be no HELP FOR POOR IN INDIA.
WHAT A SHAME FOR INDIA!
FOR EVERYGROWTH OF INDIA THERE WILL COME MORE AND MORE OPPORTUNITY FOR POLITICIANS TO MAKE MONEY FOR GIVING LICENCES FOR VARIOUS PROJECTS ETC.......