According to the Stats given by government’s Comptroller and Auditor General, the Indian exchequer has lost anywhere between $22 billion and $45 billion in the most sizable of the three current scandals: the alleged mishandling of a second-generation spectrum auction that favored a few bidders. In India, past scandals look ho-hum
Total sum involved: $25 million. In the 1990s, there was a corruption scandal involving fodder in Bihar. Total sum involved: less than $250 million.
Incompetence and alleged corruption involving the preparations for the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi in early October are still percolating.
They have tarnished the reputation of Organizing Committee Chairman Suresh Kalmadi, who resigned from a parliamentary post under pressure from the ruling Congress Party.
But the biggest of the scandals from a financial perspective came to a head in the past few days.
Two years ago, the Indian telecommunications ministry auctioned off additional 2G spectrum.
With approximately 300 million mobile subscribers in 2008, India was a must-be place for any global telecom player.
The government received approximately $400 million for each license for a sum total of $3.6 billion.
The CAG claims the value of each license should have been much greater, as much as $45 billion.
Even the most conservative estimates show that the government should have netted at least $22 billion in 2008.
The scam is so large that the media is having a tough time describing it using lakhs (100,000) and crores (10,000,000.)
Working in India and many developing countries means having to make compromises at points but this was of a scale where nothing short of a re-run will be sufficient to cleanse the process.
It’s much too much to ask for an end to corruption in one fell swoop. But the government needs to end the astronomical scaling-up of it. If it doesn’t, within the next decade, the biggest Indian scandal may just involve the sum of a truly unfathomable $1 trillion.