The Shame of India - 3

Talking about "Swiss Bank Accounts", today I tweeted (in two parts), "Offshore banking is a 11 trillion dollar industry. It encourages massive tax evasion and instead of investment into development ... it creates avenues for money laundering, terrorism, drug trade, weapons dealing, sex trafficking, and other international crimes".

These facts and figures are sourced from Financial Taskforce, and are put out by researchers who have done their homework very well. Since they go by available records, we can safely assume that the actual figures could be more but, certainly not less.

A figure of 1 trillion is difficult to visualise. Here are some other ways to think about it :

• $1 trillion was a little less than half of the entire developing worlds’ government revenue in 2007 ($2.5 trillion), which means that for every $2.50 those governments earned, $1 crept out of their countries.

• $1 trillion was about 8% of the entire developing worlds’ income or $181 per person.  This is particularly significant given the fact that the average annual income of the developing world is only $2,366 per year.

• $181 per person is more than the developing world’s total health spending per person ($114 per person)

• $1 trillion is 500 times what the World Bank will spend on emergency food aid in the next two years

• If the $1 trillion had been taxed, it would have generated an additional $144.5-$170 billion in government revenue for the developing world, in 2006 alone (assumes an average 17% tax rate).

1 trillion dollars is not very easy to put into perspective. Especially for us Indians. Our reach only goes just over a billion in population - and that too is very hard to visualise, isn't it? So, let us put our Indian caps and see what a trillion dollar mean.

As I said, India's population crossed 1 billion over a decade back. Now what is 1 billion? It is one thousand million - and each million is thousand thousand or 10 Lakhs. Now reverting to US$ @ Rs.50 for convenience (actual is approx. 46), we have $1 million as Rs. 500 lakhs - or 5 crores. And, 1 billion is 5000 crores, and a trillion is thousand times 5000 crores.

Our Government does not want to know, but we are told that corrupt Indians own at least US$1.4 Trillion of that 11 Trillion - if not more! These are figures till 2007. Remember these figures does not include the massive moneys siphoned in the 2G Spectrum scam, CWG scam and other's yet to be reported scams including hundreds of smaller scams.

Just imagine what India could have done if all that money was available for development?  

(Rajeev Gandhi, as a politician, speaking the truth on a rare occasion,  had said, "out of every Rs.100 spent for development, only Rs.15 reached the people")

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