Attacking black money.

A few days back, the black money pandemonium was rife in the whole nation. When the government rebutted to disclose the name of the people whose name were included in the list of black money holders in safe tax haven outside Indian borders, the opposition just cracked down on the government over its refusal to reveal the names of the black money holders.

The opposition’s perspective can be challenged and must be condemned as it hurts the Indian government’s ties with other nations regarding the matter but rather than talking at length about it I would like to focus on a better alternative of stopping the outflow of money rather than taking it out because the former is much more pragmatic and easier.

Its pretty sure that the problem of black money is not vulnerable to easy solutions. The problem of this demon is susceptible to some formidable and stiff solutions which need to be applied to make things work or otherwise we would waste another fifty to sixty years looking up for the names of black money holders and then some more years probing them and then some more years to get them sentenced and such things will go on and on and nothing would ameliorate for better.

Here are some steps which if taken gravely and applied ingeniously can surely lead to huge success to the government in order to halt the process of outflow of Indian currency.

First and foremost thing is that it is not a covert fact that all the public departments amass huge sums of black money through tenders and contracts which are given to other private companies or businesses. The lack of transparency in such things leads to huge sums of illegitimate money flowing to the department being disbursed out the companies vying for the tender. Recently the case of the Chief Engineer in Noida who accumulated a whopping Rs. 1000 crores including diamonds worth Rs.100 crores. Such a huge sum of money would have been collected over a period of some decades but our whole system and investigative authorities are incapable of trapping such illicit transactions from being carried out, this clearly portrays our inefficaciousness in dealing with such huge grass root problems which eventually lead to this deadly problem of black money.

The second thing is that the investigatory skills of our intelligence agencies are also mediocre type. Till now humongous sums of money have passed on to different nations but still none of our intelligence agencies have got a sniff of it and this clearly portrays our inefficiency and unpreparedness in dealing with the issue of black money. Raghabendra Jha of Australian National University estimated that during 1998-2012 around $186 billion left our shores.

The third thing is the real estate sector and the donations to NGOs. In these two places, huge sums of money are invested or given as donations in order to hide the traces of black money and to escape out from the taxes. Property investments and made in order to escape out of paying the taxes to the government and such things also play a huge role in helping the culprits to get out of the problem thereby exacerbating the already complex labyrinth of black money in the nation.

All these things lead to huge problems for the government as well as the people of the nation because due to lack of money leads to dearth of better infrastructure, thereby exasperating it all. Hence I believe that we should assault at the grass root causes of generation of black money rather than beating about the bush.

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT

JAI MA BHARTI