Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitely had described the black money as a curse on the economy and keeping its promise of exposing the parallel economy, the govt today has brought out few names of Indians who had stashed money abroad. Actually black money is a tiny component of the huge parallel setup. The system has been accepted at all levels and going after the foreign component is a diversion. The bulk of money is within the country. No amount of agreement to avoid double taxation or information sharing has resulted in big exposures as expected. Since 1948, about 40 commissions have looked into the problem from different angles. There have been raids, amnesty schemes announced by the governments to declare unaccounted money and even government went for demonetisation and at one stage withdrew the Rs 1,000 currency notes. The end results till date of all these exercises have been a big zero and the special investigation team (SIT) formed by the government under Supreme Court directions too has not been able to unearth the hidden money. The problem is that there is a nexus of vested interest group comprising politicians, business houses and executive arm which runs the country’s administration has more influence in policy making than implementation of the same. So there has never been a political will to tackle the menace. India has one of the lowest direct tax to GDP ratio in the world and whatever improvements is seen is because of the enormous increase in corporate profits. Over a lakh people travel to Switzerland every year and some of them very frequently, obviously the frequent traveler can never be a tourist. They must be travelling for their so-called ‘business trips’. And the recent disclosure of few cases shows government’s haplessness to take the big players directly and to check the draining out of financial resources from the country. Many big fishes are yet to be identified, which looks a remote possibility on all yardsticks. The disclosure made are of deposits in Swiss banks what about the money stashed in other foreign banks and invested within the country in Benami investments.
