It's in your face.

Officers of the Central Economic Intelligence Bureau and Income Tax ( Intelligence ) have informed the Finance Minister that 40% of undisclosed income, known in India as black money, is in real estate and 27% in manufacturing. HT online, May 6. They have uncovered Rs 14 billion in real estate and Rs 11 billion in manufacturing. Wow! How brilliant is that? We have been writing about black money in the property sector for 2 years now. Our intelligent intelligence has just woken up to the fact. The money they have uncovered is not even the tip of the proverbial iceberg. No one has any idea how much black money there is in India but it is in trillions of rupees. The officers also mention mining, health, forex business and education as other sectors generating black money. What they fail to mention, intentionally or innocently, is that most of the black money is generated by the government, that is politicians and civil servants who take bribes for every service and commissions for every purchase. This money is then invested in properties, hospitals, schools and colleges and trusts which help to launder black into white. Just follow the trusts and NGOs involving politicians, civil servants and their children and you will get some idea about where the black money is going. Form a trust, get cheap land from the government to build a college, appoint low grade teachers cheaply and charge millions in cash from parents of youngsters desperate to get a higher education. And then there is farming. All farm income is tax free. So, it is common to see politicians declaring their profession as farmers. Loot the exchequer and show it as farm income and, voila, it becomes white money without paying a paisa in tax. However, these are the people running the government so instead of concentrating on catching the real scoundrels the government spends all its energy on devising new laws or tricks to wring more money out of the suffering people. The telecom regulator, TRAI has come out with a new wheeze to wring more money out of consumers. This follows from the 2G scam where the then minister, A Raja distributed licenses on a first-come-first-served basis to cronies who then went on to sell the licenses for hundreds of millions thus making windfall profits. Now TRAI, headed by a civil servant, is proposing that telecom service providers should pay Rs 36.22 billion per MHz for pan India spectrum but also that they should be shifted to a new frequency and charged market rates for the license. It is like asking someone renewing his driving license to pay a huge some of money because he license number has been changed by force. Naturally, calling charges will jump anything up to 50%. It is shocking that politicians and civil servants spend their time in cheating citizens instead of serving them. Yet, India could be a rich and wonderful country to live in. If only we could get rid of the scum.