We are the best.

A couple of days ago 2 ministers at the center were forced to resign to provide a fig leaf to the Congress in the run up to next year's general elections. One of them had altered a CBI report to the Supreme Court regarding granting of coal mining licenses while the Prime Minister was in charge of the Coal ministry and the other, who sacrificed a goat to prevent being sacked, because his relatives were selling high level government posts for vast sums of money. Not just politicians, every business in India is crooked. It is only a matter of degree, the respected ones being more subtle. Telecom companies charge pre-paid customers much higher than post-paid ones. In every business you have to provide goods or services before billing your customers but pre-paid customers pay up front for calls they are going to make in the future. The company collects hundreds of billions of rupees from millions of customers before providing any service, which is like getting a huge bank loan interest free. Common sense would suggest that telecom companies would value such customers but instead they are charged at a much higher rate per minute of usage. The reason is that companies can falsely elevate the usage of post-paid customers thus inflating their bills. After all, no one keeps a record of every call with a stop watch. Wireless internet service providers cheat customers with periods of validity. You pay for so many GBs of download but this must be used within a limited period of time. If you do not renew by the given date you lose all the GBs remaining in your account. A web based company has used a series of stings to expose how officers in our banks help in laundering money. Every bank was most keen to help fictitious politicians turn black money into white. While banks enforce the " Know Your Customer " rules strictly if we want to open accounts with a few thousand rupees Madhu Koda was apparently able to keep Rs 50 billion of black money in bank accounts. A chit fund company, Saradha which was very close to Trinamul Congress politicians in Bengal has collapsed. It had raised between Rs 15-40 billion by operating a classical ponzi scheme. It had some 3 hundred thousand agents who were given commissions of 15-40% for collecting money from poorer households by promising returns of 15-50%. At least one person has been murdered and 8 have committed suicide so far. Then there is a reverse ponzi scheme in which a person claims to have raised hundreds of billions of rupees from millions of fictitious customers. Actually he has been given vast sums of black money by politicians. He has invested this money in legitimate businesses, such as hotels, shopping malls and residential housing making huge profits. Ponzi schemes are common but no country knows how to run a reverse ponzi. Truly, we are the best.