QUOTE Corruption in India is ubiquitous and may be broadly classified as illegal and “legal”. This paper delves into the typology of legal corruption, which, apart from abuse of discretionary powers and tactical law and policymaking, includes use of the information advantage by politicians to make private gains. Analysing the growth rates in assets of some politicians in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, it finds that they are much higher than the market growth rate. The paper recommends enforcing greater transparency by disseminating information on all transactions conducted by politicians and implementing broad-based reforms to bring about system-wide changes....
Our findings suggest that growth rates of assets of politicians in power exceed the market growth rate considerably. The modus operandi used by these politicians to make gains may be illegal (by violating laws) or legal. Illegal corruption is fairly easy to identify and is a supervision and implementation prob- lem, which while being difficult, is not complex. Since most politicians are sensible enough to disclose only those assets that have been acquired through legal means, the increase in value of the assets (as given in the affidavits) does not show the gains that may have been made illegally.32 Thus growth in asset valuations must be due to practices that fall within the ambit of legal corruption. UNQUOTE http://epw.in/ -- FN +91-832-2409490 or +91-9822122436 f...@goa-india.org Books from Goa,1556 http://scr.bi/Goa1556Books Audio recordings (mostly from Goa): http://bit.ly/GoaRecordings