Corruption cost India Rs 1,555 thousand crore: study

The menace of corruption in the country is pegged at Rs 1,555 thousand crore in the last decade and majority of it has been laundered out of India using illicit gateways, a recent study has claimed.

According to a first of its kind report on 'Ascertaining size of corruption in India with respect to money laundering', an individual spent over Rs 2,000 as a cost of corruption in 2009, which is 260 per cent higher than the amount borne by a citizen ten years back.

"In the past decade, money laundered out of India was at least Rs 1,886 thousand crores or $419 billion. This quantification of the laundering is worked out on the most pessimistic manner and by considering the global parameters," it said.

"If the Gross Domestic Product-based money laundering model is translated to quantify the corruption, then the size of corruption in the last decade is Rs 1,555 thousand crore or $345 billion in India," the report said.

The study was conducted by a Pune-based company Indiaforensic, which has pioneered in fraud examination, security, risk management and forensic accounting research and has been for long helping the country's investigating agencies like CBI in several high profile cases.

It is based on the analysis of scarce data available for measuring money laundering described through three models-- property recovery, crime based and GDP based. "The three models gave details of quantum of money laundering. They are based on the statistics by National Crime records Bureau (NCRB)," said Mayur Joshi, an anti-fraud and money laundering expert and founder member of the firm which had assisted CBI in the multi-crore Satyam scam.

According to property recovery based model developed on the data by NCRB, the total amount of recovery from the crime proceeds is Rs 190 crore. In total 70,773 cases were investigated between 2000-2009.

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