India's Shocking Corruption Scams

Corruption is plagued throughout our country and India has witnessed many corruption scams from Bofors Scam to Satyam to Harshad Mehta scam and many more. Further, with Coalgate creating fresh controversy and debate, here are few of India’s corruption scandals of recent times as listed by yahoo.com.

Coalgate:

The Coalgate has been on the news for a while now. Known as the Mother of all Scams, the Coalgate is allegedly a corruption scandal in which the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) office accused the Government of India for providing the nation's coal deposits to private and state-run entities in an arbitrary and irregular manner instead of publicly auctioning them off to the highest bidder, resulting in a loss of
approximately 186,000 crore to the exchequer during the period 2004-2009.  As per leaks of the report in March this year, the claim is that the figure is around 1,060,000 crore. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he would give up his public life if found guilty in this scam. But, BJP leaders are said to not be in a mood to give up on their demand that Manmohan Singh take responsibility on the coal blocks allocation and resign.

Tatra Truck scam:

Another scam that drew a lot of attention was the Tatra truck scam. Bharat Earth Movers Ltd in partnership with Tatra Vectra Motors had produced over 7000 trucks to the Army. When General VK Singh took over as the Army Chief, he refused to authorize the purchase of trucks after he was offered a bribe. This scam was estimated at 750 crore. General Singh's allegation was that a batch of 600 odd trucks was 'substandard'. He alleged he was offered 14 crore, apparently to sanction the purchase of 600 Tatra high-mobility vehicles from BEML.

Adarsh Housing Society scam:

The origins of the scam go back to February 2002 when a request was made to the Chief Minister of Maharashtra to allot land for the construction of a housing complex for "the welfare of serving and retired personnel of the Defence Services. However, top politicians, bureaucrats and military officers proceeded to bend several rules and commit various acts of omission and commission in order to have the building constructed and then got themselves allotted flats in this premier property at artificially lowered prices. The CBI, the Income Tax Department and the Enforcement Directorate(ED) are investigating the involvement of three former chief ministers, Sushilkumar Shinde, Vilasrao Deshmukh and Ashok Chavan in the scam.

Antrix Devas deal:

A Contract was signed between Antrix Corporation and Devas Multimedia Private Limited in 2005 during G Madhavan Nair’s tenure as Chairman ISRO and Secretary, DOS. In 2011, Nair and three other scientists were held responsible for a controversial deal between the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) commercial arm Antrix Corporation and Devas Multimedia. The deal involved ISRO leasing the S-band transponders on two satellites (GSAT6 and GSAT6A) to Devas for broadcasting reasons. Following the controversy in January, 2012 he was barred from holding any Government jobs.

A CAG report stated that the department of space hid facts from the cabinet and violated rules and policies in approving the agreement. The report’s leak created a controversy that free spectrum was being given. The CAG audit accounted a loss of Rs 200,000 crore.

Commonwealth games scam:

The Commonwealth Games is one the most well known scams. Suresh Kalmadi (then chairman of the Organizing Committee of the Commonwealth Games) was the main accused. The scam involved a number of corrupt deals involving overstated contracts. Kalmadi also handed out Rs 141 crore contracts to Swiss Timing for its timing equipment; the deal was inflated by Rs 95 crores. Several problems related to the 2010 Commonwealth Games were highlighted by Indian investigative agencies and media outlets, which include — serious corruption by officials of the Games' Organising Committee, delays in the construction of main Games' venues, infrastructural compromise, possibility of a terrorist attack, and exceptionally poor ticket sales before the event. On April 25, 2011 Kalmadi was arrested by CBI for awarding illegal contracts to a Swiss firm for Timing-Scoring-Result (TSR) system for the 2010 Commonwealth Games causing a loss to the exchequer of Rs 95 crore.

Bellary mines scandal:

Illegal iron ore mining was found to be taking place in the Bellary region of Karnataka. The illegal mining started after paying a tiny royalty to the government. The major regularities involved were G. Karunakara Reddy and G. Janardhana Reddy who were ministers in the Government of Karnataka and also the owners of Obulapuram Mining Company (OMC).

This scam led to the resignation of its chief minister B S Yeddyurappa. Then Lokayukta of Karnataka, Justice Santosh Hegde published a report saying there was corruption and that the chief minister and his family members were found guilty of taking bribes in the form of donations to their trusts from mining companies as well as overpricing land they sold to the companies, in exchange for issuing mining leases. The state government lost Rs 16,085 crore due to this.

2G Spectrum scam:

The 2G spectrum scam involved government officials illegally undercharging mobile telephony companies for frequency allocation licenses, which would then be used to create 2G subscriptions for cell phones. As per Comptroller and Auditor General of India based on 3G and BWA spectrum auction prices in 2010, the shortfall between the money collected and the money which the law mandated to be collected is estimated to be 176,645 crore.  

The speculations of profit, loss and no-loss were put to rest in February this year when the Supreme Court of India delivered judgement on a public interest litigation (PIL) which was directly related to the 2G spectrum scam. The Supreme Court quashed all the 122 licenses issued in 2008 during tenure of A. Raja (then minister for communications & IT) the main official accused in the 2G scam case. The court said that A. Raja "wanted to favour some companies at the cost of the public exchequer" and "virtually gifted away important national asset." On 3 August 2012, as per the directions of the Supreme Court, Govt of India revised the base price for 5 MHz 2G spectrum auction to 14,000 crore, which roughly gives the value of spectrum to be around 2,800 crore  per MHz that is close to the CAG's estimate of 3,350 crore per MHz.

Telgi and stamp paper scam:

The Stamp paper scam or the Telgi scam involved printing duplicate stamp papers and selling them to banks and other institutions. The scam was discovered in 2003. The fake stamp and stamp paper case had penetrated 12 states and was estimated at a whooping 20000 crore plus. The Telgi evidently had a lot of support from government departments that were responsible for the production and sale of high security stamps.