Operation Clean Up

Electoral and Police Reforms To Follow.

- TN Ashok

Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept to power in 2014 general elections on the back of a popular wave with assurances to root out black money and clean up the entire economic system of its ills.

So he first set up a Special Investigating Team (SIT) under a Supreme Court judge to identify the sources of black money, tax havens overseas where they are parked and repatriate them back to the country. In a notional statement, much misunderstood by the people, he said if all black wealth were to be repatriated to the country, then every citizen would have Rs 13 lakhs in his bank account. The idea was to stress how much a honest tax payer had been deprived of.

In his war on black money and corruption, Modi took a series of steps starting with the passage of a legislation in 2015 for disclosure of foreign black money; initialling agreements with many countries, including the USA, add provisions for sharing banking information; a strict law enunciated in August 2016 to curb benami transactions used to deploy black money earned through corruption; and finally a scheme of declaring black money after paying a stiff penalty of some 45% that led to receipt of some Rs 60,000 crore and still counting.