Vinod Rai is making India’s blood billionaires sweat

Vinod Rai is making CAG a feared name by exposing the secrets behind the blood billionaires of India. Being slightly aggressive about the national issues, I might have personally liked Vinod Rai, the current Comptroller and Auditor General of India, to stretch his constitutional limits more, redefine them, and take the government head- on perhaps more loudly. But then all human beings don’t have the same approach to dealing with identical issues.

Vinod Rai is a man who is soft- spoken, abhorring the limelight, but is doing his work with amazing sincerity, courage and commitment, bringing to public notice the sham and the shame behind India’s Blood Billionaires - the saga of corruption and transfer of national wealth into private hands at the cost of the tax payers’ money and the country’s national interests.

What exactly do I mean? Well, the annual Forbes billionaires’ list now regularly features a significant number of Indian businessmen ( almost 30 plus) with an accumulated worth that’s a staggering $ 200 billion plus ( almost 15 per cent of what the entire Indian population earns in a year).

When I go abroad, this intrigues everyone! They are amazed that while bil- lionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and others have made their fortunes after years of investing in brand building, R& D and by painstakingly focusing on capturing international markets, we have managed so many billionaires without having any brand in the international markets.

Look at the Businessweek- Interbrand survey of the world’s 100 top brands - not one is Indian. Then how are the Indians dominating the various lists of global billionaires?

The answer is quite simple actually — purely through scams, loot and the criminal transfer of national wealth into private hands… ensuring the billionaire status for them!

After Independence, our industrialists were given a monopoly market to operate in, thanks to the bureaucratic system of bribery- driven work cul-

Vinod Rai’s efforts in exposing the reality behind the growing number of Indian billionaires in the global billionaires’ list is making CAG a feared name

ture we created.

The private sector was allowed to buy public sector products at subsidised prices, and sell the finished products at the market prices.

Subsequently, PSUS were branded loss- making failures while the industrialists amassed obnoxious amounts of money! This was the first phase of growth for our Indian business houses. Since this first experiment kept us a third world and third class country, the second phase of growth started post liberalisation.

In this phase, the government started selling off PSUS in totality at a fraction of the price these PSUS could have commanded in the markets — this made, but obviously, a few more dollar billionaires.

And, now has come the latest phase! It is actually the government of India that started the process of creating numerous global billionaires out of our existing industrialists through the SEZ Act - what we at IIPM Think Tank have termed the National Land Loot Act — and other such processes of giving away natural resources over to private hands.

Be it the 2G Scam or the ‘ Coalgate Scam’ or any other scam, it is the same story. One visit to Kalinga Nagar, Kujang and the likes, tells us the glaring tale of how a handful of companies are becoming abnormally wealthy by amassing an obscene amount of land and natural resources, that too at throwaway prices, thanks to the dacoits running this country in the garb of politicians. There, of course, is no consideration to the thousands of poor farmers and fishermen families who are getting displaced. No wonder then that at each and every place, wherever the government is trying to repossess land, there is fierce agitation and bloodshed.

And that unfortunately is the story of India… Blood Billionaires making their billions out of scams, poverty and bloodshed. And that is where Vinod Rai, our current CAG, is steadily bringing in front of the public the reality of how the government is trying to hoodwink the people and dole out 2G licenses and mining permits, costing this poor nation losses to the tune of three lakh to ten lakh crore rupees!

Everything perhaps can’t be done by getting aggressive. Some things require sincere fact- finding, auditing with honesty and patriotism.

That’s what Vinod Rai is doing, motivating people like us to get aggressive with his brilliant exposes! He is sincerely showing Indians the secret behind the growing number of Indian billionaires in the global billionaires’ lists, thus exposing our Blood Billionaires and in turn making CAG a feared name! The author is a Management Guru and Hony Think Director of IIPM Tank. ( The views expressed in this column belong to the writer and do not reflect those of this newspaper)