Thursday, November 18, 2010

One Lakh Crore–What does that mean?

CAG report for 2G spectrum allocation scandal has highlighted that India has lost 1.7 lakh crore due to corruption by Telecom Ministry. By all means, I think, there are more than ten thousand people involved in this scandal. So, just hanging former Telecom Minister A.Raja is not enough. Yet, except for resignation of A.Raja, there has been no action from the government. What is even worse, common man of India isn’t bothered with the scale of this scandal. This is the unfortunate truth of India. To help the common man understand, what this scandal means to India, I am going to describe what 1.7 lakh crore means to us. To make the mathematics simple, I am assuming the scandal is only 1 lakh crore.

If one writes down 1 lakh crore in numbers, it is 1,00,000,00,00,000. That’s ‘1’ followed by twelve zeros.

If Government of India wanted to distribute 1 lakh crore to Indian Citizens, each one of us would have got about ~900 rupees.

With 1 lakh crore, government of India could have provided free primary education for every girl child in India for next three years.

With 1 lakh crore, Government of India could have got every heart patient in India operated.

With 1 lakh crore, Government of India could have got doubled the strength of Indian army.

With 1 lakh crore, Government of India could have increased the security five-fold for all major Indian cities, which reduces the chances of a terrorist attack five times.

With 1 lakh crore, Government of India could have reduced the Tax Rate for every citizen by 10% for one year.

With 1 lakh crore, Government of India could have planted approximately 10 lakh crore trees in India, hence reducing the impact of green-house gases by 300%.

With 1 lakh crore, Government of India could have set-up 10 million clean and hygienic public toilets across India.

With 1 lakh crore, Government of India could have increased the budget by 40 times for R&D in Indian Universities.

With 1 lakh crore, Government of India could have provided purified drinking water for every citizen of India for a period of 5 years.

With 1 lakh crore, Government of India could have provided free electricity to all the farmers in India for a period of 2 years.

I can go on and on… but what’s the point? 1 lakh crore is just the tip of iceberg. Corruption has become an industry in India. And people of India has got so used to corruption… just simply don’t care. But someday, this is going to take us down. I just hope Indians wake up before the country is sold out in pieces by corrupt Indians.

No comments: