Do scamsters have it easier now?

The moral worth of a society can be deduced by how it bestows its wealth to its members. Some societies like to think themselves as meritocracies: intelligence, hard-work and ability can get a committed individual far in life. Some, like the tribal societies, are equally-opportunity deniers – no amount of hard work will guarantee a comfortable life, let alone wealth. The India of today fares abysmally on this count. A primary source of wealth in India is rent-seeking.

The Wikipedia entry for rent-seeking seems to have been written keeping India in mind:

“an individual, organization or firm seeks to earn income by capturing economic rent through manipulation or exploitation of the economic or political environment, rather than by earning profits through economic transactions and the production of added wealth.”

Consider the three recent high-profile scams: the CWG mess, the 2G scandal and the land scam in Karnataka. In each of the three cases, the state, or rather the Mafioso who adorn the ministries and the secretariats, controls the access to rare resources: there’s only one instance of the Commonwealth Games in decades; the spectrum is owned by the people of India and hence its elected government; the chief Minister has tremendous discretionary powers to allocate land. Each of the beneficiaries of these scams had it easy: once they made it to the position (to be fair, this involves lot of struggle and effort) that enabled them to arbitrate, they could go for the kill.

Contrasting these scams with the scams from the yesteryears fills me with nostalgia. Consider three examples from 1992-2002: the Fodder Scam, the Tehelka scandal and the Harshad Mehta securities scam. In each of these three illustrious, path-breaking scams, there was lot of hard-work for the scamsters to do. In the fodder scam, for instance, the mafia (the involved politicians and the administrators) had to create records of thousands of livestock and maintain elaborate records to divert the funds marked for the fodder and the medicines. The defense officers in the Tehelka scandal had to elaborately justify their proposed purchasing decisions. Harshad Mehta had stupendous knowledge of the stock market and was a maverick trader. Compared to these stalwarts, today’s Mafioso are novices. (I can picture Harshad Mehta, having his way out of hell into heaven, muttering at A. Raja: "all you could arrange was a mere 1.76 lakh crores?")

The quality of scamsters, much like moral universe India inhabits today, has deteriorated. Our Mafia need increasingly lesser skills to acquire wealth, and increasingly, winning a biological lottery in enough, as Jagadish, the son of the disgraced ex-Karnataka IT minister Katta Naidu demonstrates, if you are hatched from an egg that is fertilized by an Indian politician’s sperm, you have a much higher chance to be filthy rich. Why struggle with innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity when being a minister or an administrator can fetch you millions a year?