Money - its the size that matters

Barabanki is a small town near Lucknow. I cross this everytime I visit my hometown in Faizabad, sleepy dusty town I never cared to notice. But amidst those dusty lanes are two village 'Tikra Usma' and 'Tikra Murtaza' who generate INR 1500 crores annually through drug trafficking. Holy crap, thats the size of a mid sized FMCG company. The core line of business is heroin trafficking, illegally produced from opium sourced from different parts of India. The local MLA, once a BJP man and now close to Mayawati is in thick of it but no authority can every dare to touch him. Ajjan a local drug lord makes 100 crores every year and yet sells heroin at rates 100 times lower than what it would fetch in Mumbai. He really doesn't know what he will do with more money, where will he spend so much money in his village. A story goes that once a drug lord carried gunny bags full of cash to Lucknow to buy a helicopter, he was ofcourse caught.

Ajjan doesn't know he could have asked his customers to send him money through wire transfers to his secret accounts in a snow laden beautiful country in west. His greed is thus limited by his ability to spend and thank God for the small mercies. 

Ajjan also thankfully is not exposed to the tricks and wizardry of financial brains a la Mr. Raju of Satyam Shivam fame or for that matter money laundering techniques adopted by DB reality of the world for transferring favors in form of monies to a channel owned by DMK.  He could have otherwise created 50 companies and got himself benami properties and assets all over the world, expertly hiding the flow of monies again.

Money by its very nature breeds corruption, after all you could stove away 200 crores in your bank and it wouldn't take any more space than piddly Rs 73,000  that was the average bank balance of mine last year. What if we change the form of money, replace every paper currency by metal. It would then become harder to move it across states, harder to hide and definitely harder to even store if you would want to own 200 crores. 


Ajjan would then sell his heroin and opium for lesser, ofcourse he wouldnt want to carry a truck full of coins to buy a helicopter in Lucknow. And for all the weight, the corruption would reduce. 


For some serious posts on Corruption in todays India
Zephyr http://cybernag.in/2011/01/could-this-become-the-movement/
Purba http://purba-ray.blogspot.com/2011/01/honesty-is-now-obsoleteit-died-slow.html


I just voted against corruption on the website of India Against Corruption at http://voteforindia.org/Won’t you?


PhotoCredits: makemoneyideas.in
Barabanki Investigative Repot: Tehelka