The trillion-dollar question

At the beginning of 2010, management guru CK Prahalad gave a figure of Rs 2,50,000 crore for the annual cost of corruption in India. He got to this number by adding up the costs of elections and assuming a 10X return on those risky investments. That sounds like a huge number, so let me reduce it by converting it to US dollars (after all, still the world’s reserve currency). That becomes about $55 billion. That still seems like a lot— an annual cost that exceeds Mukesh Ambani’s known wealth. But let’s put it into perspective. India’s GDP is about $1.2 trillion. So Prahalad’s estimate is only 5% of GDP. That does not sound too bad.

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