Seven Big Indian Corruption Scandals

The autumn of 2010 produced a density of corruption revelations in India that overwhelmed the public's ability to track them. Seven scandals, each enormous by any previous standard, arrived in such rapid succession that the outrage each individually merited was dissipated by the pace of revelation.

The 2G spectrum scandal was the largest in quantified terms. The Comptroller and Auditor General's report, tabled in Parliament this month, estimated that the underpricing of telecom licenses had cost the government Rs 1.76 lakh crore — a number so large it required journalistic translation into dollars to communicate its scale. The methodology was immediately contested by economists who argued it measured opportunity cost rather than loss, but the number stuck: it became the defining figure of the season's debates.

The Commonwealth Games contracting produced images rather than numbers — the collapsed stadium footbridge, the athletes' village declared uninhabitable days before the Games — that communicated corruption's consequences in terms accounting figures cannot. The money had not just disappeared; it had produced defective infrastructure for an event India had positioned as its global coming-out party.

The Adarsh Housing Society scandal in Mumbai — flats meant for war widows diverted to politicians and bureaucrats — cost Maharashtra's chief minister his job this month. The Radia tapes exposed the lobbyist-journalist-politician nexus in the participants' own voices. Karnataka's illegal mining operations, UP's foodgrain diversion, and the IPL's Kochi franchise row that felled a Union minister in April each added their own chapter.

What the season suggested was cumulative: not seven separate outrages but a single public mood — the sense that the system for converting public resources into private gain had become the system itself. The question hanging over the winter was what that anger would attach itself to next.