New Tales Of Graft And Greed.(political corruption on the rise in India)

Indians can be forgiven if they are suffering from corruption fatigue. Almost daily they seem to be bombarded with yet another official scandal. Despite her vociferous denials, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh was forced to resign this summer amid allegations that she was accepting kickbacks from a real-estate developer, tucking the money away in her 87 personal bank accounts. Last month Dilip Singh Judeo, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's state minister for Environment and Forests, was caught on videotape accepting bundles of rupees in a posh New Delhi hotel room from a man claiming to represent an Australian mining company looking to secure mineral rights in two Indian states. And over the past few weeks what may amount to the country's largest scam has been slowly coming to light: a $5 billion nationwide forgery racket, allegedly run by a former south Indian village peanut vendor, which reportedly involved some of the nation's top cops and politicians.

Official venality, of course, is nothing new in India. But the most recent scandals involve increasingly large sums of money, encompass officials from coast to coast and seem to be occurring with greater frequency. Although India's economy is posting its best numbers in a long time, the growth in business does not mean the country has broken the shackles of corruption--if anything, the temptations are all the greater as the trough gets bigger. Even worse, the incessant scandals may be making Indians dangerously inured to the proliferating graft. "There is growing cynicism all around," says Ashis Nandy of New Delhi's Center for the Study of Developing Societies.

If India's newest tale of graft and greed is accurate, no one may better understand how the tentacles of corruption work than Abdul Karim Telgi, a former peanut seller and travel agent from the southern state of Karnataka. Imprisoned in 1991 without bail (he was neither tried nor convicted) for having bilked customers of his travel agency, the ambitious Telgi allegedly learned the art of forgery from his cellmate. Authorities say that by 1997, only two years after being released from prison, Telgi had set up a sophisticated forgery operation in Mumbai, printing and selling government stamp papers--official documents bearing a tax stamp of denominations ranging from $1 to many hundreds of dollars on which most legal and commercial transactions in India must be written. Given that Indian states earn some $7 billion in tax revenues annually from the sale of stamp papers, Telgi's potential market would have been enormous. Officials claim that he was soon raking in tens of millions of dollars a month. ...