Notes of Nagesh

♦️ ED officials have secured only 9 convictions after conducting 1700 raids and 1569 specific investigations since 2011 * 🔴  Government's Argument * The Solicitor General,* *argued that out of 4700 cases investigated under PMLA only 313 arrests have been made and 388 searches have been conducte d,* which is quite low in comparison to other jurisdictions - UK, USA, China, Australia, Hong Kong, Belgium and Russia. Out of 33 lakh predicate offences that were registered, ED has decided to take up only 2186 cases for investigation, in the last five years.

A Culture of Growth. By Joel Mokyr. Princeton University Press; 424 pages; $22.95 and £17.99 This book deals squarely with the question of why Europe was the first region to industrialise. It focuses on institutions—how ideas of free debate and free markets became embedded in everyday life. Mr Mokyr talks a lot about the Royal Society, a learned institution founded in London in 1660, with the motto “nullius in verba”—“take nobody’s word for it”. The Royal Society was the site of furious disagreements between different scientists, who nonetheless recognised that they were working towards a common cause: improving humanity. And why did this happen in Europe? Geography probably played a role. Fractured into lots of states, a firebrand intellectual who incurred the wrath of the authorities could easily move elsewhere. In most other places, free thinkers had few escape routes

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/ed-conducted-112-raids-from-2004-14-over-3-000-in-8-years-after-thatcentre-101658862318096.html Arguments Matrix of PMLA case in Supreme Court https://www.scobserver.in/reports/pmla-arguments-matrix/ ♦️Below is comment by an economist I am as opposed to and as distressed as any well meaning and law abiding Indian citizen should be with the sheer scale of the parallel universe of criminally acquired wealth and consequent tax evasion. Well regarded experts now estimate this parallel economic and social universe to be as much as 75% of our GDP. Not part of our GDP but existing mostly in addition to it. It is just unreported and deprives the nation of about ₹30 lakh crores of tax revenue.  This is probably our biggest challenge and the recently retired Justice Khanvilkar was probably not hyperbolic when he described it as a bigger challenge than terrorism. I am sure most citizens would be with him when he ratified the draconian...

MOHAN GURUSWAMY: The Covid2019 shock hit all world economies and has caused a serious contraction in all of them. Ironically, in the advanced economies like the USA, UK, Japan and others, it exposed their intrinsic strengths with highly evolved social security systems by and large being able to absorb the labor displacement and the ability to quickly put together a fiscal fight back plan. Even China has been able to quickly recover its pole position as the worlds leading exporter and industrial production center. In India, Covid2019 exposed our co-morbidities, and has further opened the traditional faultlines, with the large unorganized labor cohort bearing the brunt of the costs. At last count the CMIE estimates over 130 million daily wagers in the urban centers being rendered jobless and homeless. India’s economy which has been in distress for most of the last decade in now seriously stricken. When India’s economic history is written in some future date, and when a serious examina...