Even more surprising is the absence of oil sector scam from the long list of scams getting national attention today. The PDS scam, involving an even larger amount of money, has failed to get the attention it deserves. Diversion of PDS kerosene and residential LPG is generating about Rs 52,000 crore on an annual basis. This should make it the mother of all scams in India. When other lesser scams are associated with some well known political leaders, the oil sector scam involves thousands of politicians, bureaucrats and petty businessmen at all levels. There is no single political leader or one political party who can be blamed for the oil sector scam.Let's run some numbers.
52,000 crore Rupees is 520 billion rupees.
Rs 520 B is about ten billion U.S. dollars.
According to the CIA World Factbook, India's 2010 GDP per capita was U.S. $3,500.
If the numbers in this article and the CIA World Factbook are accurate, the losses in this one scam amount to the average annual productive capacity of more than 2.8 million Indians.
Wikipedia:
2010 population of the state of Utah = 2,763,885
2010 population of the city of Chicago = 2,695,598
This is shocking.
