As India immerses itself into removing corruption, it's important to understand what the past scams cost us. But talking in mere amounts isn't fruitful. After all, does 55,000 crore rupees sound bad? How much worse is it than a mere 50,000 crores? (Answer: 1,000 kilometers of highway worse, or the stretch from Bangalore to Mumbai)
The biggest scam that unfortunately doesn't get classified as one is that food enough to feed 100 million people rots in government warehouses. For the rest, we have for you an info-graphic that puts the amounts in context, how much we could have done. For past scams we have adjusted the amount for inflation to reflect an equivalent in 2011 — the Rs. 5,000 crore Harshad Mehta Scam for instance is worth Rs. 15,000 cr. today.
Here's all that we could have done with the money lost to some of the biggest scams in India.
