Sir — This refers to the article, “Moving beyond words for corrupt-free India” (December 26) by Joginder Singh. To make India corrupt-free, the process must begin from the top. Efforts must be made to weed out benami property, gold and foreign bank deposits abroad, political funding must be made transparent and we must adopt a pro-poor direct tax regime.
It is unfortunate that the cause for persistent poverty in the country is inequality. According to a recent report by the International Monetary Fund, income distributed in the country is highly unequal. The Gini index of India (which indicates inequality — higher the index value, more would be the inequality) has gone up from 45.18 in 1990 to 51.36 in 2013 — worse than latin America’s 43.69.
Our growth shows a sign of malignancy as the richest 10 per cent of our population has whopping 76.3 per cent of the nation’s wealth, on the other hand more than half of our population is reeling with a meagre 4.1 per cent. The Government, in order to catch the greedy, should not trample on the livelihood of the needy.