Now that the government was retreating from being a producer, it had to give land, energy and commodity rights, wireless spectrum and other concessions to the private sector and procure — on behalf of the public — electricity, roads, ports, telecom services and jobs. The opportunities for corruption swelled, and a nexus of businesses, politicians and criminals coalesced to exploit them. By 2004, the once-dominant Congress Party’s Manmohan Singh was prime minister, leading yet another ragtag coalition. He returned to power in 2009, but the triumph of his victory didn’t endure. With the world economy entering its post-2008 funk, India’s unreformed markets, political opportunism, fiscal profligacy and the private sector’s unregulated greed overwhelmed Singh’s second term. The vulgarity of crony capitalism became a lightning rod for mass mobilization. An “India Against Corruption” movement fed a frenzy of disgust against crooked politicians and businessmen who were usurping farmers’ land, promising to create jobs and then not delivering. But most crucially, people’s anger was aimed at the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty. Scandals surfaced and metastasized. In 2012, the Indian Supreme Court cancelled 122 telecom licenses. The government’s auditor said that the granting of those licenses had cost the country $23 billion. This debacle was soon dwarfed by what the auditor said was a $42 billion scam in allocating coal mines to private firms. Those were also scrapped.
Andy Mukherjee, ‘Why I’m Losing Hope in India’, Bloomberg