Who said to you that digitalization reduces corruption? I can give tens of examples where digitalization has increased the level of corruption and wrongdoing. The best example is the share market. Share price manipulation was possible in a very limited manner when the trading was in manual form. But after digitalization, share price manipulation is possible at any point and at a much bigger scale. Share prices can be increased and decreased at any moment without any correlation to the actual financial performance of the concerned business houses. Over the last five years, some of the Adani share prices have grown by a few thousand percent. Do you think the financial result or the real assets of the house have grown by such volume? If Adani’s financial performance had improved by such proportion it would have never gone to the PSU banks every now & then with the begging bowl. Secondly, hardly around 5% of Adani shares are in the retail market. So transactions in the retail market can not push Adani shares’ price to such a height.
As per CNBC report American consumers reported losing more than $5.8 billion to fraud in the year 2021, up from $3.4 billion in 2020 (an increase of more than 70%), the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday. Almost 2.8 million consumers filed a fraud report to the agency in 2021 — the highest number on record dating back to 2001, according to the FTC. About 25% of those scams led to a financial loss, with the typical person losing $500.
Ramkrishna - who was head of the exchange between April 2013 and December 2016 - was arrested by the CBI on March 6.(Reuters) Image source - Hindustan Times.
People would possibly remember the NSE Colocation Scam that came to light in the year 2015. The alleged key Perpetrator(s) were some executives at NSE including Chitra Ramakrishna. The scam involved an estimated amount of ₹50,000 cr to ₹75,000 cr. One Himalayan Yogi Scam seems to be the prime accused. However, supposed to be the cleanest government Modi government never tried to find out who is this Himalayan Yogi. Every effort was made to paint Chitra Ramkrishna the then managing director (MD) and chief executive officer (CEO) of the National Stock Exchange (NSE), as the prime the prime accused. Ramkrishna - who was head of the exchange between April 2013 and December 2016. CBI claimed that she made regular mail communication supposedly from her official ID with an external email ID - the mysterious 'Himalayan Yogi'. Somewhere I read she supposedly made 2000 plus such mail communication. I am a little surprised - would she be so naive to communicate with an external email ID so regularly from her official ID disclosing confidential matters and preserve all those communications in her mail server to be used against her as proof? How many people would believe such an allegation that an intelligent person of her stature would divulge confidential information to an external entity from her official email ID regularly every day? I will not be surprised if she has been framed. The story seems more bizarre than any fiction
Banking frauds have gone up because of digital banking. Bank fraud involving cards, internet, and cash rise. According to the RBI, the number of fraud cases reported by private banks outnumbered those by PSU banks for the second consecutive year in 2021-22. In terms of the amount involved, however, the share of PSBs was 66.7 percent in 2021-22, as compared with 59.4 percent in the previous year. Fraudsters create a third-party phishing website that looks like an existing genuine website, such as a bank’s website or an e-commerce website, or a search engine. Links to these websites are circulated by fraudsters through SMS, social media, email, and Messenger. Many customers click on the link without checking the detailed Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and enter secure credentials such as PIN, One Time Password (OTP), and password which are captured and used by the fraudsters.
The RBI said total frauds, including advances, forex, inter-branch accounts, deposits, and off-balance sheet items were at 4,069 cases in the FY 2021–22 for Rs 36,316 crore. The number has increased to 5,406 cases involving Rs 19,485 crore during the six-month period of the FY 2022–23.
Source: RBI's Annual Report
Source: RBI's Annual Report
Despite digitalization election spending by political parties (particularly of BJP) has gone up by a huge proportion which is the mother of all corruption. Currency in circulation has increased by 83% since demonetization in 2016. According to the Reserve Bank data, the currency in circulation (CIC) in value terms soared from ₹17.74 lakh crore on November 4, 2016, to ₹32.42 lakh crore on December 23, 2022. This is despite all claims by the Modi government of digitalization of the economy.
Answering the 2nd part of your question - Will there be a day when a corruption-free sun will rise ?. Sorry, don’t expect such a day. It will never come. It is simply not possible. We all are corrupt in one way or the other, more or less, not a single exception.
Edit:
There have been some comments from people who could have possibly failed to understand my article. So I am putting this edit section.
I could have touched upon each of the areas of comments and I could go on writing, however imparting knowledge or proving someone wrong was not my agenda. I just wanted to point out that the overall number of crimes has not gone down in any field. Digitalization has not been able to reduce the number of crimes whatsoever may be the domain. Rather it has added new dimensions like cyber crime and other economic offences that are in the digital domain. Even in the traditional fields like drugs, rape, crimes against women, robbery, theft, car lifting, land grabbing, sand mafia, and coal mafia nowhere do you see any drop. No, I am not blaming digitalization. It definitely adds convenience. Ideally, it should have led to a reduction of crimes and corruption. But the reality is something else. Rather digitalization & technology orientation is not all good, it have flip sides as well
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