At one of its branches near Mumbai, the United Commercial Bank does not feel the need to keep its cash under lock and key. There are no metal doors, no armed guards and no closed-circuit television cameras.
But there is no need to fret about potential bank robbers. The bank is protected by a Hindu god.
This lock-free branch is near a temple dedicated to Lord Shani or the god of Saturn, a highly revered Hindu deity cloaked in black, clutching a dagger and a sword, and mounted on a vulture.
Bank officials are confident that anyone who tries to steal cash will have to bear Shani's wrath. Mythological stories reveal its propensity to menace those who commit evil acts by turning them blind or mute. They believe the fear of Shani will act as a powerful deterrent for potential bank robbers.
The story is one of many bizarre tales highlighting how this nation of more than 1 billion people often finds itself torn between tradition and modernity, between faith and reasoning.
But the story inspires a broader question: can India institute a similar deterrent to prevent the outflow of illicit wealth, stolen from a billion people, to alleged offshore tax havens such as Liechtenstein and Switzerland?
The practice of funnelling "black money", or undisclosed and unaccounted income, overseas by Indians has flourished for decades, denting the country's tax collections and spawning a large shadow economy.
The US non-profit Global Financial Integrity estimates that US$462 billion (Dh1.69 trillion), nearly half of India's GDP, has been illegally moved abroad from the taxman's prying eyes between 1948 and 2008. Tax on that money could have helped finance India's myriad social schemes. An Indian court recently called it "pure and simple theft of national money".
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The old argument is that high tax rates and stringent regulation exacerbates the pace of creation and stashing away of black money overseas. It deters people from diligently paying their taxes.
However, this is not the case.
Since India initiated economic reforms in 1991, taxes have been lowered and government controls over many key sectors have been relaxed. But even after this, the movement of black money has grown.
Dev Kar, a leading economist at Global Financial Integrity, estimates the outflow of illicit money from India has increased by 11.5 per cent annually since the economic reforms were initiated.
I also view with deep suspicion the government claim that offshore banks are impregnable and protected by sweeping secrecy laws. India has the legislative framework in the form of a double taxation avoidance agreement to scoop out information about suspected tax evaders with foreign bank accounts.
Contrast that with the efforts of the US government, which in 2009 sought information about 4,000 American account holders for a tax evasion-related investigation from the Union Bank of Switzerland. Many European countries have successfully sought similar information from other tax havens.
The real devil in India is the lack of political will.
"Politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen who benefit the most from the black economy are also the ones in power," says Arun Kumar, a professor at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University and the author of The Black Economy In India. "Hence there is no urgency to check this."
Even though dogged by multibillion-dollar corruption scandals, the Indian government is doing little to dispel the widespread belief that it is protecting high-profile tax evaders. Last month, India's supreme court reprimanded the government for not revealing the names of Indians on a list of suspected tax evaders abroad shared with the country in recent months by the German government. Pranab Mukherjee, the finance minister, said the list helped the government discover cases of tax evasion amounting to 150bn rupees (Dh12.02bn) in the past 18 months. He clarified that the government had "nothing to hide", but was bound by a confidentiality agreement with German authorities.
Even if that were true, what stops the government from initiating stern legal action against people on that list?
Black money flourishes in India because it is allowed to flourish. It will stop when the Indian government really wants it to stop, with or without Hindu gods.