Controlling Money Laundering in India - Problems and Perspectives

'Money-Laundering' - A sophisticated crime not to be taken very seriously at the first glance by anyone in the society as compared to street crimes. To give a head start to this paper, researcher wanted to limit the paper to National context, but was not able to do so as it was not at all possible due to the fact that any instance of money laundering would have a tinge of international flavour as money laundering typically involves transferring money through several countries in order to obscure its origin. It was difficult to discuss the topic of money-laundering nationally in abstract. If done so, would have appeared as a patchwork. To have a comprehensive paper, the researcher discusses the theme of the paper in three parts. Part I opens up with explaining the concepts and processes of money laundering pointing out the challenges and losses and is a kind of primer to money laundering. As observed earlier, money laundering essentially involves a foreign ground for washing - laundering the dirty money - proceeds of crime, Part II moves with elaborating the international developments and control mechanisms to deal with the problem of money laundering. In light of the aforesaid discussion Part III proceeds to analyze the position of India in controlling money laundering keeping up with the mandate of international forum. India is proposing to update its anti-money-laundering law and a Bill of 2008 is waiting for enforcement. A comparative analysis of the Bill of 08 is done in one of the sub-parts of the paper. To sum up the paper various problems and loopholes in implementation of the anti-money-laundering laws are discussed putting forth few humble suggestions to have a balanced anti-money-laundering regime