The lead author, Kar, says that both the BJP and Congress are "misquoting" and "misinterpreting" him to serve their political agenda.
Out to score political mileage, the BJP is inflating money stashed from India into Swiss banks and tax havens, while the Congress is downplaying the illicit outflows estimated by a global report, lead author has said.
"The range of illicit outflows from India is actually between USD 22.7 billion and USD 27.3 billion per year," Dev Kar, lead author of
Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries 2002-2006 said.
Kar said both the BJP and the Congress are "misquoting" and "misinterpreting" him to serve their political agenda.
He said the Congress has been "downplaying" the figures given in the report, as if it was not a serious issue. The BJP, on the other hand, is giving a highly inflated figure.
While his report is based on a five-year data from 2002 to 2006, the BJP figure goes back to the entire period of post-independent India, by multiplying the figure into the number of years, he said.
Kar blamed Congress election coordinator Jairam Ramesh for having "misquoted" him, stating that the report pegged black money in the range of USD 4.7 billion-USD 27.3 billion.
"That is wrong because USD 4.7 billion only consists the CED (change in external debt) component. But when you look at the range, you should be combining both CED and Trade Mispricing, which comes to USD 22.7 billion," he said.
The report by Global Financial Integrity - a Washington-based think tank - was released in December last year.
Kar, who earned his degree in Physics from St Xavier's College, University of Calcutta, and left India about 36 years ago, is deeply disappointed to see that his figures are being "manipulated" and he is being "misquoted" by the two major Indian political parties.
"This was not my purpose. It is a global report and India is only a part of it," he said adding, "Let me be very clear that I am neither pro-BJP nor pro-Congress. I left India 36 years ago and I am out of touch with local politics and neither am I interested in their mud-slinging match."
He said S Gurumurthy (a member of the BJP task force on black money) sent him an email seeking clarifications on his report.
BJP's prime ministerial candidate LK Advani had released a report of the party's task force on April 17 that pegged Indian wealth in Swiss banks and other offshore tax havens between USD 500 billion and USD 1.4 trillion (more than the size of the Indian economy).
Referring to Ramesh questioning the methodology of the report, Kar said any economist familiar with the capital flight research should be able to interpret the results of his study.
Kar said the figures given in the report were conservative estimates and the actual numbers could be much more. They do not include huge "hawala" transactions.
"It is strange; we find that there is a tendency by the ruling party to downplay these estimates. Jairam Ramesh gives the impression that these numbers are too high. However, the contrary is true. These numbers are too low," he argued.
Kar said overall nobody knew for certain how much money from India was really being transferred abroad.
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