Thin Dividing Line: India, Mauritius and Global Illicit Financial Flows

by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta with Shinzani Jain

Over the past two decades, roughly 40 percent of foreign investment to India has been directed through Mauritius, a nation off the southeastern coast of Africa, where a majority of the inhabitants are descendants of Indian indentured labourers. Today, Mauritius is notorious as a tax haven. This work of investigative journalism shows how the business elite in India have used the country’s historic links with Mauritius to reroute investments in India through legal and illegal means—on both sides of “the thin dividing line” between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion—to avoid paying corporate taxes in India.

Penguin Random House, 304 pages, Rs 599