Index Of Badla

But one favor remained. The last one was not owed in coin, nor in public confession. It was owed in restoring a choice. The traffic in labor, the men with paper faces, had bound Rajeev with a signature that could not be rubbed away. To undo it they needed Rajeev himself.

Despite its utility, the Badla system was fraught with systemic risk. Because it was largely informal and lacked the rigorous "mark-to-market" margins of modern exchanges, it was prone to manipulation. The system was famously exploited during the 1992 Securities Scam by Harshad Mehta and again during the 2001 Ketan Parekh scam index of badla