HONG KONG — Corruption in India has become so public and pervasive that the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been forced to take action on two blatant abuses. The problem is that corruption is only one highly visible part of a hydra-headed monster that is preventing India from fulfilling its great promise and keeping hundreds of millions of Indians in poverty.

The expensive mess of the New Delhi Commonwealth Games last year, costs of which exploded from an originally estimated $352 million to $13 billion, proved a scandal too much for the government, which had to take action.

Another expensive scandal was the award of telecommunications licenses in 2008 at knockdown prices, which may have deprived the government of $39 billion in revenues. The public outcry has been so great that police authorities called in some of the big tycoons for questioning, the first time they had endured such humiliation.