India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi didn’t waste much time: Among his first acts on his first day in office was to make it a priority to recover billions of dollars stashed overseas to avoid taxes.

Within 24 hours of his May 26 inauguration, Modi created an investigative team of former judges and current regulators to find the concealed assets, known as black money, and bring them back. At stake is what’s estimated to be as much as $2 trillion, more than India’s annual gross domestic product.

“It will send out a loud and clear signal to all tax evaders,” said Arun Kumar, author of “The Black Economy in India” and an economics professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, who calculated the $2 trillion figure. “There was always a lack of political willpower, and I hope it will be different this time.”

India is joining countries including the U.S. and Britain in cracking down on rich people who haven’t reported offshore funds. The nation ranked third in the world for money illegally moved overseas in 2011, behind China and Russia, according to a 2013 report by Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based group researching cross-border money transfers. High-net-worth individuals and private companies are the “primary drivers of illicit flows,” the group said in a 2010 report.

Asia’s third-largest economy loses an estimated 60 trillion rupees ($1 trillion) each year from its formal sector, such as banks, and almost 6 trillion rupees of that is moved out of the country, according to Kumar, who analyzed independent studies and World Bank and International Monetary Fund data on trade flows. His $2 trillion estimate is the total amount Indians currently have stashed abroad illegally, without paying taxes in the South Asian nation or disclosing the funds to authorities.

Tax revenue on those assets could exceed $600 billion, based on a 30 percent rate plus penalties, Kumar said. That’s six times the amount the federal government estimates it will need to borrow this year to meet expenses. India’s fiscal deficit will widen this year to the highest among BRIC countries ― Brazil, Russia, India and China ― in part because taxes as a proportion of GDP are low, a May 29 IMF estimate showed.

Estimates about the amount of black money vary widely. Indians had moved $644 billion to tax havens as of 2011, according to data from Global Financial Integrity. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party said in a 2011 report that Indians had $250 billion, or 20 percent of the previous year’s gross domestic product, hiding in Switzerland alone.

The government defines black money as assets that haven’t been reported to authorities at the time of their generation or disclosed at any point during their possession. A large portion is converted into gold and held in households domestically. It’s legal for Indian residents to hold money in foreign bank accounts as long as they disclose it and pay taxes.

Modi’s special investigative team, set up to comply with a Supreme Court directive, will focus on the black money held in offshore accounts.

“The black money within the country is more easy to get at than that stashed abroad,” Kumar said. “Probing money moved abroad is a rather convenient way of diverting public attention from addressing the larger issue of unaccounted money within the country.”

Getting the money back won’t be easy, according to Ashutosh Kumar Mishra, the New Delhi-based executive director of Transparency International India, a group that monitors corporate and political corruption.

India needs to raise the issue in international forums and put pressure on foreign banks to disclose information about those who are evading taxes through their branches, he said.

“The problem of black money cannot be solved in a day,” Mishra said. “Lack of proper implementation is what has derailed all well-intentioned announcements like this.”

The Congress party pledged to claw back funds held illicitly in offshore accounts in May 2009 after its victory in federal elections. In a Supreme Court filing that month in response to a petition from former Minister for Law and Justice Ram Jethmalani, the government said it had proposed a new tax agreement with Switzerland to improve the exchange of bank data.

In June 2011, the government received information from French authorities about 700 Indians who had accounts at HSBC Holdings Plc’s Swiss branches. That data, along with details about more than 23,000 other HSBC clients, had been stolen from the bank by a former employee, the London-based lender said.

About 100 of the 700 people on the list accepted amnesty from India, avoiding criminal prosecution in exchange for repatriating the money and paying taxes, a government official with knowledge of the matter said in July 2012. The official declined to provide any names or say how much was recouped.

“HSBC does not condone tax evasion,” the bank said in an e-mailed response from New Delhi last week. “Individuals are responsible for their own tax affairs.”

Mario Tuor, a spokesman for Switzerland’s State Secretariat for International Financial Matters in Bern, said his government “can only cooperate within the framework of Swiss law, and it doesn’t allow cooperation based on stolen data.” (Bloomberg)