In a sweeping look at the country’s financial crime battlefield, fresh data placed before Parliament reveals just how intensely the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has been working the levers of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act over the past decade. Since 2014, the agency has set 6,444 investigations in motion — a staggering climb from the modest numbers that marked the beginning of the decade.
The Union Finance Ministry, answering questions in the Lok Sabha, laid out a picture of an agency that has not merely opened cases at scale but has also secured courtroom success in the bulk of matters where verdicts were delivered. Special courts under the PMLA handed down 56 judgments on merit between April 2014 and November 2025. In 53 of those, the ED walked away with convictions — a haul involving 121 individuals and translating into an eye-catching conviction rate of 94.64%.
An Era of Expanding Dockets
The ED’s Enforcement Case Information Reports (ECIRs) — its formal trigger for money laundering probes — have multiplied at a dizzying pace. In 2014-15, the figure sat at 181. By 2021-22, that number had ballooned to 1,116, reflecting an investigative apparatus accelerating year after year.
The Income Tax Department (ITD) followed a similar upward curve. It logged 13,877 prosecution filings since 2014-15, hitting its own peak in 2017-18 with over 4,500 cases — a sharp rise from the 669 recorded when the decade began.
Searches on Overdrive
The past eleven years tell a story of agencies fanning out with growing intensity. The ED alone carried out 11,106 searches during this period. What began as just 46 operations in 2014-15 erupted into over 2,600 by 2023-24, with more than 2,200 searches recorded in the current financial year up to November.
The ITD was not far behind, conducting 9,657 group searches, including a high of 1,437 in 2024-25.
From Filing to Final Verdict
On the prosecution front, the ED submitted 2,416 complaints — primary and supplementary — naming an expansive 16,404 individuals and entities. And while only a fraction of these cases have reached final judgment, the outcome in those that have is remarkably consistent: convictions in nearly every case decided on merits.
The ITD’s courtroom trajectory paints a more varied picture: 522 convictions, 963 acquittals, and 3,345 withdrawals since 2014-15. The Ministry clarified that these outcomes may relate to cases filed in previous years, making year-to-year comparisons more complex.
Across the decade, what emerges unmistakably is an investigative landscape that has grown broader, sharper, and far more assertive — with the ED, in particular, showcasing a conviction record that remains exceptionally robust even as its caseload continues to surge.
