Virtue is its own reward. The Indian market is down 13 per cent in the past week in dollar terms, largely because investor confidence in the quality of corporate information on the subcontinent has collapsed in the wake of the accounting fraud at Satyam, the country’s fourth-largest IT services firm. To say that the Indian market faces a quality of earnings issue is an understatement. After all, corporate profits have grown almost six-fold between 2003 and 2008, according to Morgan Stanley, and there is now justifiable concern about the extent to which this exceptional performance might result from artful book-keeping, particularly at some of the large family-controlled groups that dominate the Sensex index of 30 leading shares.

But the market’s fall disguises the extent to which investors have in fact discriminated, penalising companies perceived to take corporate governance least seriously and showing mercy to those reckoned to do more than just pay lip-service to it. Shares in Wipro, a family-controlled rival of Satyam’s, on Monday fell 9 per cent after it emerged it had been barred from work with the World Bank for four years in June 2007 for trying to curry favour with some Bank employees by offering them the chance to take part in its 2000 initial public offering. This further burnished the halo of Infosys, the sector darling, which has outperformed the Sensex by 12 per cent in the past week.