When the drinks company Diageo paid entrepreneur Vijay Mallya a $100 million severance package two weeks ago to end his role as its Indian chairman, it looked like yet another sweetheart deal for a well-connected tycoon.
But over lunch that day with a Mumbai private equity executive, I was surprised to hear her describe the deal as one of the best examples yet of how the opaque, sometimes corrupt culture that has been a feature of Indian business is undergoing a clean-up.
In the first instance Diageo was just cutting its ties with a discredited erstwhile door-opener who has subsequently provoked widespread outrage for not paying bills at his failed airline Kingfisher while inexplicably continuing to receive generous funding from state banks. 
But on Tuesday my informant proved spot on when a State Bank of India consortium sought court action to stop Mallya from moving abroad because that would stall loan recovery proceedings against him in India. The previous day a Debt Recovery Tribunal judge restrained Diageo from paying Mallya, claiming the money should go to Kingfisher creditors who are owed up to $3 billion.
This action may take a long while to play out in a legal system where such cases can take years, but it nonetheless draws together two underlying trends in India that could provide crucial support in the long term for its high economic growth aspirations.
The first is a feeling in the business community that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has put a halt to the spiralling corruption in the later years of the previous government which ranged from Commonwealth Games contracts to the sale of mining and telecommunications rights.
The second is the unrelenting pressure from respected Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuran Rajan on banks - especially the state ones - to clean up the bad loans which are acting as constraint on new credit creation.
The private equity investor says there was too much hype about India when Modi was elected in 2014 but the cultural change involved in cleaning up bad debt and auctioning government licences in a transparent way, means the country's prospects are now under rated.
The government has certainly run into heavy weather recently over its handling of ethnic conflict and a parliamentary impasse which has stopped some major legislation. On Tuesday its long-term budget deficit reduction strategy faced a set back when forced to abandon measures to impose annuities on retirees.
But in conversations during a visit it was striking how Modi was given credit for trying to make business more transparent even by people who doubt his overall economic reform agenda.
Indian Merchants Chamber president Dilip Paramal, who runs a luggage business, says: "This government is eschewing corruption and not just at the top level. I feel personally at least 50 per cent of our corruption can be eliminated.
"Coal blocks, spectrum allocation were all mired in controversy until two years ago. Businesses are now beginning to realise that unethical practices will make business unsustainable."
The smooth distribution of new coal permits to private miners has real relevance for Australia because they are the key to boosting domestic production and cutting back on imports.
Modi has no obvious family members trading on his government role, unlike the situation in so many Asian countries, and has a track record of relatively transparent economic decision-making from his time running Gudjarat state.
The bank loan clean-up is more complex. Last month Rajan told banks to sort out debts within a year and imposed an escalating provision for restructured loans that would gradually make them as costly as non-performing loans.
There is also a question of whether a move to close down zombie companies and force mergers of state banks would disrupt economic growth just when India has become the fastest growing large economy due to its relative isolation from global financial turmoil and the value it is getting from low commodities prices.
There are also continuing suggestions that relations between the RBI governor, an economist with a global reputation, and the government are not always easy. This was underlined by a recent government suggestion that the RBI should be using some of its own assets to fund a bad loan conversion vehicle rather than seeking government investment.
So whether the government is prepared to establish an independent debt reconstruction agency like other countries facing conflicts of interests in an indebted banking system, will be an important test of Modi's reform appetite.