Reports, Thursday, claimed that India now ranks at 95th spot– way lower than China - Asia’s fastest growing economy, which ranked 75th in world rankings.
India was earlier ranked eighty-fifth in the list.
On TI’s latest corruption perception index, India scored 3.1 on a scale from zero to 10, which is not a good sign at all. Its competitor China scored 3.6 points on the scale. Last year, India scored 3.3.
The global corruption watchdog also took into account the mass awareness created by social activist Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption campaign and concluded that the country’s urban middle class has become more outspoken against the social evil.
However, it said that the menace of corruption has worsened over the past year.
“It’s not a good score at all for India,” Rukshana Nanayakkara, acting director of Transparency International’s Asia Pacific division, was quoted as saying in an interview.
The Berlin-based group brings together recent data by conducting business surveys and inputs from economists and measures the level of corruption in as many as 183 nations.
The study brings together recent data from a variety of sources, including business surveys and country experts, to assess the overall extent of graft in 183 nations.
Of the BRIC economies, India only fared better than Russia, which ranked way down at No. 143 with a score of 2.4. In the South Asian region, India scored badly as compared to both Sri Lanka (No. 86) and the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan (No. 38).
A series of corruption scandals including the Commonwealth Games and the 2G telecom scam unearthed in the country combined with petty corruption contributed to India’s low score on the rankings.
However, there is a positive aspect of this assessment. According to TI’s study, the reason why corruption in India is perceived to be getting worse is that more and more people are willing to speak out against it.
The urban middle classes, who are exposed to episodes of bribery more than most, have become “a lot more outspoken and much more intolerant of petty corruption,” it says.
The TI report also mentioned how Anna has taken the country’s fight against graft to a different level and pressed the government to push through powerful anti-graft legislation. A draft bill to set up a Lokpal, an anticorruption ombudsman, is being reviewed in the current session of Parliament.
In TI’s corruption index, India is placed well above Pakistan (No. 134) and Nepal (154). In these two South Asian countries, the evil of corruption is perceived to be most widespread.
Countries like Afghanistan, Myanmar, North Korea and Somalia have placed at the bottom of the list. New Zealand topped the list of countries with almost no corruption in public life followed by a string of Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Finland and Sweden.
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