Transparency International brings India down to 81st rank in corruption perception

PM Narendra Modi came to the power in 2014, riding on the wave driven by the incompetencies and corruption scandals of the UPA government. The NDA government was voted to power with a thumping victory giving the people of India the hope to end the widespread corruption in various departments. PM Modi promised to get back the black money stacked abroad within 100 days of him coming to the PMO.

The struggle against corruption has been a long one for India. The country faced one of the biggest financial challenges recently when the big denomination notes were demonetized on November 8, 2016.The economy had to face a financial crisis and the small and micro industries faced the biggest blow.

India has since then been recovering and is now heading towards a stable growth. The UPA 2 regime was defined by a flurry of corruption scams and until very recently NDA had its slate clean in terms of corruption but then Nirav Modi happened.

However, a Berlin-based NGO, Transparency International has put India at the 81st spot for the year 2017. The index ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption.

According to experts and business people, it uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. This year, the index found that more than two-thirds of countries score below 50, with an average score of 43. Unfortunately, compared to recent years, this poor performance is nothing new.

India's position, in the index, dropped from 79th to 81st this year. TI also specifically referred India as one of the poorest performers in the Asia-Pacific region. The report put New Zealand and Denmark at the top with scores of 89 and 88 respectively. Whereas, Syria, South Sudan and Somalia performed the worst with scores of 14, 12 and 9 respectively.

Western Europe was reported to be the best performer with an average score of 66. The worst performing regions were reported to be Sub-Saharan Africa (average score 32) and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (average score 34).

According to the report, “Since 2012, several countries significantly improved their index score, including Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and the United Kingdom, while several countries declined in their performance, including Syria, Yemen and Australia.”.

The Transparency International report gives us more than an idea as to what sort of effect corruption makes on a society. For, it is for the readers to judge from the rankings provided in the report to find what's common between the most prosperous countries and the ones in immense economic distress.

Corruption is not the only benchmark that decides a country's prosperity and economic well-being but undoubtedly, it is one of the most significant ones.