Corruption Index : tool to know about corruption level
| May 14, 2012 | Posted by Britul under Perspective |
corruption index is known as the perceived level of corruption in any country. Corruption index or corruption perception index is published by Transparency International; a nonprofit civil society organization based at Berlin. It was established in 1993 and has more than 90 chapters in different nations around the world. Corruption perception index is published every year.
Corruption index tells us about the relative position of any country in the scale of being corrupt!! It doesn’t measure the actual VOLUME of corruption. Neither can it tell us anything about the monetary involvement of all or any of the corrupt acts. What it does is, it rank different countries against the perceived level of corruption and in a relative manner.
We can compare the position of India in the index listing for few years and thereby get an idea whether corruption in our country is increasing or decreasing or is steady at a certain level. We can even evaluate how the scenario of perceived corruption of the whole world is changing. Whether it is increasing or decreasing. We can compare different continents, different countries etc. for their performance in corruption!! Or their performance in curbing corruption.
We can obtain a profile or trend of increase and decrease of perceived corruption level of India. Then we can correlate them with major economic and political incidents during the year. Thereby we may be able to understand what kind of economic or political incidents are more responsible for increase in corruption level. This may help us in taking adequate measures in curbing corruption.
The data, based on which corruption index is evaluated is collected by Transparency International by means of 17(seventeen) different data sources. A country is added to the corruption index listing once three or more data source is available for that country.
Before analyzing the corruption index data few points need to be known:
1) Corruption index is measured in a scale of 1 to 10. A country with index 10 is the cleanest and 0 is the most corrupt.
2) Based on the corruption index, a global position is assigned to each country. It is the rank of that country among all the countries evaluated. Global position is from cleanest to corrupt. i.e. no. 1 is the cleanest(or least corrupt).
Now, let us have a look at the corruption index and global position of India from 1998 to 2011(2012 is not yet released):
|
|
Year |
2011 |
2010 |
2009 |
2008 |
2007 |
2006 |
2005 |
2004 |
2003 |
2002 |
2001 |
2000 |
1999 |
1998 |
|
|
Corr. Index |
3.1 |
3.3 |
3.4 |
3.4 |
3.5 |
3.3 |
2.9 |
2.8 |
2.8 |
2.7 |
2.7 |
2.8 |
2.9 |
2.9 |
|
India |
Global Position |
95 |
87 |
84 |
85 |
72 |
70 |
88 |
90 |
83 |
71 |
71 |
69 |
72 |
66 |
The number of countries evaluated in 2011 was 183. From 1998 to 2011 it hasn’t changed much.
So, from 1998 to 2005 the index had remained almost constant (with insignificant changes). From 2006 it slightly increased indicating decrease in corruption. From 2006 to 2011 it remained almost constant. The trend is almost similar to the trend during 1998 to 2995.
Now, let us consider the change in national leadership during the timeline:
|
I. K. Gujral |
-> |
21st Apr'1997 |
19th Mar'98 |
|||||
|
Atal Bihari vajpayee |
-> |
19th Mar'98 |
22nd May'04 |
|||||
|
Manmohan Singh |
-> |
22nd May'04 |
May'09 |
|||||
|
-> |
May'09 |
till date |
||||||
It seems during NDA government corruption level remained almost constant and had decreased just after UPA had taken over the governance. Or it may happen that efforts put in during NDA governance had shown result during UPA governance. It depends on the interpretation. Also, I don’t want to make any politically sensitive statement here in my blog. Also, change in government is not the only reason for change in level of corruption.
But one thing is sure that from 1998 till 2011 although our corruption index has increased but Global position have decreased from 66 to 95. Increase in corruption index indicates we are becoming less corrupt. But at the same time decrease in Global position indicates that the other nations are doing better than us in curbing corruption.
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