India goes up the honesty ladder

The latest report by Transparency International (TI), the Berlin-based anti-corruption watchdog, has a surprise. India ranks No 70 on its Corruption Perception Index (CPI) out of 163 nations. It is a distinct improvement over last year, when India stood at No 88. For the first time, India has reversed its downward slide on the CPI, and a reason for this is probably the Right to Information (RTI) Act.

Published on: Nov 7, 2006, 01:54:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The latest report by Transparency International (TI), the Berlin-based anti-corruption watchdog, has a surprise. India ranks No 70 on its Corruption Perception Index (CPI) out of 163 nations. It is a distinct improvement over last year, when India stood at No 88. For the first time, India has reversed its downward slide on the CPI, and a reason for this is probably the Right to Information (RTI) Act.

In the report released on Monday, Iraq, Myanmar and Haiti are perceived as most corrupt while Finland, Iceland and New Zealand are seen as the cleanest.

TI calculates the CPI score on the basis of perceptions of the degree of corruption in each country by international organisations, business people and analysts. The score ranges between zero, which means highly corrupt, and 10, which means very clean. The agency said countries with indices below three were considered highly corrupt. India narrowly escaped falling in this category with a score of 3.3 points.

Vice-Admiral (retd) R.H. Tahiliani, president of TI-India, said the improvement was welcome but there was a long road ahead. "Indians give Rs 21,000 crore every year as bribes," he said. He credited the RTI Act with bringing in more transparency in the government. "That was objective of the Act," said O.P. Kejriwal, information commissioner in the Central Information Commission. India has the lowest perceived level of corruption among South Asian nations.

Bangladesh, ranked 156, is the most corrupt, followed by Pakistan at 142 and Sri Lanka at 84.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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