India 94th in list of corrupt nations

New Delhi, Dec 3 (IANS) India is ranked 94th in a list of most corrupt countries in the world, doing better than its neighbours Pakistan - ranked at 127 - and Bangladesh - at 136, a new report by Transparency International said Tuesday.

India has also done better than Thailand (102), Mexico (106), Egypt (114), Nepal (116), Vietnam (116) and Iran (144).

More than two-thirds of the 177 countries ranked in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index 2013, scored below 50, on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (clean).

Denmark and New Zealand were tied for the first place with a score of 91, followed by Finland and Sweden (89) and Singapore (86).

Afghanistan, North Korea and Somalia were at the bottom with a score of 8, said the report released in Berlin.

According to the list, India scored 36 points on a scale of 0-100.

No country managed to get the perfect 100 score. Top-ranked Denmark and New Zealand scored 91 points each to share the first place on the list.

India's neighbours Pakistan and Bangladesh scored 27 and 28, respectively.

While India maintained status quo with its rank at 94 and the same score as last year, Pakistan and Bangladesh improved their rankings, said Transparency International director Ramanath Jha.

Pakistan moved up from a rank of 139 in 2012 to 127 this year and Bangladesh bettered its rank from 144 to 136.

A statement said that such a low rank and score for India could be attributed to recently exposed scams involving government officials, politicians and private companies.

"Corruption can be tackled only if various stakeholders join hands in their effort to clean the country," said Justice (retd) Kamleshwar Nath, chair of Transparency International India (TII).

According to Transparency International, to calculate India's position, 10 out of 13 independent data sources specialising in governance and business climate analysis were used.

The sources, including World Bank and World Economic Forum, helped in measuring perceptions of corruption in public sector, and enabled cross-country comparability and comparison over time.

It is this sort of reports which makes Indians living abroad hand their heads in shame.

It is for this that so many NRIs contributed to the donation of AAP and even came over to work for them.

It is for this reason only that they have won so many seats.

AAP efforts have already started bearing fruits.

See, how the BJP has refused to cobble up a majority by breaking up the Congress.

If it had been an earlier scenario, the Congress would have been decimated with defections by now and many of their winners becoming ministers in Delhi and multi crorepatis. They already are simple crorepatis.

All these politicians must be cursing Arvind Kejriwal and his AAP for changing the rules. If he remains long. politics will become a non-paying profession and politicians will have to look for jobs for their children elsewhere.