NEW DELHI, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- India has ranked at the 81st place on the scale of corruption perception index for 2017 released by Berlin-based corruption watchdog -- Transparency International.
"The index, which ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople, uses a scale of zero to 100, where zero is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean," a statement issued by Transparency International said.
"This year, the index found that more than two-thirds of countries score below 50, with an average score of 43."
India's score stands at 40.
"Analysis of the index results indicates that countries with the lowest protections for press and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) also tend to have the worst rates of corruption," Transparency International said.
Despite promises and pledges from governments from time to time in India to uproot the menace of corruption, it continues to be deep-rooted.
In 2014, India's right wing Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) came to power riding an anti-corruption wave promising to increase accountability. However, three years down the line little seems to have changed.
India's main opposition Congress party that ruled the country for two consecutive terms from 2004-2014 faced serious allegations of corruption. The Congress party was accused of being involved in corruption scams including the 2G spectrum scam and coal block allocation scam.
In the 2G spectrum scam, the politicians and bureaucrats were accused of undercharging mobile telephone companies for frequency allocation licenses, while as in the coal block scam, lack of transparency and irregularities were found in their allocations.
India's former prime minister Manomhan Singh, known as one of the cleanest politicians in the country, was questioned by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and later summoned by court in the coal scandal in 2015. Though he was not charged with any crime, he was investigated for criminal conspiracy, criminal breach of trust and corruption-related offences in the case.
The two cases rattled India and saw downfall of the Congress Party in 2014 elections.
"If we take the latest survey from Transparency International into account, then little has changed in India vis-a-vis corruption," said Burhan Majid, an Assistant Professor of law at Central University in Kashmir.
