In a report published early this year, India has slipped by a point, scoring 38 out of 100, and sliding to 96th position in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) for 2024 which has listed 180 countries with Denmark being the least corrupt nation and South Sudan the most.

In 2024, India’s overall score was 38 while it was 39 in 2023 and 40 in 2022. India’s rank in 2023 was 93, which was 81st in 2016. 81 was no good, but 96th, in 8 years of this ruling dispensation shares a lot about what has been happening in the last 10 years. All starts at the very top.

The 2016-2017 story here…

The report, the world’s most widely read global corruption ranking, is compiled by Transparency International, a non-government organisation that calls itself “the global coalition against corruption”.

According to the watchdog, the CPI captures the perceived level of corruption in the public sector of a country based on input from experts and business people. The index ranks 180 countries and territories from zero to 100, with “zero” being highly corrupt and “100” being highly clean.

I have been travelling by road across India and in many countries in the world, for both personal and professional purposes, for the last 30+ years. I have driven in over 25+ countries of the world, thanks to my licenses from India and Dubai, and international driving license, that allows me to drive both left and right hand driven vehicles.

I have covered all states of our magnificent and matchless country by road except Arunachal, Mizoram, Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura and it is very easy to experience the corruption by the way the policeman on the road behave with the people who drive the vehicles registered in another state. There are a few states where this is very very rampant. The color coded map down under is a good indicator.

Also my experiences with

A. The customs, how they behave when you live abroad and come back (When I came back from Dubai, after living for 5 years, I had literally read ever rule and article of customs department and had a printout of all of those in my laptop bag to ward off the customs guys. After a few objections from them, and countering them with the documents I had, they realized that they cannot get anything out of me, they let our family go)

B. The passport verification process, and expectations of the police that comes to verify. This is a repeat issue every few years, for one member or other in the family.

C. How the police behaves in many of the civil cases taken to the police station will tell you clearly that the people who are perpetrators have already greased the palms of the law enforcers to behave with illogical arguments, with those who are on the right side of the law.

These graphs share more about financial corruption. But these corruptions start from the very top…manipulating religion and faith, media, courts etc for one’s selfish and powerful ends is at the core of this wide spread corruption…

A. Manipulating peoples psyche using religion is the highest form of corruption
B. Buying over the entire media by the ruling party through proxies (most of the media is in the hands of either Ambani or Adani). Adani’s hostile taking over NDTV is the last nail in the coffin
C. Manipulating the highest offices and courts of Judiciary – keeping citizens behind the bars without cases being heard for years murders the very soul of truthfulness
D. Promulgating laws and making sure that they cannot be challenged in courts – we all know what happened with the Electoral Bonds case…
…..
…. the list is endless…

The nation has plummeted to the abysmal levels in the last decade of the current ruling dispensation.