A report by the corruption watchdog Transparency International has indicated India as the worst country in Asia continent in terms of corruption.
The Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) – Asia, reported that India has 32% of people use personal connections to access public services while 50% use paid bribes for works to be done in government offices. The report said
With the highest bribery rate (39 per cent) in the region, India also has the highest rate of people using personal connections to access public services (46 per cent),
Both national and state governments need to streamline administrative processes for public services, implement preventative measures to combat bribery and nepotism, and invest in user-friendly online platforms to deliver essential public services quickly and effectively,
Although reporting cases of corruption is critical to curbing the spread, a majority of citizens in India (63 per cent) think that if they report corruption, they will suffer retaliation,
The main reason that has been mentioned for the bribery by many citizens is that the government policies and regulatory frameworks are one reason and the second reason is the time factor- very slow because of a complicated bureaucratic process.
The GCB surveyed nearly 20,000 citizens in total, based on fieldwork conducted in 17 countries. This equates to approximately 836 million citizens.
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The survey also covered sextortion apart from corruption. Surprisingly India stands high in sextortion rate. Behind India – Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia queue the list in subsequent numbers for. In corruption, Cambodia has the second-highest bribery rate at 37%, followed by Indonesia (30%) after India.
Sextortion has become a part of corruption as it has replaced money in many cases. And in many cases, the sextortion rate is reported because of threatening to reveal evidence of their sexual activity through means like morphed images.
Maldives and Japan maintain the lowest overall bribery rate (2%), followed by South Korea (10%) and Nepal (12%).
The survey was conducted between June 17, 2020, and July 17, 2020, with 2,000 samples in India for calculations.