India's bribery rate is 69%, highest in Asia Pacific; Pakistan's 40%, China's 26%, Sri Lanka's 23%, Japan's 0.2%: Report

By Jag Jivan*
A recent report by a Berlin-based non-profit, Transparency International, has qualified India as the most corrupt country in the Asia-Pacific region. Based on interviews with 21,861 people in 16 countries of the region, the report says that while the “bribery rate” in India was highest at 69%, it was the lowest in Japan, 0.2%.
Conducted in India by Cvoter International for Transparency International through mainly face-to-face interviews with 2,802 people, the survey finds 73% of the poorest people paid bribe, as against the regional average of just 38%. Interestingly, 55% of the richest people in India also said they paid bribe.
The report carries the photograph of activists of NGO Prayas rescuing a trafficked child in a train reaching Mumbai from the India-Nepal border town of Raxaul, insisting, “Corruption is increasingly cited as a key cause and traffickers rarely face justice.
It adds, “Corruption both facilitates trafficking and feeds the flow of people by destabilizing democracies, weakening a country’s rule of law and stalling development.”
Across all the countries, people were asked about corruption in six key public services during the previous 12 months – public schools, public clinics or hospitals, official documents, utility services, the police and the courts.
The report says, as compared to India, the bribery rate was Vietnam is 65%, followed by Thailand 41%, Pakistan, Myanmar and Cambodia (40% each), Indonesia 32%, China 26%, Malaysia 23%, Mongolia 20%, Sri Lanka 15%, Taiwan 6%, Australia 4%, South Korea 3%, and Japan 0.2%.

Ironically, despite such high bribery rate, the survey results show that 53% of those interviewed found that the government in India was “doing well” in fighting corruption, while 35% said, it was doing badly. At the same time, 41% of those interviewed said that the level of corruption has “increased” in India.
The survey further found that 63% agreed when asked, “Can ordinary people make a difference in the fight against corruption?” This is against 53% in Pakistan, 49% in Japan, 53% in Vietnam, 66% in South Korea, 72% in Thailand, 73% in Sri Lanka, 78% in Indonesia and 80% in Australia.
Conducted between July 2015 and January 2017, the survey is based on what the report says, “the Global Corruption Barometer 2017”, with questions asked “via face to face or telephone survey in the Asia Pacific region, with a random selection of adults in all 16 surveyed countries, territories and regions.”
“Face to face household interviews were conducted either with Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) or Paper-and-Pencil Interviewing (PAPI)”, the report adds.
“To calculate the total number of bribe payers in the Asia Pacific region, we used the national bribery rates (the percentage of all adults who had paid a bribe) to calculate the number of bribe payers in each country/territory/ region”, says the report, adding, “We then added the projected number of bribe payers across all 16 countries/territories.”
It further says, “The scores are based on the percentage of respondents in each country/ territory who say that corruption has either increased a little or increased a lot over the 12 months prior to when the survey was conducted.”

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*Freelance writer

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