India has been ranked 84th among the world's most corrupt nations

NEW DELHI:

India is still perceived to be one of the most corrupt countries by the transparency international in its annual corruption perceptions.

India has been ranked 84th in the list of 180 countries in terms of public-sector corruption, which is perceived to be highly corrupt.

While releasing the list of naming and shaming the world's most corrupt countries, the international watchdog has for the first time recommended that tax havens like Switzerland and Liechtenstein should do away with the secrecy in banking laws.

"Corrupt money must not find safe haven. It is time to put an end to secrecy in banking laws," said the Berlin-based group's head Huguette Labelle.

The bottom five nations were Somalia, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sudan and Iraq, while the cleanest countries with ranking close to perfect 10 were New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore.

This year developing countries like Serbia, Burkina Faso, Peru and Ghana fared better than India by claiming 83, 79, 75 and 69 spots respectively.

China scored 3.6 on the scale, thereby indicating slightly better position than India in terms of perception of corrupt countries.

In neighbouring countries, Nepal was at 143rd position much below India, Pakistan scored 2.4 claiming 139th position along with Bangladesh while Sri Lanka scored 3.1 and stood at 97th position.

Nearly half of the countries have scored three or less on the scale of zero (perceived to be most corrupt) to 10 (perceived to be least corrupt) showing that corruption is rampant across the world. The index prepared by the voluntary group used 13 different expert and business surveys.

"Transparency international has found that strong correlation between corruption and poverty continued to exist, jeopardising the global fight against poverty and threatening to derail the UN Millennium Development Goals," Admiral (retd. R H Tahiliani, Chairman of Transparency International India said in a statement.