New Delhi, Feb 23 (DHNS): India has been ranked worse than China and Bhutan in terms of "corruption perception", but fares better than its other neighbours, including Pakistan and Bangladesh, according to a global list released by graft watchdog Transperency International.

In the Corruption Perception Index for 2017, India ranked 81 with a score of 40.

Among the neighbouring countries, Pakistan was ranked 117 with a score of 32, Bangladesh 143 (score 28), Myanmar 130 (30) and Sri Lanka 91 (38). Bhutan has the best score of 67 among India's neighbours and has been placed high on the index at 26th place. China also fared better than India with rank 77 and score 41.
The index ranks 180 jurisdictions by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and business people and uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 denotes highly corrupt and 100 very clean. In the BRICS block of major emerging economies, South Africa is ranked the best (71), followed by China and India, while Brazil is at 96th and Russia at 135th place. As per the report, there is a high variance in public sector corruption across the Asia Pacific region as more than half of the countries in the Asia Pacific score less than 50 on the index.

Best & worst
"While corruption continues to be a rampant problem across the region, improvements will only be made if there is strong political will for change and if a comprehensive strategy is adopted, not one based on isolated actions," the report said. New Zealand and Denmark have topped the list, while Syria, South Sudan and Somalia have been ranked the lowest with scores of 14, 12 and 9 respectively.

The best performing region is Western Europe with an average score of 66. The worst performing regions are Sub-Saharan Africa (average score 32) and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (average score 34), the report said.