How open is India in terms of openness of government?
28 Mar, 2015In the Open Government Index 2015 report released by World Justice Project's (WJP), India has been ranked 37 out of 102 countries with an overall score of 0.57 with scores ranging from 0 to 1 (with 1 indicating greatest openness). The Index is used to measures the government openness based on the general experience of the public and its perception. It uses four dimensions to measure government openness:
· Publicised laws and government data,
· right to information,
· civic participation, and
· complaint mechanisms.
The top three positions were bagged by Sweden (1), New Zealand (2), and Norway (3rd), while the last three were Myanmar (100), Uzbekistan (101), and Zimbabwe (102). Amongst the developed countries, the United Kingdom was ranked 8th, while the United States bagged the 11th place.
Within the SAARC nations, India stood a better position ranking where the ranking was Nepal (40), Sri Lanka (52), Bangladesh (73), Pakistan (83) and Afghanistan (89). Amongst the emerging market countries, Brazil was placed at the 38th position, Russia at 67th while China was placed at 87th position.
The report is prepared by the Washington-based World Justice Project, an independent, multidisciplinary organisation working to advance the rule of law around the world and this year, the Scoring has been based on replies from a representative sample of 1,000 respondents in the three largest cities of the concerned country and a set of in-country practitioners and academics who are experts in the field of transparency.
Juan Carlos Botero, one of the authors of the report, reprtedly said that India has a strong transparency law and it now needs to implement it.