NEW DELHI: India has been ranked 81st in Transparency International’s Global

. While it maintained its score at 40 on a 100-point scale where anything below 30 is considered seriously corrupt, its ranking changed from 79th last year partly because Vanuatu, one of the countries added to the rankings this year, was rated higher and partly because others improved.

A Transparency International release also characterised India as “among the worst regional offenders” in the Asia Pacific region on grounds of journalists, activists, opposition leaders and even staff of law enforcement or watchdog agencies being threatened or even murdered. In this, it was clubbed with the Philippines and Maldives. “These countries score high for

corruption

and have fewer press freedoms and higher numbers of journalist deaths,” the report added.

Interestingly, Pakistan with a score of 32 and China with 41 are perceived to be more corrupt than India. Russia is more corrupt than all three counties with a score of 29.

New Zealand and Denmark were ranked as the cleanest countries in the 2017 list as in 2016, with scores of 89 and 88, respectively. Syria, South Sudan and Somalia were ranked as the most

with scores of 14, 12 and 9, respectively. Of the three countries that were tied with India in 2016, Belarus has moved up to 68th with a score of 44 and China to 77th with a score of 41. Brazil, in contrast, has slipped to 96th with a score of 37.

Of the other Brics nations, Russia was at the 135th place with a score of 29 while South Africa was 71st, having dropped seven places from 2016. Countries with the poorest protection for press and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) also tended to have the lowest ranks on the index.

The analysis, which incorporates data from Committee to Protect Journalists, showed that in the last six years, 9 out of 10 journalists killings of journalists happened in countries that score 45 or less on the index.