What is the issue?
Worldwide Governance Indicators might be useful to measure the performance of Union governance.
What are these indicators about?
- Worldwide Governance Indicators, which is available on the World Bank’s database.
- Although the Bank and other associated institutions have the standard disclaimer that they are not accountable for what the Indicators say.
- There are six indicators, and 214 economies are scored on each of them every year, using combinations of surveys, opinion polls, individual interviews, consultations with experts and such.
- India’s percentile rank is measured using such indicators (scoring from 0 to 100, a higher score being better)
What does the indicators figures about India?
- Control of corruption – India improved sharply from 37.0 in 2013 to 47.1 in 2016.
- Government effectiveness - India’s rank improved sharply from 45.2 in 2014 to 57.2 in 2016.
- Regulatory quality - India’s rank moved up smartly from 35.1 in 2012 to 41.3 in 2016.
- But these scores was noticeably better in 2006 (45.1).
- On political stability and Absence of violence - India’s overall rank is surprisingly poor because of divergence of scores on two different issues.
- India seriously being poor in this indicator, there is growing right wing extremism in the nation.
- Present government pulled it up to 17.1 in 2015, but then saw the rank dip to 14.3 in 2016 lower than in 2005 (17.5).
- On the internal security front, the Union government clearly suffered a setback in 2016.
- Rule of law - The country’s rank in 2016 (52.4) was marginally lower than in 2013 (53.1), and significantly lower than in 2006 (58.4).
- Voice and accountability – In this India has dipped from a rank of 61.5 in 2013 to 58.6 in 2016.
- It is no surprise that the Union government does not do very well.
Source: Business standard
