Colonialism By Numbers

How arbitrary opinions from random ‘experts’ regularly & unfairly impact India’s global rankings

- Sanjeev Sanyal & Aakanksha Arora

A visible trend in recent years has been the decline of India’s scores and rankings on a number of global indices. As illustrated in our previous column (‘Fact-Checking The HDI Tally’, October 18, 2022), India’s scores are suspect even in the case of indices like the Human Development Index that are supposedly based on hard data. However, the largest declines have been in opinion-based indices that deal with subjective issues such as democracy, freedom and so on. Do they pass the smell test?

The Indian response so far has been to ignore these perception indices, but the problem is that they have concrete implications. For instance, these indices are inputs into the World Bank’s World Governance Indicators (WGI) that, in turn, have approximately 20% weightage in sovereign ratings. Consider three indicators that feed into WGI.

Freed from reality

The Freedom in the World Index (FWI) has been published since 1973 by Freedom House, a New York-based thinktank.

• India’s score on Civil Liberties was flat at 42 till 2018 but dropped sharply to 33 by 2022.

• That for Political Rights dropped from 35 to 33.

• India’s total score dropped to 66 which places it in the “partially free” category – the same status it had during the Emergency.