Bangladesh gains on graft index

Bangladesh jumped three notches in the 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), the Transparency International, Bangladesh (TIB) said Thursday, report agencies.
But the country was ranked as the second most corrupt in South Asia.
Afghanistan is the only country in South Asia whose position is worse than that of Bangladesh.
TIB, a Berlin-based graft watchdog, listed some reasons why Bangladesh was 146th in the corruption index among 180 countries.
The CPI uses a scale of 0 to 100, which means 100 is very clean and 0 is most corrupt. Bangladesh, however, did not make any improvement in its score from last year, scoring 26 in the latest report.
TIB Executive Director Iftekharuzzaman unveiled the report while sharing findings of the global survey at a press conference at its Dhanmondi office on Thursday.
Denmark and New Zealand were ranked as the least corrupt countries with scores of 87. Bangladesh scored 26.
Bangladesh is tied with Iran, Nigeria and Guatemala, among others, with the CPI score of 26.
Among South Asian countries, Bhutan had a score 68, while India scored 41, Sri Lanka 38, Nepal 34, Pakistan 32, Maldives 29 and Afghanistan 16.
Somalia was ranked as the most corrupt country this year with a score of 9.
Iftekharuzzaman said there has hardly been any improvement in Bangladesh's corruption scenario, noting that the government took many initiatives in the last 10 years but could not implement those properly.
"The country is in the same position in the corruption in terms of score as it was last year," he said. "We're not satisfied with Bangladesh's performance in the index."
CPI, which ranks 180 countries by their perceived levels of public sector corruption based on findings by globally-reputable survey sources, uses a scale of zero to 100, where zero is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean.