Indians continue to live in a corruption ridden society with incidents of bribery, abuse of power and unethical dealings on the rise. In 2012, the country stood at 94 out of 176 countries surveyed by the Transparency International's (TI) annual corruption report.

“India ranks 94 on corruption perception index (CPI) this year with a score of 36 on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean),” says the index annual release on India in New Delhi. However, this year the index has been prepared with updated methodology while calculating the countries on corruption index. Higher rank means the country is cleaner in terms of corrupt practices.

“Low score could be attributed to several scams and incidents of corruption in the public sector, involving government officials, politicians and private companies,” added a Berlin-based group on India. India’s rank has been based on data collected from 10 independent sources specialising in governance and business climate in measuring perceptions of corruption in public sector.

However, last year India was ranked at 95 out of 183 countries. But the TI said that if the updated methodology is used to calculate last year’s ranking, India would be placed at 96. “It is a marginal improvement from last year but in 2012 the number of countries is less than last year’s,” says the index. It clarified that previous study on corruption perception index is not comparable with 2012 because of slight modification in methodology.

“The common man is not able to avail public goods in the country. There is need of systematic change,” said SK Agarwal, one of the board members of TI.

Overall, Denmark, Finland and New Zealand were in a first-place tie with scores of 90 on a new scale where 100 stands for most clean and 0 for most corrupt. Somalia, North Korea and Afghanistan stood at the last.