NEW DELHI: About three-fourths of households surveyed across 13 states feel that the level of corruption has increased or remained the same during the last one year, while the percentage of people who admitted paying bribe has decreased marginally, according to a report on public perception about corruption.
About 7% of people admitted to having paid a bribe for getting an Aadhaar card, while 3% confessed bribing to get a voter ID card, the report on public perception about corruption by Centre for Media Studies said.
A comparison of the reports published in 2017 and 2018 shows that last year about 68% of respondents had felt that the level of corruption had either increased or remained same. Interestingly, this year’s report said that 27% households confessed to paying a bribe to avail public services, while in 2017 their share was 31%. The report for 2018 was released on Friday.
At least 2,000 households were surveyed from over 200 rural and urban clusters of 13 states -
Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and Bengal. The 11 public services covered include public distribution system (PDS), electricity, health, school education, water supply, banking services, police, judicial services, land/housing and transport.
The report estimates that people would have paid between Rs 2,500 to Rs 2,800 crore during a year to avail these public services.
Another interesting aspect of the comparison of data in the past two years shows that except for availing health services, less households surveyed experienced corruption in availing public service. The report showed while availing public services put Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan among the “poor performing” category; West Bengal, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were among the “better performing” states.
According to the report, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Bihar, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan topped the list so far as people’s perception of corruption is concerned. Transport and police are the two services for which more people paid bribes.