The Telugu Desam Party government in Andhra Pradesh has come out with some strange report stating that the corruption in administration has come down to a great extent in the last year.
Out of 29 states in India, Andhra Pradesh stood at 19th place this year, compared to third place in the country last year.
This was claimed by Andhra Pradesh planning board vice-chairman C Kutumba Rao, quoting a survey done by a national agency.
He said the survey had proved that the government stood for a transparent administration of N Chandrababu Naidu curbing the menace of corruption at all levels. He expressed confidence that the state’s rank in terms of corruption will further fall to 24 next year.
Admitting that the state stood in third place in corruption as per the survey taken up in 2016, he said that in the survey taken up during the Congress party rule prior to the TDP coming to power, the state had a dubious distinction.
Rao even made a strange claim that AP had got 19th rank only because of the disproportionate assets cases against YSR Congress chief Y S Jaganmohan Reddy. Otherwise, it would have dropped to lower than 20, he observed.
One does not know what agency report the official was quoting, but it was only in April this year that a prominent organisation – Centre for Media Survey, in its India Corruption Study 2017, revealed that Andhra Pradesh is the second most corrupt state in the country, after Karnataka.
The survey was done among the people, rather than the corruption cases registered by the state.
According to the survey, 74 per cent of the people of Andhra Pradesh said they had experienced corruption in accessing public services, compared to 77 per cent in Karnataka. It was followed by Tamil Nadu (68 per cent), Maharashtra (57 per cent), Jammu and Kashmir (44 per cent) and Punjab (42 per cent).
In 2005, AP was far better than many other states in corruption index. In 2005, the more corrupt states were Bihar (74 per cent), Jammu and Kashmir (69 per cent) Odisha (60 per cent), Rajashthan (59 per cent) and Tamil Nadu (59 per cent).
So, has corruption increased or decreased in the last two years, Mr Naidu?
