India to review 28 international indices on their methodology

Stats ministry to review 28 global indices for drawbacks, methodology concerns

Can India be in the same group of countries as Bangladesh and Pakistan, when it comes to democratic status or rank worse than Bangladesh and Nepal when it comes to hunger? These are some of the concerns that the government is trying to address with its study of 28 international indices.

The ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MoSPI) has been tasked with studying 28 such indices to determine the issues with methodology and sample selection of these indicators.

The ministry will get back to the line ministries, which will then take up the matter with concerned agencies conducting these cross-country rankings.

“Rankings done by international organisations are being analysed to check drawbacks and communicate the results to concerned ministries,” a source told Moneycontrol.

Democracy index results, where India has found bias and opacity issues will, for instance, be sent to ministry of law and justice.

India was ranked 41 in the latest democracy index behind countries like Mauritius and Botswana and was termed as a flawed democracy.

In the V-DEM index report places India in the same group as Bangladesh of electoral autocracies.

“The elections in June 2024 were a setback for the BJP forcing it to govern in a coalition. 2024 is the first year since 2008 with no deteriorations on democracy levels for India but it remains an electoral autocracy since 2017,” the V-DEM report stated.

The study by MoSPI follows from a paper written by Prime Ministers’ Economic Advisory Council member Sanjeev Sanyal on why India fares poorly on global perception indices, which had pointed to flaws in methodology of democracy and freedom index reports.

For instance, Sanyal had noted that the indices were derived from perceptions of few experts and in most cases the organisations do not describe how these experts were chosen.

Similarly, the results are based on vague questions like “How pervasive is corruption?” and “To what extent is the direct popular vote utilised?”. Sanyal noted that India ranked second on the latter along with the US, while Afghanistan and Cuba were ranked higher.

India ranks 105 out of 127 countries in global hunger index and 49 in the network readiness index.

Climate change performance index also features among the indices analysed by MoSPI. India dropped two places to rank 10 in the CCPI in 2025.