Why the West’s report card on India deserves far more scrutiny

Every autumn, a familiar ritual plays out in newsrooms around the world. A new index drops — on hunger, press freedom, democracy, corruption — and India finds itself somewhere near the bottom, sandwiched between countries it has little in common with economically, demographically or institutionally. Headlines follow. Debates erupt. And the numbers, stripped of their methodological fine print, harden into received wisdom.

But what if the scale itself is bent?

A growing body of evidence — from peer-reviewed research to official government rebuttals to high-profile institutional scandals — suggests that many of the Western-produced indices used to assess India suffer from flawed methodologies, outdated data, perception-based scoring and, in some cases, outright institutional corruption. There have been allegations that most of these rather uncomfortable rankings are produced by foreign meddling and biased institutions. Of course, none of this means that India does not have real and serious problems. But the lazy journalistic habit of treating these indices as objective, authoritative scorecards, without interrogating how they are built, does a disservice to readers and to the truth itself.

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Perhaps no index better illustrates the problem than the Global Hunger Index (GHI), published annually by two NGOs: Concern Worldwide of Ireland and Welthungerhilfe of Germany. In 2024, the GHI placed India 105th out of 127 countries with a score of 27.3 — categorised as “serious” hunger — alongside Afghanistan and Pakistan, and below African nations including Namibia, which was recently reported to have considered culling elephants to feed its own citizens.

The Indian government rejected this ranking, and the rejection came with a compelling technical case. Three of the GHI’s four indicators — child stunting, child wasting and child mortality — relate exclusively to children under five and are used as proxies for the hunger of a 1.4 billion-person population. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) published a peer-reviewed paper arguing that these indicators “do not measure hunger per se”, and that outcomes like stunting are determined by a complex matrix of factors including genetics, sanitation, drinking water quality and environmental exposure — not caloric intake alone.

The numbers dispute is stark. The GHI used a child wasting rate of 18.7 per cent for India. The government’s own Poshan Tracker, which monitors nutrition interventions across millions of beneficiaries, reported a wasting rate of 7.2 per cent. Yet, the GHI disregarded this data in favour of older survey-based estimates. The ICMR also noted that international stunting norms may not be biologically applicable to Indian population groups, where genetic predispositions produce lower average heights independent of nutritional status. A further structural problem: the GHI’s undernourishment component relies on a Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) model based on a three-year moving average of food availability data, supplemented by a survey of just 3,000 people — a sample size that barely registers in a country of India’s scale and diversity.

If any single episode should permanently inoculate journalists against uncritical index worship, it is the collapse of the World Bank’s Doing Business report. For nearly two decades, this flagship publication ranked 190 economies on the ease of starting and operating a business. Countries, including India, spent enormous policy energy chasing improvements in their scores. In September 2021, the World Bank discontinued the report entirely after an independent investigation by law firm WilmerHale — scrutinising over 80,000 documents and interviewing current and former officials — found that senior bank management had pressured staff to alter data to improve China’s rankings, as the bank sought a $13 billion capital increase from major shareholders. India’s rankings were also found to have been subject to irregular methodological adjustments.

The scandal implicated some of the World Bank’s top leadership. Kristalina Georgieva, then the bank’s CEO and now Managing Director of the IMF, came under scrutiny. The World Bank itself acknowledged that “data underlying the Doing Business scores was not processed transparently” and that the data-gathering process allowed “significant collaboration and input from governments and government officials who wanted their rankings to improve”.

This is not a fringe critique. This is an institutional admission, made under oath by one of the world’s most powerful multilateral organisations, that its flagship ranking system was corrupted by political pressure and conflicts of interest. Scores of international media outlets had, for years, reported India’s Doing Business rank as a straightforward measure of economic reform progress. The editorial reckonings that followed were conspicuously muted.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index has long been a go-to citation for characterising India as a “flawed democracy”, a classification it has held since 2020. The downgrade provoked significant comment, but how exactly is the index constructed? Of the roughly 60 questions on which countries are assessed across five categories — electoral process, functioning of government, political participation, political culture and civil liberties — 45 are answered by a panel of “experts” chosen by the EIU itself. The remaining 15 draw on public opinion polls. The index does not clearly disclose who its experts are, what their credentials are, how they are selected, or how disagreements between them are reconciled.

India, a country where over 960 million people were registered to vote in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections — the largest democratic exercise in human history — sits in the “flawed democracy” tier, while several Gulf monarchies and one-party-dominant states receive more flattering assessments on some metrics. The EIU’s parent company is the Economist Group, a publication with its own well-documented editorial positions on India.

India’s rank in the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index has improved marginally — from 161st in 2023 to 159th in 2024 to 151st in 2025 — though it remains in the “very serious” category. The RSF methodology, on which the index is evaluated, is substantially perception-based. The document was waved around by a Norwegian journalist with a skewed agenda during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Norway. Scores are derived partly from surveys of journalists and media experts, not from systematic, audited counts of incidents. The geographic and cultural specificity of respondents, their own political orientations, and the difficulty of comparing a country of 1.4 billion people with dozens of independent media ecosystems to a Nordic nation of five million — none of this is adequately accounted for. A country like India, with tens of thousands of newspapers, hundreds of television channels, and a hyperactive social media environment, is assessed on metrics designed for far simpler media landscapes.

Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) placed India 96th out of 180 countries in 2024, with a score of 38 out of 100, slipping slightly from prior years. The 2025 edition showed a marginal improvement to 91st with a score of 39. But the very name of the index is its central limitation: it measures perceptions of corruption, not corruption itself. The CPI aggregates assessments from business executives, country analysts and risk consultants — populations that skew towards urban, formal-sector, Western-educated professionals with limited exposure to the full texture of governance in a country that stretches from the Rann of Kutch to Arunachal Pradesh. It gives no weight to India’s significant recent anti-corruption infrastructure: the digital Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) system, which has reportedly eliminated tens of millions of ghost beneficiaries from welfare rolls; the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which has dramatically reduced cash transactions; or the rollout of real-time procurement transparency platforms. Reforms that reduce corruption at scale, but do not immediately change elite perceptions, are effectively invisible to the index.

Underlying many of these methodological failures is a more fundamental problem: most of these indices were designed by Western institutions for a world in which “countries” are roughly comparable units. A Scandinavian democracy of five million people with a century of institutional development and a small homogeneous population is not a comparable unit to a continental democracy of 1.4 billion people, 22 constitutionally recognised languages, 28 states with widely varying governance quality, and a history of colonisation that ended less than 80 years ago. When a single index score must summarise the full spectrum of Indian governance — from the digital infrastructure of Karnataka’s start-up ecosystem to the administrative realities of a remote block in Jharkhand — something is necessarily lost. Or rather, compressed into a number that then travels around the world stripped of all context.

The launch of Global Rankings Watch in June 2025, a Bangalore-based think tank dedicated to tracking and challenging India’s position in over 80 global indices, reflects growing recognition of this problem. Its founding premise — that “in a world where data drives perception, and perception drives investment, diplomacy, and creditworthiness, global indices are not just academic exercises” — is a reasonable one.

None of this is an argument for ignoring India’s remaining, real governance deficits. But rigorous, honest reporting requires interrogating the tools used to measure them. When an index ranks Namibia — a country that recently debated killing its elephants to address food shortages — 19 places above India on hunger, that is not a finding to be cited without comment. When the world’s most famous business climate ranking is discontinued for data manipulation, that is not a footnote. When a democracy index is built substantially on anonymous expert perception surveys, readers deserve to know that.

India’s complexity does not make it unrankable. It makes it badly ranked by instruments not built for it. The next time a global index places India near the bottom of a list, the journalist’s first question should not be: “What does this say about India?” It should be: “What does this say about the index?”

(Dr Roshni Sengupta is an author, political commentator, Professor of Geopolitics and International Relations at IILM University Gurugram, and Distinguished Fellow, Visvaniti Foundation, New Delhi. The data cited in this piece draws on publicly available index methodologies, government responses, peer-reviewed research published in academic journals, and official investigations by the World Bank and its independent auditors. The views expressed in this piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)