Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

Every fourth Indian has paid a bribe in the past year, an influential annual survey by a leading anti-corruption watchdog said in its report released in Berlin on Thursday. India emerged as the world's 18th most corrupt country on the basis of the percentage of its people paying bribes in Transparency Internationale's Global Corruption Barometer 2007. African, East European and Latin American countries are ahead of India in the corruption index. Cameroon is the most corrupt, with a whopping 79 per cent of its population having paid a bribe in the course of the past year. Pakistan is the world's sixth most corrupt: 44 per cent of its people having paid a bribe in the past 12 months. Worldwide, an average 25 per cent of people have been asked to pay a bribe to the police, and political parties and parliaments are the most tainted by corruption. The poor are targeted for bribes in both developed and developing countries. The study "has made it clear that too