New Delhi, Feb 22: India has been ranked worse than China and Bhutan in terms of 'corruption perception', but fares better than its other neighbours including Pakistan and Bangladesh, as per a global list released by graft watchdog Transparency International.

In the Corruption Perception Index for 2017, India was ranked at the 81st place with a score of 40.

Among the neighbouring countries, Pakistan was ranked at the 117th place with a score of 32, Bangladesh at 143th (score of 28), Myanmar at 130th (score 30) and Sri Lanka 91st (score 38). Bhutan has the best score of 67 among India's neighbours and has been placed high on the index at the 26th place. China also fared better than India with a rank of 77 and score of 41.

The index ranks 180 jurisdictions by their perceived levels of public sector corruption according to experts and business people and uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 denotes highly corrupt and 100 very clean. In the BRICS block of major emerging economies, South Africa is ranked the best (71st), followed by China and India, while Brazil is at 96th and Russia at 135th. As per the report, there is a high variance in public sector corruption across the Asia Pacific region as more than half of the countries in the Asia Pacific score less than 50 on the index.

"While corruption continues to be a rampant problem across the region, improvements will only be made if there is strong political will for change and if a comprehensive strategy is adopted, not one based on isolated actions," the report said. New Zealand and Denmark have topped the list, while Syria, South Sudan and Somalia have been ranked the lowest with scores of 14, 12 and 9 respectively.

The best performing region is Western Europe with an average score of 66. The worst performing regions are Sub-Saharan Africa (average score 32) and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (average score 34), the report said. PTI DRR BJ BJ -