India's ranking in global Corruption Index is distressing: VP

India's poor ranking in global Corruption Perception Index is "distressing", Vice President Hamid Ansari today said and suggested fourfold approach to treat the "deadly social ailment".

"Our ranking in the global Corruption Perception Index is, to say the least, distressing. The disease is not of recent origin but, in an earlier period, carried a social stigma less evident today," Ansari said, delivering Annual Bhimsen Sachar Memorial Lecture on 'Virtue in Public Life' here today.

Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index (CPI) has placed India at 94th rank out of 176 nations this year.

Ansari said the fourfold approach to treat corruption and promote probity would lie in the combination of ethical training in norms incorporated in legally enforceable Code of Ethics, comprehensive protection of human rights, a legal framework and regulatory practices that enforce clash of interest rules and laws and procedures that forbid nepotism in all its manifestations.

These steps would assist the attainment of "excellence" in terms of the duties prescribed in the Constitution, the Vice President said.

He expressed his deep concern that the perception of wide-spread corruption has widened and deepened in the public mind.

"Furthermore, there is a nagging apprehension that the administrative and judicial mechanism in place is inadequate as a deterrent," Ansari said.

He quoted the Ethics in Governance' report of the Second Administrative Reform Commission released in 2007, which concluded that "anti corruption interventions so far made are seen to be ineffectual and there is widespread public cynicism about them."

This cynicism, it added, "is spreading so fast that it bodes ill for our democratic system itself," he said.

He suggested that more effective corrective action is needed to restore public confidence.