Corruption: Perceptions and Deceptions

Narayan Manandhar

Two years back, in 2004, through my informal channel, I proposed to Transparency International Nepal Chapter, to have full scale 20 year presentation of CPI data, during their media briefing, to mark yearly released by TI Berlin CPI data for 2003. The data is being released every year since 1995 at global, and for Nepal from 2004 onwards. Twenty year data, definitely, is a longer span of time to arrive at some definite conclusion about corruption perception in Nepal.

The TIN characters refused to listen me saying it is a global event presentation for a year. Therefore, I gave up my writing to the local English broadsheet “Nepal’s tryst with Corruption Perception Index”.

Earlier, I wrote corruption including good governance suddenly becoming a sexy topic post Gen-Z movement. In fact, since mid 1990s, corruption used to be a sexy topic in development studies. With the release of new set of data for 2025, we now have 14 years of comparable CPI data (2012-2025). Table 1 presents these information.     

Data Source: Transparency International, Berlin

For the last 14 years, CPI data indicate that Nepal’s progress in fighting corruption is moving at a snail’s pace. In 2012, we scored 27 out of 100, this increased to 34 in 2025. This is a marginal gain, if we count CPI fall downs in 2014-15, 2020-21, we can conclude that we are, literally, at a stagnant position, that is, there has been no or insignificant improvement in CPI scores. However, our global ranking has improved from 139^th position in 2012 to 109^th position in 2025. This implies that many countries in the world have also worsened their corruption situation thereby giving an edge to us. This is no wonder. At global level, anti-corruption efforts have stagnated or is improving only at a very slow pace. Many factors could have accounted for this situation. Corruption is no more the concern of poor and developing countries, it is also pronounced in highly developed countries. Moreover, corruption (related to resource use and abuse) comes in direct clash with development issues making difficult to identify which is corruption and which is not.

Looking at the data, the drastic reduction in standard error and narrowing down of upper and lower values of the class interval indicate our data to be more reliable. We can conclude that definitely Nepal is a corrupt country but our corruption as worse as what is happening in some other countries of the world or of our own region. Our region, South Asia, presents a contrasting picture having stellar country like Bhutan or the most corrupt country like Afghanistan. This does not mean that we should keep our fingers toddling. Anti-corruption and good governance noise this Gen-Z movement is creating a bit cacophony to me. Pathetic situation of the country is that yesterday we saw the CIAA celebrating its anniversary and today, TI reporting stagnant corruption and anti-corruption situation in the country.