Monday, February 13, 2012

Publishing a daily graft index

    Across different parts of the world it is common to find air quality index reports published on a daily basis. This gives residents of the region an idea of how bad the air is on a given day. Perhaps, that idea should be extended to combat another public problem? The incidence of corruption in public life. 

    There is already a web site i paid a bribe , which collects this data. They have rolled out an SMS based mobile reporting service. When smartphones become more widespread, it would be nice if a mobile application is launched as well. 
 
    With data for a long enough period, trends on incidence of graft can be established for individual regions and specific agencies of government. Websites like myneta.info also generate assessments of elected representatives of constituencies.These two data points could provide a good indicator of the governance deficit of different regions of the country.
    
     All this could be correlated into a daily/weekly index and published on billboards in cities.Who knows, someday a handful of TV news channels might find this information worthy of some air time too. Yes, corruption is widespread in public life and everybody knows that. It would help to have more concrete numbers to establish the extent of it.

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