With a decline in India’s rankings in recent years on opinion-based global indices on issues like democracy and freedom, a working paper that investigated three well-known Western think-tanks found shallow and opaque methodologies having been used with a common thread that they are derived from perceptions of a few experts. The working paper ‘Why India does poorly on global perception indices: Case study of three opinion-based indices’ written by economist Sanjeev Sanyal and Aakanksha Arora, looked at three indices – Freedom in the World Index, Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Democracy Index and Variety of Democracy indices. It said the government should request the World Bank to demand transparency and accountability from think tanks that provide inputs for the World Governance Indicators (WGI).
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