World
India Pushes For New International Governance Index Under Its IIAS Presidency: Report
UN Members' flags—Representative Image/Wikimedia Commons
India has proposed the creation of a new international governance index under its presidency of the Brussels-based International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS), The Indian Express reported.
The initiative comes against the backdrop of India’s declining performance on several global indices and its consistent criticism of their methodology.
India assumed the presidency of IIAS for the first time in June 2025, after winning a contested election against Austria.
As the country marked 100 days of its three-year tenure, IIAS announced its key achievements on Friday (3 October), highlighting progress on developing an international governance index.
Speaking to The Indian Express, V Srinivas, Secretary of the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG) and President of IIAS, confirmed that discussions were held on 25 September with the institute’s Research Advisory Committee.
The discussions reportedly focused on "the agenda for strengthening the scientific strategy by developing an international governance index and trend analysis as a core activity for IIAS".
"The study methodology, the collaborations by leveraging existing work of World Bank, OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) and potential partnerships with UN DESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs), will be pursued by the Research Advisory Committee," Srinivas was quoted as saying by IE.
He added that a working group would be set up to develop the index, and the proposal would be placed on the agenda of the IIAS Annual Conference in 2026.
India’s push comes as its rankings in global democracy and governance reports have declined. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute has classified India as an “electoral autocracy” since 2017. I
Its 2025 report placed India at 100 out of 179 countries on the Liberal Democracy Index, with Denmark ranked first.
Other indices, such as the Freedom in the World Index and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Democracy Index, have similarly downgraded India.
In 2022, the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) criticised these reports as perception-based and lacking transparency.
It argued that such rankings placed India at levels comparable to the 1970s Emergency period.
Independent Indian think tanks should be encouraged to do “similar perception-based indices for the world in order to break the monopoly of a handful of western institutions,” the EAC-PM said in a November 2022 statement.
Senior government officials have repeatedly flagged the impact of governance indices on international perceptions and credit ratings.
“This World Governance Index itself is a composite of several sub-indices, which are purely based on the subjective opinions of some so-called expert institutions which do not have presence on the ground nor do they understand whether the context in which they are making these judgements is appropriate or apt for the member countries," he had said.
"But these indices become an important part of the assessment methodology of the credit rating agencies and they do not reveal the extent to which these indices are implanted in their assessment process, the weights they carry, because there seems to be qualitative overlays on top of qualitative assessments,” the CEA had added.
The WGI, covering over 200 economies, includes six parameters:
Voice and accountability
Political stability and absence of violence/terrorism
Government effectiveness
Regulatory quality
Rule of law
Control of corruption
India’s 2023 WGI percentile ranks in these were mixed — 51.47 for voice and accountability, 21.33 for political stability, 67.92 for government effectiveness, 47.17 for regulatory quality, 56.13 for rule of law, and 41.51 for control of corruption.
Founded in 1930, IIAS has 31 member countries, including India, Japan, China, Germany and Saudi Arabia. Though not formally part of the UN, it collaborates on global governance research and training.
In June, when India secured the presidency for 2025–2028, the government said the leadership would advance Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of “maximum governance, minimum government”, while seeking to “bridge the North-South divide with inclusivity and unity.”
