India’s Ranking Moves Up Slightly on Global Peace Index

India has acquired the 136th spot in the Global Peace Index 2018 (GPI), moving up one spot since last year, according to the index released on June 6.

Iceland was ranked first on the index, with a score of 1.096, followed by New Zealand with a score of 1.192, while Austria was ranked third with a score of 1.274. China scored 2.243 to occupy the 112th rank.

India, with a score of 2.504, recorded a slightly improved overall score due to the government’s efforts to tackle violent crime, along with falling levels of military expenditure, particularly on weapons imports, resulting in a slight improvement in its militarization score. This led to an improved rank from 137th place last year.

“However, the concentration of power in the office of Prime Minister Narendra Modi led to a deterioration in India’s score for political instability, and the country’s scores on the political terror scale and internal conflicts fought, at 4 and 4.7 respectively, remain elevated,” the index stated.

The twelfth edition of the Global Peace Index ranked 163 independent states and territories according to their level of peacefulness. It is produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), a think tank headquartered in Sydney that develops metrics to analyze peace and quantifies its economic value.

Within South Asia, India was ranked fifth, while Bhutan was at the top spot, followed by Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh, respectively. However, while Bhutan has slipped from 13 to 19, Bangladesh deteriorated from 84 to 93. India was followed by Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“South Asia experienced the largest regional improvement in peacefulness, with Bhutan, Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal all improving,” the index pointed out.

The report added that India kept pace until 1980, following which it started to mirror the United Kingdom’s decline and has increased at a much slower rate since then. China, it said, maintained a lower number of diplomatic exchanges until surpassing Russia and India in 1980. India’s military personnel rate almost tripled in the 1960s and ’70s but has declined slowly since, it said.

The GPI covered 99.7 per cent of the world’s population, using 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators. It measured the state of peace using three thematic domains — the level of societal safety and security, the extent of ongoing domestic and international conflict and the degree of militarization.

In the ongoing domestic and international conflict domain, India’s score was 2.826 — among the worst. Syria was at the bottom, with a score of 3.828 while Botswana, Brazil, Chile, Mauritius and Uruguay had the best score of 1.