Human Freedom Index 2020: India slips 17 spots down to 111th rank

A worldwide ranking of civil, economic and personal freedom, the Human Freedom Index 2020 was released on Thursday. India was placed at the 111th spot out of 162 countries. In 2019, India ranked 94 on the index.

However, India has been ranked ahead of China and Bangladesh, which ranked 129 and 139 on the 2020 index respectively. The first three sports have been bagged by New Zealand, Switzerland and Hong Kong. Fred McMahon and Ian Vásquez, the authors of the report, said that they expected Hong Kong’s rank to decline in the future, because of China’s “aggressive interventions” in the region in 2019 and 2020.

India’s scored 6.30 out of 10 in personal freedom and 6.56 in economic freedom. The country’s overall human freedom score was 6.43.

Human Freedom Index was published by American think tank Cato Institute and Fraser Institute in Canada. The index takes into account 76 indicators of personal, civil, and economic freedoms to rank 162 countries from 2008 to 2018. The institutes noted that the world has seen a notable decline in personal freedom since 2008.

“Overall freedom has also declined, though to a lesser degree, over the same time period. Of the 12 major categories that we measure in the report, all but five have seen some deterioration, with freedom of religion, identity and relationship freedoms, and the rule of law seeing the largest decreases,” they said.

The United States and United Kingdom are tied at the 17th spot on the index. War-torn Syria ranked the last on the list.

“The report continues to find a strong, positive relationship between freedom and prosperity, but also finds that there is an unequal distribution of freedom in the world. Fifteen per cent of the world’s population lives in the freest quartile of countries in the index, while 34 per cent lives in the bottom quartile of countries. The gap in freedom between the most free and the least free countries has also been increasing since 2008,” the authors said.