Abusrd enough? V-Dem Institute releases Academic Freedom Index, places Pakistan & Taliban-ruled Afghanistan above India
V-Dem Institute released updates to its Academic Freedom Index, where they compared academic freedom scores in 2005 with those in 2021 and has placed India in the Botton 20% group out of 177 countries.
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In what can be called as absurd ranking, Sweden-based The V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute, known for its so-called "democracy reports", has once again released a list that one might laugh seeing it. The institute funded by the George Soros funded group released a report on Academic Freedom in which Pakistan, Iraq, and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan are ranked above Indian academic freedom.
V-Dem Institute released updates to its Academic Freedom Index, where they compared academic freedom scores in 2005 with those in 2021 and has placed India in the Botton 20% group out of 177 countries.
Besides, the Indian ranking falls below Iraq, Pakistan, and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq are placed in the Bottom 30-40% group. From the subcontinent, Nepal is ranked way above, in the top 20-30% group. North American and European countries dominate the top rankings in the report, with the inclusion of several countries in Africa, like Senegal, Nigeria, Burkina Faso etc, which are ranked in the top 20-30% group.
The report stated, "Populous countries such as Brazil, China, India, and Russia exhibit substantially less academic freedom today than in 2011." According to the paper titled ‘Academic Freedom Index Update 2022,’ the fall in academic freedom is accompanied by an increasing and deepening wave of ‘autocratization.’
Speaking on the same, in a series of tweets on Thursday (1 December), V-Dem Institute's Academic Index Freedom graph showed India below Pakistan and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, and along with Hong Kong and China.
"Meanwhile, the picture in China, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand, India, and Hong Kong is discouraging," the V-Dem institute said. "China and India alone have curtailed academic freedom for more than one-third of the world’s population," it added.
These declines are especially worrisome as the levels of academic freedom in the region were relatively low to begin with, the institute said.
However, Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to Prime Minister (EAC-PM), has rubbished Swedish V-Dem Institute's claim that Pakistan and Afghanistan have higher levels of academic freedom than India.
Sanyal said, "Am pleased to see the high levels of academic freedoms in Afghanistan and Pakistan. India must aspire to their levels as per V-Dem". He added, "These indicators are utter nonsense - based on laughable methodology. I am amazed they have not been systematically challenged all these years".
Sanyal had recently co-authored a working paper with deputy director of EAC-PM Aakanksha Arora. The paper investigated three opinion-based indices including the V-Dem. The paper found serious problems with the methodology used in perception-based global indices that ranked India on several parameters including democracy and freedom.
Sanyal, in the working paper, calls the methodologies used by these indices as "opaque and shallow."
Last year, the V-Dem institute examines the "democratic performances of the countries globally" and termed India as an "electoral autocracy". In its 2022 reports, it also enlisted India among the top 10 countries that have been showing autocratic nature.