The latest issue of The Economist carries an article which talks about the “eroding trust in national governments”. This article is based on a poll conducted by Gallup in 2007 and again in 2012 with one simple question “do you trust your national government?”. World over, the proportion of people answering “yes” to this question has dipped significantly between the two years.
Now, this graph has been sorted by the orange dots (2012 data) so India is lost somewhere in the middle. What if, however, this graph were sorted by the 2007 numbers (white dots)? Notice that the white dot for India is very close to the 90% mark – the highest ever achieved among all countries surveyed in this poll!
This just goes to show the kind of confidence the Indian National Government (UPA-1) enjoyed back in 2007, perhaps a result of the populist schemes it had launched such as the NREGA. This was before any of the scams hit, and this goodwill might have resulted in the government getting voted back into power in 2009. The interesting thing, though, is that the number for India is still higher than that of a large number of OECD countries.
PS: I would have drawn this graph differently. Rather than using a scatter-plot like this, I would have rather used a slope-graph, which would have shown the relative standings in both years and also the way the ratings have moved.