ISLAMABAD:
Pakistan’s ranking on the global corruption index has slightly slipped to 136 out of 182 countries, according to Transparency International (TI), which also listed Islamabad among nations considered dangerous for journalists investigating corruption.
The 2025 report covers 182 countries, an addition of two more territories compared to a year ago, which also contributed to a one rank fall in Pakistan’s global standing on the index.
Despite the drop in ranking, Pakistan’s score on the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) improved marginally from 27 to 28 in 2025. However, the country remains grouped with nations perceived as highly corrupt, such as Bolivia and Iraq. The score is well below Pakistan’s recent best of 33 in 2018.
TI’s annual flagship report comes days after the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) claimed recoveries of Rs11.5 trillion ($41 billion) from 2023 to 2025more than double Pakistan’s official foreign exchange reserves of $16 billion.
The CPI measures perceived public-sector corruption on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 indicates highly corrupt and 100 represents very clean.
For context, India scored 39 with a ranking of 91, Bangladesh 24 at 150, and Afghanistan 16 at 169.
TI noted that small fluctuations in the score are more significant than changes in rank, as rankings can be influenced by the performance of other countries.
The report has also commented on the plight of journalists who investigate corruption stories.
“When journalists are attacked or killed for investigating corruption, power cannot be held to account effectively and corruption tends to worsen”, said the report. Since 2012, in non-conflict zones worldwide, 829 journalists have been murdered, it added.
The report underlined that 150 journalists were killed while covering corruption-related stories, five of them in 2025. “Over 90% of these killings happened in countries with a CPI score lower than 50, including in Brazil, India, Mexico, Pakistan and Iraq, which are particularly dangerous for journalists reporting on corruption”, the TI said.
It added the CPI 2025 shows that corruption remains a serious threat in every part of the world, although there are limited signs of progress. Leaders must act to tackle abuses of power and the wider factors driving this decline, such as the roll-back of democratic checks and balances, and attacks on independent civil society, said the report.
Pakistan has also recently released the ‘Governance and Corruption Diagnostic Assessment’ report under duress from the IMF. The IMF’s report depicts a sorry state of affairs, as the global lender has asked Islamabad to introduce short to long term measures to tackle corruption and poor governance, including improving the rule of law and the judicial system.
NAB has recently claimed in its annual performance report that the graft buster directly or indirectly recovered a whopping Rs6.2 trillion from the corrupt elements in the last year. It further claimed that the direct and indirect recoveries of the corruption proceeds amounted to Rs11.5 trillion for the past three years alone.
Such a high level of Rs11.5 trillion recoveries suggest the prevalent corruption in Pakistan and also authenticate the 136 ranking on the global index.
According to details provided by NAB to the media, the recoveries were made through the retrieval of encroached state and other organisations’ land, as well as cash. These included the reclamation of three million acres of encroached state and forest land, valued at approximately Rs6 trillion.
NAB Sukkur recovered 1.63 million acres of land worth Rs3.73 trillion. It was not clear who assessed the land values or what methodology was used. NAB Balochistan reportedly recovered 1.02 million acres worth Rs1.37 trillion, while NAB Multan recovered 330,000 acres valued at Rs654 billion, along with 51 kanals of state land worth Rs29.4 billion in Islamabad.
