India Corruption Research Report 2025: Systemic Corruption Embedded in Governance Structures

India Corruption Research Report 2025: Systemic Corruption Embedded in Governance Structures

An Analysis of Systemic Decay and Democratic Backsliding

By Rakesh Raman
New Delhi | November 24, 2025

New Delhi — The India Corruption Research Report 2025 (ICRR 2025) has unveiled a disturbing assessment of corruption across India, concluding that corruption is now systemic, deeply rooted within the nation’s governance frameworks, and intrinsically linked to democratic backsliding.

The comprehensive analysis, covering India’s political, corporate, judicial, and administrative sectors, suggests that the complexity, scale, and impunity of corruption have increased due to the collective erosion of democratic freedoms and the weakening of autonomous institutions. The report stresses that the decline of key institutional safeguards, including financial oversight, electoral transparency, judicial independence, and bureaucratic neutrality, has allowed corruption to evolve into more concealed and sophisticated forms.

Decay Across Key Sectors

The ICRR 2025 documents systemic decay across several critical spheres:

1. Political Corruption and Democratic Decline: The report highlights the expanding influence of centralized political power over constitutional bodies, investigative agencies, and administrative decision-making. Political corruption now manifests not only through traditional illicit funding but also through regulatory capture and legislative manipulation. The author attributes significant democratic deterioration to the rise of opaque electoral bonds, the shrinking space for dissent, and the misuse of central agencies.
2. Administrative Breakdown and Citizen Rights: Administrative corruption continues to obstruct the delivery of public services in both rural and urban settings. Bureaucratic discretion in taxation, licensing, land allocation, and welfare distribution has become a major source of rent extraction. The findings indicate that citizens increasingly face a pay-to-access governance system where fundamental rights and entitlements are mediated through corruption.
3. Erosion of the Rule of Law: Judicial corruption is identified as a serious issue, compounded by the opacity of the judicial system. ICRR 2025 points to severe judicial delays, rendering justice inaccessible for many and increasing public vulnerability to corruption. The report also notes unresolved conflicts of interest, inconsistent judgments, politicized appointments, and a decline in judicial independence, which erodes public trust in constitutional remedies.
4. Corporate Collusion: The report details how corporate-political collusion has amplified corruption in vital sectors such as infrastructure, energy, defense, and mining. Preferential regulations, corporate lobbying, and manipulated tendering processes are fostering crony capitalism and granting unfair market advantages. Widespread financial irregularities, including shell company networks, bank frauds, and illicit capital flows, remain prevalent.

Corruption and Human Rights

The report establishes a direct connection between corruption and human rights abuses. The law-enforcement apparatus is compromised by structural corruption, weak public complaint mechanisms, and political control. Police corruption, including selective investigation, extortion, and illegal arrests, functions as an instrument of coercion due to political interference.

Marginalized groups, including the poor, minorities, women, and slum residents, face consistent exploitation due to administrative corruption and limited access to legal remedies in crucial sectors like housing, healthcare, and welfare schemes.

Digital Risks and Future Solutions

While new technologies present challenges, the ICRR 2025 also addressed the emerging risks associated with digital governance, noting that the adoption of digital tools has introduced new corruption risks, including data manipulation, opaque algorithmic decision-making, and surveillance. Digital corruption has been observed in the monitoring of political dissent and the tampering of beneficiary databases.

Looking ahead, the report suggests Artificial Intelligence (AI) could serve as a powerful anti-corruption tool through anomaly detection, forensic data analysis, and predictive risk models. However, the ICRR 2025 cautions that the safe deployment of such technology is currently limited by the absence of robust AI governance frameworks in India.

Archiving on Zenodo

The India Corruption Research Report 2025 (ICRR 2025) has been officially archived on Zenodo—a globally recognized research repository developed by the European OpenAIRE initiative and managed by CERN. This ensures worldwide visibility and academic traceability of its findings.

The report is freely available for access, download, and citation via its permanent Digital Object Identifier (DOI). By securing international archiving, the report offers a credible reference point for global research on judicial reform, corruption, and human rights in India.