Indonesia’s ongoing battle against corruption appears to be making little headway as fewer people expressed enthusiasm for the government’s efforts to prevent illicit transactions and prosecute graft perpetrators over the past two years, a recent study by the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI) has found.

The survey, for which 2,000 people were polled across the archipelago between Nov. 29 and Dec. 3, showed that only 28.3 percent of respondents noticed an improvement in the government’s graft prevention efforts – a decline from the 42.7 percent recorded in a similar survey conducted in late 2018.

Similarly, only 22.2 percent of the respondents believed law enforcement against graft perpetrators had improved. That also marks a significant drop from the 44.1 percent recorded in 2018 survey.

“It is a sharp decline. This could be a signal for us to see that people perceive corruption to be getting worse in terms of prevention and law enforcement,” LSI executive director Djayadi Hanan said during an online forum held by the research firm on Sunday.

Furthermore, the latest survey also found that a majority of 45.6 percent of the respondents believed the number of corruption cases had increased over the last two years, whereas only 23 percent noticed a downtrend in reported graft during the same period.

“There are far more respondents perceiving an uptrend in reported graft,” Djayadi said.

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