First among equals?

The chief economic adviser, however, declined to claim that CRIS was a new idea. Asked whether any other agency had developed a comparative rating system for nations on the lines of CRIS, Basu provided a different answer. His long association with academics, he said, suggested that the moment someone claimed to have developed a new idea, any number of rival claimants would insist they had developed it 20 years before. For instance, when he was facing criticism for his views on corruption – especially on the point that the bribe giver should be protected – somebody wrote to him from Italy saying the idea had been developed by him before and he should be given the credit for it. So on CRIS, Basu said he would not stick his neck out and claim that he had developed the idea first — he did add, however, that the research done by his team suggested that nobody else had come out with this kind of relative index earlier.