Asked for a bribe at a government office? Indian student builds website where you can report it online

An Indian student has built a website where people can report incidents of bribery in government offices and see similar reports from across the country.

Bribes.fyi was created by Aryan Nishad, a BTech student at Maharaja Agrasen Institute Of Technology. The website went live on July 2 and calls itself a “free, crowdsourced platform” where citizens can report bribes they were asked to pay or refused to pay.

The website collects these reports and groups them by department, city and state. It currently has 616 reports from 251 cities.

How does Bribes.fyi work?

Anyone can submit a report by sharing basic details, such as the government department involved, the amount allegedly demanded and the city where the incident happened.

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Users can also say whether they paid the bribe or refused to pay it. The website says submitting a report takes about a minute.

Once submitted, the report appears on the website anonymously, with identifying details removed.

One report on the website reads, “For Flat Purchase Sale Deed Registration, Every new flat buyer paid Rs. 35000 to the Sub-registrar office, Domlur via Builder. The builder collected all the amount in the cash from every buyer and paid in the office to the sub-registrar.”

The website also warns that its data comes from a self-selected group of users and should not be seen as a measure of corruption across India.

Police departments top the list

Bribes.fyi lets users browse reports and compare them by department and location. It also has a map showing the number of reports from different parts of India.

Police departments currently have the highest number of reports, with 337 entries. The RTO has 88 reports, followed by Revenue/Land Records with 69.

Passport offices account for 43 reports, while municipal corporations have 29.

The website says 38 per cent of reported incidents were refused. In some cases, users said they still received the service they needed even after refusing to pay.

The platform says its database is meant to show people's experiences and identify possible patterns, rather than give an official corruption rate.

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Users welcome the idea, but some question verification

The website has also received attention on Reddit. Many users welcomed the idea of creating a public record of bribery complaints.

“This is going to be the most consequential platform ever built,” one user wrote. “Dar ka mahaul bi-directional hona chaiye.”

Another user said, “This is excellent! However, shameless and/or ignorant fellow citizens try to justify it by passing it to peers and how the world works analogy.”

However, some users questioned how the reports are checked. On Hacker News, one person wrote, “Not sure what ‘verified’ means because the only verification they did was require a checkbox that ‘I confirm this is a genuine experience.’”

Bribes.fyi says it has a verification system that can help identify patterns when several reports are made about the same department or office.

The reports on the website are user submissions and do not independently prove that a bribe was demanded. The platform's aim is to make these reported experiences public and help people see where similar complaints are being reported.