This wasn’t a protest which was making headlines. There wasn’t a mass of humanity supporting the cause or celebrities pledging their alliance. Yet the voice of Varun Arya was loud and clear. Loud enough, in fact, to shake the Rajasthan government out of a deep slumber.

Arya, founder of the Aravali Institute of Management in Jodhpur, went on an indefinite fast near Jantar Mantar in Delhi last week to secure the future of hundreds of students enrolled in his institute. His protest was to draw attention to the fact that the government wouldn’t let his school take off by sitting on the papers that were needed for the piece of land he’d acquired for the purpose.

If I had paid a bribe to some government officials I would have got my land in no time. But I refused to do so,” says Arya. “We would rather be foolish and stay hungry than grease somebody’s palms,” he adds.

Corruption is a word that triggers a host of complaints. Everybody has a story to relate — about having to pay off the cops, an electricity linesman demanding money to fix a problem, or the civic authorities asking for a king’s ransom for anything that requires permission.

But there are some, like Arya, who don’t merely grumble — but take on the bribe-seekers head-on. The fight against corruption may have turned into a nationwide campaign now, but some individuals have always sought to battle graft in their own little ways.

“My family thinks I am mad but then that is the only way I know to lead a fulfilling life,” says Leila Seth, the first woman to head a High Court. In 1988, when Seth was building her house in Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi, she was told that she’d have to pay a bribe if she wanted a completion certificate from the civic authorities. But Seth refused to pay up and was harassed even by her architect who kept urging her to bribe the inspection officials.

“I made my architect redo what the inspector objected to and ended up spending much more than what the bribe amount would have been,” says Seth. The completion certificate was finally given to her but after more than a year of waiting.

“Rules can be exploited by paying a bribe. But you have to do what you ought to do,” says Seth.

BRAVEHEART: Varun Arya

People, who make it a point not to give in to the demands of the corrupt, stress that the going is never easy. “At every stage you feel that you are fighting a losing battle and are made to feel humiliated,” says E.K. Shaji, founder of Jodo Gyan, a children’s educational enterprise based in Delhi.

Shaji started the informal centre of learning in 1997 and says has struggled at every stage to move ahead. The latest victim of his struggle is a primary school that he started in a resettlement colony in Delhi with 122 children in 2005.

“My school will soon have to be shut because I refuse to bribe anyone,” says Shaji. Having failed to get a clearance certificate from the authorities concerned, his school has not yet been registered.

Shaji cites the example of how rules are made to be broken. “In Delhi you need to have at least one acre of land to run a school. But where is the land in the place where I run my school with slums all around,” he asks. “I see the school getting closed anytime now,” he adds.

Arya’s story was different. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, he quit a company job to start a management school in 2000. Awaiting land, it operated out of four rented buildings in Jodhpur, with the first batch comprising just five students.

When his educational trust could not get land from the Rajasthan government, it bought about 94.4 acres of land near Jodhpur in 2005 and thereby started a long-drawn battle with the government which refused to complete the formalities required. A petition signed by more than 2,000 alumni of the IITs and IIMs was sent to the Rajasthan chief minister but yielded no results.

“I bought wasteland and wanted to convert it from agricultural to educational land. The government was unwilling to cooperate despite the fact that we followed every rule,” says Arya, who after fasting for seven days was finally given an assurance in writing by the Rajasthan government that the matter would be expedited.

Entrepreneur Vivek Pawar testifies that the right path is usually a thorny one. The resident of Hubli in Karnataka learned it the hard way. Pawar needed a licence for his semi-conductor manufacturing company and sent his officials to procure one. “We had to get a clearance from the customs department for our import-export business. The customs officials weren’t happy to learn that we were unwilling to pay a bribe,” recalls Pawar.

When his assistant’s many attempts to get a licence met with no success, Pawar walked into the customs office one day and launched a speech. “I stressed that I wanted to work within the system,” says Pawar. This small speech got him the import licence.

Getting his export licence was much easier. He entered an assistant commissioner’s office and told him the story. “The official was delighted that I wanted to take the right route. He immediately issued me a licence,” says Pawar.

The anti-grafters feel that people succumb to the system of corruption because the alternative is so much harder. “It’s like putting 100 times more effort when you’re not paying a bribe,” says Shaji. “One just has to start thinking that the delay is affordable,” advises Pawar. He paid Rs 54,000 as duty to the customs department instead of the Rs 10,000 he was asked to pay as bribe when he got a consignment from the US.

“People will start respecting you for your integrity,” says Pawar, who now plans to organise an Ethics Week in schools to impart morality lessons.

Changing the system is what some are striving for, rather than individual actions to end the scourge of bribery. Ramesh Ramanathan, co-founder of Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, a non-profit organisation in Bangalore, started the website www.ipaidabribe.com in 2010 to record bribery transactions. People are asked to write their experiences related to bribery. His website gets around 4,000 hits a day and has logged in 8196 bribery reports so far.

“We thought rather than moralising it would be better if we acknowledge that we pay bribes. We want to record the transactions and take it forward to the authorities for some policy change,” says Ramanathan.

He met the head of the regional transport office in Karnataka with a report of bribes paid by people for their driving licences. “We want the officials to streamline the process and eliminate the gaps which lead to bribes,” says Ramanathan, who is still awaiting a plan sanction by the Coonoor municipality for a house that he wants to build. “It’s been three years now. But even if it takes an entire lifetime I won’t pay a bribe for it,” he adds.

For people battling bribery, the fight is against a system which has now become a part of life for the majority. But, they hold, if more and more people refuse to give in to demands for bribes, the system may change. It’s, after all, the old story of five fingers on one’s hand. One finger can’t do much on its own, but the five together can be a formidable force.