Three guesses as to what most IAS officers do on reaching office every morning? Order a cup of tea? Bury their noses in a newspaper? Heck, maybe even do some work and ask for the list of appointments for the day?

Oh no, they crank up their computers and log on to www.whispersinthecorridors. com, a website, which has taken the country’s bureaucracy by storm. Who is going to be the next cabinet secretary? Who has moved up the ladder? Who has been kicked off it? Have transfer orders been issued? And who is returning to their cadre? Basically just about all the inner goings on in the corridors of power find its way to this website.

So who’s the mole spilling all the bureaucratic beans? Some speculate that he must be a bureaucrat while others suspect he’s a low-level functionary in the personnel ministry. But they are all wrong. Meet Suresh Mehrotra, a doctorate in history and a journalist by profession who runs the whispersinthe corridors website from a small room in his house in Bhopal — with just one computer. Mehrotra has informers in every department and even senior bureaucrats leak to him. But ask him to reveal their names and he’ll grin and repeat the old mantra: “A journalist never reveals his sources.”

No surprises there! In fact, Mehrotra’s sources are placed so deep within the system that hardly any information on the country’s “Iron Frame” passes him by. Consider this: a few months ago Mehrotra got a call at the crack of dawn with earthshaking — from a bureaucratic point of view — news. The cabinet secretary had been given a two-year extension.

Mehrotra uploaded the information on his website immediately. It was only later in the evening that the government announced the decision and it became the top story on every news channel. However, by this time most bureaucrats across the country were hotly debating the last minute change, thanks to Mehrotra’s website.

Says Mehrotra, “People expect me to know everything. I have senior IAS officers calling me to check whether their name is on a particular list or not.” It goes without saying that he doesn’t mind the attention. In fact he basks in it. “People often refer to me as Mr India (referring to Anil Kapoor’s role in a film of the same name), since I’m only heard and not seen,” he laughs.

Whispersin thecorridor.com started humbly enough in March 2001, with an initial investment of around Rs 50,000. It received only two hits on Day One. Today, it has more than 2.6 million visitors and is read both by bureaucrats in India, and also those attached to Indian embassies abroad. In fact, the site enjoys such credibility that bureaucrats often quote it.

Mehrotra has an anecdote about a senior officer who was hoping to be transferred to a new department. Whispersinthecorridor carried an item that he was about to be transferred, so the officer went to his boss asking to be relieved of his job. His ingenious argument? — ‘if the website said it, it must be true’. He got his orders the very next day.

Says Mehrotra, “Sometimes I know things before the officers themselves.” He goes on to talk about a secretary level officer who the website said was going to be moved to a different ministry. The officer’s son-in-law called him up from the US to ask if it was true. The officer, not a regular visitor of the whispersinthecorridor site, had no clue but two days later, he was moved.

Just how does Mehrotra get all this sensitive information? “It’s a give-and-take relationship. Some information I part with, and some they give me,” he says referring to his bureaucrat buddies. On an average, Mehrotra sends out between 25 to 30 mails a day and makes around 50 calls to various people sitting not only in Delhi but also in other state secretariats.

And how did it all start? “It was my fascination with the bureaucracy and the way the government worked. I was never much interested in the political side of things. It was the bureaucrats who attracted me,” says Mehrotra.

So in the mid-1980’s, Mehrotra, then the bureau chief of the Free Press Journal in Bhopal started a weekly column called Whispers in the Corridors. Of course, the column only covered the activities of the officers of the Madhya Pradesh government. “It was a huge success and I realised that there were a lot of people who were interested in knowing what was happening at the seat of power,” he explains.

In 1992, Mehrotra moved to Delhi for a year. “I spent most of my time in Delhi meeting bureaucrats. Today most of them are my close friends,” he says. From 1997 to 2000, Mehrotra was the editor of National Mail and then went on to edit the Hindi daily, Nayee Duniya.

However at these organisations, he didn’t get much chance to pursue his passion for the bureaucracy. So in 2001, he set up the website. “I thought it was time for me to do something on my own. The website was just an idea,” says Mehrotra who initially had to face a lot of flak from his bureaucrat friends when he called them up asking for information to put on his site.

Cut to the present and it’s an entirely different story. “Now people often call me up and give me information, even without my asking for it. In fact, sometimes they try to plant stories about others. I need to be cautious and crosscheck such information with my sources,” says Mehrotra who as a rule tries to stay away from controversies. “I concentrate only on the comings and goings rather than on issues of corruption. Investigative journalism is for newspapers. I only give information,” he declares.

Running the website costs Mehrotra around Rs 50,000 a month thanks to the server fees and the telephone bills. He has also recruited one person who uploads the site daily at around 11 am. Apart from that, it’s a completely home-run operation.

For the first couple of years Mehrotra wasn’t making any money, but now he says he is breaking even. The site gets advertisements from the Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh governments. “Most advertising is through contacts. I don’t undertake any marketing,” he says. But now, more and more people are approaching him for advertising. Recently the IAS Wives Association has started advertising on the website for a new housing complex that they are building.

So what’s the future like for whispersinthecorridors. com? Like all dot.com entrepreneurs, Mehrotra hopes that some day the site will be big enough for a company to make him an offer he just can’t refuse. Till then, Mehrotra continues to do what he loves — give voice to all those whispers floating around in the corridors of power.

Photograph by Jagan Negi