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| An anti-corruption protester. File picture |
New Delhi, Oct. 16: A Bangalore-based citizens’ group has shown that Anna Hazare’s confrontationist approach may not be the only way to fight corruption.
Former civil servant T.R. Raghunandan and his associates at the NGO Janaagraha launched ipaidabribe.com in August 2010 to “uncover the market price of corruption”. It asked people to report incidents when they had to bribe a clerk or official to get some legitimate work done.
Based on an analysis of these “bribery stories” — 16,000 at the last count, totalling a bribe amount of more than Rs 50 crore — the group has been devising, in tandem with the Karnataka government, mechanisms to reduce opportunities for public servants to demand bribes.
The website has been a hit, and not just in India. Raghunandan’s team is now helping citizens’ groups in 14 countries — including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Nigeria — to start sister websites with the same domain name.
Ipaidabribe.com also inspired seven similar websites to come up in China in July, but the Chinese authorities blocked these within a fortnight.
Ipaidabribe.com wants people to “report on the nature, number, pattern, types, location, frequency and values of actual corrupt acts” to gather a snapshot of bribes.
It, however, does not give out the names of either the bribe-givers or the alleged bribe-seekers. “The website has an inbuilt software that deletes all names. We do not want to be caught in a crossfire between a complainant and alleged offenders,” Raghunandan said.
The website also invites citizens to report instances where they did not have to pay a bribe, whether thanks to an honest official or simpler rules.
Raghunandan says the website’s popularity and analysis of bribery reports has persuaded the Karnataka chief secretary to seek the group’s assistance in reforming Bangalore’s six civic departments. The Janaagraha team is now helping officials to reform the transport, land registration and electricity departments.
The partnership will soon be extended to reforming the Bangalore Development Authority, the city’s municipal corporation and water supply and sewerage departments. The team does not accept any public money and relies on help from “friends” such as Infosys, Omidyar Network and venture capitalists.
“We believe in working with the system. We supported Hazare’s movement but in our view, there was some level of brinkmanship involved. As a policy, we disagree with their confrontationist approach and believe in a data-driven approach. We also disagree that the Lokpal is the only solution to corruption,” said Raghunandan, who is also helping the Kerala government draft an effective whistleblowers’ protection law.
The Janaagraha team’s campaign should be visible in Bangalore’s civic departments in the coming days. The government has allowed the group to paste posters of its movement in civic offices.
“The posters will ask people to report to our website if they didn’t have to pay a bribe in their dealings with that particular department. This is a non-invasive way of sending our message across,” said Raghunandan, who had taken voluntary retirement from his government job to work on this project.
Graft big daddy
Raghunandan said the group’s suggestions to reform Bangalore’s land registration department should show results soon.
The majority of bribery reports posted by people on the website have related to police corruption. “But these are petty bribes, rarely exceeding Rs 1,000. Larger bribes were paid to the land registry department, making it one of the most corrupt departments,” Raghunandan said.
The group was helped immensely by the reports sent by people. “The bribery reports made us aware of how the private and the public sectors colluded in corruption in that department,” Raghunandan said.
Nearly 70 per cent of the 560 reports relating to the land registry department spoke of how lawyers, chartered accountants and builders’ agents played intermediaries between officials and citizens.
“Corruption is so institutionalised in the department that no bribes are paid in the offices. Instead, the bribes masquerade as lawyers’ fees, which are then shared,” Raghunandan said.
The group has suggested that the land registry department allow “anytime, anywhere registration”, a strategy that aims to remove jurisdiction or service area monopolies of the department’s different offices.
Under the proposal, a citizen will be able to register his property in any of the department’s offices in Bangalore, which will have access to a centralised database. This, the group hopes, will break “area specific nexuses”.
“We will soon have a mechanism where citizens can book their time slots for meeting officials on the department’s website instead of waiting for hours in queues,” Raghunandan said.
Since officials use delaying tactics to force people to pay bribes, an online appointment system can minimise opportunities for bribe demands.
The team believes in systemic changes to curb corruption. It believes that adopting online processes and ending human interface would substantially reduce corruption. It also believes in educating citizens on government processes and services and argues that government websites can be a vital source of such information, provided the details are provided in a user-friendly way.
“Our aim is to end corruption in the delivery of public services. As for higher-level corruption, name me one country where defence deals are transparent,” Raghunandan said.
Unlike Hazare and his associates, ipaidabribe.com also wants to look at private sector corruption, such as the nexus between pharmaceutical companies and doctors, or the problem of donations in the education sector. It recently launched a campaign, “Do business, not bribery”.
Myths and habits
Raghunandan and his team are also countering convenient myths about graft, such as the ones that claim corruption has always been a way of life in India or that Hinduism is transactional by nature.
“These myths perpetuate the idea that we are corrupt because of our value system, and that since value systems take generations to change, there cannot be a quick-fix solution to corruption. These myths insidiously support corrupt practices and need to be demolished,” Raghunandan said.
“Corruption can be controlled, as the improved income-tax refunds system has shown.”
The group believes that people have become used to paying bribes and accept corruption as part and parcel of society.
“There is a need to have a critical mass of people who say ‘no’ to bribery. If that happens, you would see many more people conform to honest transactions,” Raghunandan said.
The Ipaidabribe.com team hopes its movement would reach many more people as the number of Internet users is expected to grow rapidly. It is working on developing a mobile-phone interface through which people can report their stories.
It wants to launch the website in the regional languages too, but to make that happen, it needs committed mentors in other states.