Bribes.fyi Launches Crowdsourced Database to Track Corruption in India
A new platform allows citizens to report and compare the 'going rate' of bribes across various Indian government departments.
A developer has launched Bribes.fyi, a crowdsourced platform designed to quantify and compare bribery statistics across government departments in India. The tool aims to bring transparency to the hidden costs of administrative corruption by aggregating user-reported data into a public database.
The platform recently introduced a comparison feature that enables users to analyze bribe amounts, frequency, and city-specific patterns side-by-side. According to the site's data, users can track corruption metrics for a wide array of agencies, including the Police, Regional Transport Office (RTO), Passport Office, and Municipal Corporation. The database also covers the Electricity Board, Income Tax department, Food & Drug Administration, and the GST Office.
The Context of Administrative Corruption
Administrative corruption remains a significant burden for both individual citizens and businesses in many regions. Because these payments are typically undocumented and occur in the shadows, there is rarely a centralized record of how much is being demanded or how often. Bribes.fyi attempts to solve this by turning anecdotal evidence into structured statistics, creating a community-driven map of systemic graft.
Why Transparency Matters
By aggregating this data, the tool provides a rare glimpse into which government departments are most prone to corruption. For the average citizen, the platform helps establish the "going rate" or frequency of bribes in specific cities, potentially reducing the uncertainty and exploitation that occur when officials demand arbitrary sums. On a broader scale, such structured data can serve as a deterrent to corrupt officials or provide a foundation for systemic reform by highlighting the most problematic agencies.
What's Next
The project has been shared multiple times on Hacker News, where the developer has sought community feedback and additional data to expand the database's accuracy. As the platform grows, the focus remains on gathering more comprehensive reports to better reflect the scale of corruption across different urban and rural centers. While the tool provides a snapshot of reported payments, the total volume of bribes paid remains an unverified figure, as the platform relies entirely on voluntary user submissions.