Paid rishwat? Report it now

BETTER RESPONSE NEEDED Only 21,828 people from Lucknow have reported graft cases on ipaidabribe.com. Janaagraha launches Hindi version of website

LUCKNOW: Lucknowites have paid a whopping R1.6 crore as bribe in three years. And this is just the tip of the iceberg going by the fact that only 21,828 people have gone on record saying that they have greased palms to get their work done.

According to www.ipaidabribe.com, the police department and passport office staff constitute 30% of the bribe takers, while traffic police to whom people pay to escape punishment for breaching traffic rules form 25% of bribe takers. Clerks at property registration office, touts involved in getting driving licenses made and others account for 15%, 10% and 20% respectively.

The website — www.ipaidabribe.com — referred to as IPAB in short is being run since August 2010 by Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, a Bengaluru-based NGO. IPAB is one of the largest crowdsourcing platform against corruption where citizens report their day-to-day experiences, data and stories related to bribes and corruption.

Though people from the South frequently share their experiences on the English portal, there was not enough response from North Indians. A need for a Hindi version was felt. Now comes ‘Maine Rishwat Di’. It is the Hindi language version of IPAB, said Gitesh Bansal, a representative of Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy while launching the Hindi version here in Lucknow on Wednesday.

“This is a significant step in extending the reach of IPAB. ‘Maine Rishwat Di’ will touch the lives of over 600 million Hindispeaking citizens of India, most of whom would have had a corruption or bribe experience at some point in their lives,” he said.

The website provides citizens a platform to not only narrate their experience with graft, but also aggregates data on the amount of each bribe, office and location where it was paid.