What if the bribe you were quietly asked to pay at a government office could be added to a public platform, alongside hundreds of similar experiences from across India?
That is the idea behind Bribes.fyi, a new crowdsourced website created by Aryan Nishad, a B.Tech student at Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology.
Launched on July 2, 2026, the platform allows people to anonymously report alleged bribe demands they encounter while dealing with government departments.
Users can submit details about the department involved, the city, the amount allegedly demanded and whether they eventually paid or refused.
The platform then organises these reports by department, city and state, allowing users to see where reported incidents are being recorded and compare patterns across different government services.
The platform also allows users to generate a formal complaint letter based on their report, which can be sent to the appropriate authority.
What makes the project particularly interesting is that it is not trying to document only spectacular corruption cases. It is collecting the smaller, everyday encounters that people might otherwise simply accept as part of dealing with the system, like making an alleged payment to avoid delays, get paperwork processed or make a routine government service move faster.
And now, those experiences are being put on the internet.
The Question That Started Bribes.fyi
For Aryan Nishad, the idea behind Bribes.fyi began with a question about why individual experiences of everyday corruption rarely become usable public information.
In his LinkedIn post announcing the platform, he wrote, “Been building something for the past few months. It started with one question: why is there no public data on everyday corruption in India? We’ve all heard stories – someone asked to pay at the RTO, a police station, or while accessing another public service. But stories stay stories. They don’t help us understand patterns. So I built bribes.fyi.”
The idea is straightforward. Instead of leaving each experience as an isolated story, Bribes.fyi puts the reports in one public database. Users can browse them by department, location and other details, while people submitting reports can remain anonymous.
What Does A Bribe Report Actually Look Like?
One of the reports highlighted on the platform involved an alleged ₹2,000 bribe demand by the Police Department in Pune.
The anonymous submitter wrote, “Was told to take ‘tatkal’ route which costs 2500 to avoid multiple visits and unnecessary delays.”
The report is striking precisely because it sounds so ordinary. There is no elaborate scheme described. The alleged payment is presented as a way of avoiding repeated visits and delays while accessing a government service.
Other submissions on the platform involve different amounts, departments and circumstances, turning individual accounts into a growing collection of alleged everyday encounters.
From Individual Reports To A Bigger Picture
Bribes.fyi currently groups reports across departments including Police, RTO, Revenue/Land Records, Passport Offices and Municipal Corporations.
When checked on August 17, the website showed 791 reports across 313 cities. The Police Department accounted for 426 submissions, followed by the RTO with 117 and Revenue/Land Records with 93. Because new submissions can be added, the figures on the website are not static.
At the state level, Karnataka recorded the highest number of reported incidents with 138, followed by Maharashtra with 91 and Uttar Pradesh with 75.
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Map Of Reported Bribes
The database is not limited to a list of complaints. Bribes.fyi also maps reported incidents across India, allowing users to see where submissions are coming from and compare reported experiences across states and cities.
Its Transparency Map uses different shades to show the number of reports submitted from different states, while the State Registry Ledger allows users to sort states by the number of reports, highest reported bribes and most refusals.
The map does not show the actual prevalence of corruption in different parts of the country. It shows where people have chosen to submit reports. Bribes.fyi’s figures therefore represent a self-selected pool of reports, not a representative measure of corruption across India.
Know Before You Go
Bribes.fyi has also added a feature called “Know Before You Go,” which shifts the platform from simply documenting reported bribe demands to helping people understand what others have reported before visiting a government office.
The feature uses reports collected on the platform to give users a picture of reported bribe amounts and experiences associated with different cities, departments and services. However, these figures should be treated as reported experiences, not a price list or a prediction of what a person will actually be asked to pay.
The platform also tracks what happened when people refused to pay. Its dashboard showed 40% “refused · got service”, indicating that 40% of the reports recorded under this metric involved people who said they refused to pay and still received the service.
The 40% figure reflects only the experiences reported by users of Bribes.fyi. It shows what happened in the reports submitted to the platform, rather than how often people across India refuse to pay bribes.
For now, Bribes.fyi is best understood as a growing collection of people’s reported experiences with alleged bribe demands.
A Wider Conversation Begins
The platform has also caught the attention of independent journalists. Amit Kilhor shared a video on X/Twitter discussing Bribes.fyi and the data emerging from the platform, highlighting how people with the skills to build digital tools can use technology for civic accountability.
The Internet Has Entered The Chat
The platform has also begun making its way into online communities, where reactions range from enthusiasm to questions about whether anonymous reports can be trusted.
One X/Twitter user compared the idea to India’s digital payments infrastructure, writing, “India has UPI for instant payments. Now we have bribes.fyi for the payments nobody wants to make. Turning ‘everyone knows’ into actual data.”
Another X user described the idea more simply: “First in my bloodline to witness an online database of all the bribes demanded from citizens. Hopefully someone from the government can look at this.”
The reaction was not entirely celebratory. On r/indiehackersindia, in a thread titled “A week ago I posted here asking ‘what’s next’ for bribes.fyi. Here’s what happened after,” one user raised a basic question about the reliability of anonymous submissions: “Hey, how do you verify the bribes? There’s no way we can prevent someone adding fake bribes, and that can put this site in danger. What’s the backup plan for this?”
The discussion also raised concerns about what could happen if the platform becomes widely known, with one user writing, “Hopefully we’ll have standardised bribe charge in near future. Anyhow, I’m afraid that if this gets famous, the govt will ban this and also sue you for ‘defamation’.”
But there was plenty of support too, as another Reddit user wrote, “Love the concept man. I shared this with so many of my friends.”
These reactions capture the central tension around Bribes.fyi. The same anonymity that could make people more comfortable reporting alleged bribe demands also makes those claims difficult to independently verify.
So, What Does Bribes.fyi Actually Change?
Bribes.fyi cannot establish whether every allegation submitted to it is true, and its database cannot by itself prove that one department or city is more corrupt than another.
What it can do is put experiences that would normally remain scattered across conversations, complaints and personal anecdotes into one searchable place. If more people contribute, those individual reports could make patterns easier to see.
But the platform’s credibility will depend on how it handles false or misleading submissions while preserving the anonymity that encourages people to report in the first place.
For now, the experiment is simple. Take something people are used to treating as an everyday inconvenience and put it on the record.
And perhaps that is what makes Bribes.fyi interesting. It is not claiming to have solved corruption. It is asking what happens when the stories people usually tell each other finally become data.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Hindustan Times, Mint, India Today
Find the blogger: @diptisadh
This post is tagged under: bribes.fyi, bribes in india, corruption in india, report bribes, anonymous bribe reporting, government corruption, corruption data, bribery complaints, corruption map India
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