₹5,000 or ₹15,000 – how much bribe did you pay?:Developed by a B.Tech student ‘Bribes.fyi’ is putting corruption on the map

What if you could see where people across India were allegedly asked to pay a bribe and how much they were asked to pay? A new website is trying to make that possible. Called Bribes.fyi, the platform allows citizens to report bribery incidents involving government offices anonymously. It describes itself as a “free, crowdsourced platform” where people can share details of bribes they were asked to pay, including cases where they refused.
The website was created by Aryan Nishad, a BTech student at Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology. Domain records show that bribes.fyi is registered with NameCheap Inc. and went live on July 2. Its simple design also suggests that AI may have been used to build the website. How does Bribes.fyi work? Reporting an incident takes about a minute. Users need to enter basic information, including the government department involved, the city, the amount allegedly demanded and whether they paid or refused to pay. Once submitted, the report is published anonymously in a publicly searchable database, with identifying information removed. For example, one report from Madhya Pradesh claims that a ₹40,000 bribe was reportedly demanded at the GST Office in Datia on August 17, with the person allegedly being told that a ₹4 lakh penalty would otherwise have to be paid through the GST portal. Bribery reports from across India Bribes.fyi says it has recorded 777 reports across 305 cities. However, the website makes an important point: the data comes from people who voluntarily submitted reports and should not be treated as an accurate measure of corruption across India. Users can browse the reports, compare incidents by department and location, and explore a map showing reported bribery cases across the country. Police, RTOs among most reported departments At the time of writing, police department is the highest number of reports on the platform, with 417 entries. They are followed by: Interestingly, Bribes.fyi shows that 39% of reported incidents were refused. In some cases, users claimed they still received the service they needed despite refusing to pay. Can the reports be verified? The website also has a verification mechanism designed to help identify recurring patterns. If several people report similar incidents involving the same department or office, those reports can potentially highlight repeated allegations. Bribes.fyi does not claim to provide a definitive picture of corruption in India. Instead, it aims to make reported experiences visible and put them on a map that anyone can explore. Why the website is attracting attention Despite those limitations, the concept has struck a chord because it addresses something many citizens have experienced but rarely see represented as data. Bribery often happens privately. There may be no receipt, no formal record and sometimes not even a clear way for the person involved to prove what happened. Bribes.fyi attempts to change that by creating a public record of reported experiences while allowing users to remain anonymous.
The platform also says its downloadable dataset is available for journalism, research and civic tech projects under a Creative Commons licence. It removes sensitive technical information such as IP addresses, device fingerprints and account identifiers from the public dataset. So, Bribes.fyi, may not tell India exactly how corrupt India is. But it could provide something else: a growing public collection of what citizens say they encountered when dealing with government services.