My first straight forward bribing experience

There is a rule in India that we shouldn't give bribes or collect bribes for anything. These days nobody follows those rules. India is still one of the top countries regarding corruption and bribery. I recently had to visit one of the government offices for a name transfer and I had to experience a bribe. I have been following up on this for a very long time.

Government websites suck

The very first pain point is that the government websites are very very bad. When it comes to payment or getting information from the site, for both the activities the websites are very bad. Being a developer myself it was very hard to digest the fact that the government has not spend its money on developing those websites. It will benefit a lot of people. There is a lot of scope for improvement and old officials are the ones spoiling it.

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For example, we were standing in the queue for several hours and then we got the opportunity to make the payment. The first and foremost thing is that a non-expert who was unable to use computers freely was the cashier and was doing the transactions. The second concern is the website loading time and ease of access. The person was not proactive and it took ages for him to type out everything and process payments. Governments should take it seriously and have young officials who can work fast and efficiently on computers.

Unnecessary paperwork done

I visited the officer for a Property name transfer. This was an unnecessary step according to me. Whenever the registration is happening, the government knows that there is a change to the property and they should technically update the property details too. I had to pay close to 10k rupees and on top of that some bribe amount to get the task done. If I say that I'm not interested in paying the bribe they are very much straight forward saying that without their involvement the file will not move any further.

No work done without bribe

We were standing in the queue for a very long time and the officials were continuously saying something or the other. Later we found the right person and that person started negotiating how much we should be paying him. Just for moving the files and completing it, they wanted to charge 5k INR as a bribe. We want the work to be done and not delayed so we couldn't negotiate much. Additionally, the officers kept on saying that we could not do it without a bribe. We have to keep on going to that office for this and the name would remain the same it seems even if all the documents are correct. After the money is given to them, they will start moving the file and completing the tasks it seems. It was embarrassing to give bribe to these officials for the very first time.

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Government charge too much

This is not just my experience alone but I think there is too much unnecessary paper work involved and the common people end up paying a lot of money towards that. It was not just me but I checked with a few more people and they also expressed the same thought saying that the charges are too much for plan approvals and other things. Since government officials charge so much for activities related to properties, people find it hard to purchase a property or construct a property.

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