What is usually a private and undocumented experience is now being turned into a searchable source of information. Delhi B.Tech student Aryan Nishad has built Bribes.fyi, a crowdsourced platform that allows Indians to anonymously report alleged bribe demands and view reported patterns across cities, states and government departments.
Nishad, a student at Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology in Delhi, launched the platform on 2 July with a simple idea: create public data around the everyday corruption people may encounter while accessing government services.
Bribes.fyi is designed as a privacy-first platform and does not require users to create an account. People can submit details such as the government department involved, city, amount allegedly demanded, reason for the payment, and whether they eventually paid or refused.
The submission takes about 1 minute. Reports are published anonymously after identifying information is removed and added to a searchable database.
The platform aims to look beyond individual complaints. A single incident can be seen as isolated, but multiple reports involving the same department or city could point to a broader pattern. Users can browse submissions through categories including Reports, Departments and Cities.
A map also shows where reports have been submitted across India. Departments listed on the platform include Police, RTO, Revenue and Land Records, Passport Office, Municipal Corporation, GST, Electricity Board, Income Tax, and Food and Drug Administration.
As of 17 August, the website showed hundreds of reports across more than 250 cities, with police departments recording the highest number of submissions. The platform also tracks refusals. More than 1 in 3 reported incidents were marked as refusals at the time, with some users stating that they still received the required service.
However, the figures are based on self-reported experiences and are not an official measure of corruption. The platform itself cautions that its data should not be treated as a definitive picture of bribery across India.
The project is also notable for how it was built. Nishad reportedly used AI-assisted “vibe coding”, an approach where developers use natural-language instructions to generate and refine software rather than manually writing every line of code.
For a B.Tech student, the project shows how AI can lower the barrier to building civic-tech platforms. The technology may be relatively straightforward, but the larger idea is to turn individual experiences into searchable data.
Bribes.fyi is still evolving, and questions around verifying submissions remain. Its core premise, however, is simple: make it easier to document experiences that would otherwise remain invisible.
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