Phony currency used to fight bribes in India | Hacker News Reader

Phony currency used to fight bribes in India

boston.com

81 pointsrobg43 comments

A reduction in the bribe amount bureaucrats are willing to pay for the right to receive bribes themselves would be a great indicator of success.

As an aside, I'm an American who worked last week in the US with a guy from my company's Indian office. Because India apparently has high import duties on watches, he decided this trip would be a good opportunity to purchase a watch for his wife. When he asked me where to to to buy a Swiss Army watch, I suggested Amazon.com. I'm a Prime member and offered to use my account so he could get free 2nd day shipping. I ordered the watch while he observed. "That's all you had to do?" I hadn't even used 1-click! When it shipped, I emailed him the tracking number. Over the next couple of days, he checked UPS.com in semi-disbelief and seemed amazed when the watch showed up as expected.

Apparently, according to my co-worker, there's little online purchasing of physical goods in India. While credit cards are becoming increasingly common, delivery systems are seen as too corrupt to be trusted. "You'll order a watch, but only an empty box will be delivered." It probably also doesn't help that a product purchased by a middle-class Indian might be worth months of lower-class wages.

It's the hidden, non-physical infrastructure that's so important. Layers and layers of laws, enforcement, responsible government, etc. are required to produce a system where an expensive item can be delivered to my house reliably.

What that guy said is true. Indian customs is terrible. And tracking anything in India is a crazy challenge - that includes people as well.

The biggest thing that pisses me off every time I travel there is the inter-state crossings where you have to pay a small "toll." Nothing like your 50¢ auto-vending one.

The most interesting bribe chain is perhaps the driver license (DMV) anything. The bribes for those are so bad that a significant percentage of drivers even avoid getting a license. And if you are getting a car license, you will most likely need a broker - as in you would need to learn to drive from a "driving school," which will broker for your license at a "fee." The best/sad part is that upon bribery you don't even have to drive to pass the test. Of course, this may not be everywhere, but just speaking from observation.

As about bribery punishment, there have been literally thousands of movies with the theme.

Customs is terrible only because people don't want to pay the actual customs duties as set by the government and will try anything possible to avoid paying including indulging in corruption.

True, but also is nightmarish to ship anything there.

Maybe Indian Customs has gotten better and is not acting petty but try importing USD $500k worth of equipment/machinery from Germany and then see how many ways Customs figures out to hold the goods and cause unnecessary delays and somehow everything magically works when you fly to their office in Kochi and do what's necessary to please them :)

If that's a genuine incident you're talking about, you could try contacting Shashi Tharoor (the local MP, who's on Twitter and seems very accessible) to see what can be done for the future. Nothing's going to change if you don't atleast try to fix them.

You don't pay a toll at inter-state crossings if you're a private vehicle. What I think you might have experienced are just the ridiculous number of toll booths setup on highways to collect fees for newly constructed sections of the highways. These road project contracts are handed over to external construction companies and they recover the costs by collecting toll for the next 10-15 years. A 5 hour journey from Bangalore -> Chennai includes 6-7 stops at toll booths each adding 5-10 mins to the journey depending on whether the cars before you have the exact change or not and how lazy the toll booth operator is.

Btw I can attest to the fact about having to bribe indirectly in order to get a driving license (learner's permit actually).

I go to the DMV/RTO office and submit my application and the guy just throws away my application form stating I don't have a valid address proof. I showed him my rental contract. I showed him a mobile phone bill, bank statement proof, etc but none of those were acceptable to him.

So I go downstairs and find a driving instructor and pay his fees. This time he files a separate application just 30 mins after my application gets rejected and this time the guy doesn't even bother reading anything in the application. He just signs it and it's all taken care of. Basically the driving school guy pays the DMV officers a commission for every application that they approve.

This is exactly the same experience I had while getting a driver's license in 2 places - Chennai and Hyderabad. I remember thinking how much of a joke it was.

Sorry, that's just wrong. Delivery systems in India are pretty good in most cities and online stores are a dime a dozen (nothing as dominant as Amazon however). There are even sites which deliver direct from the US (pretty much everything available there). Online payment systems are actually more advanced than in the US.

The real reason is due to a penny-pincher mentality. Even young highly educated people with well paying jobs tend to forego internet connectivity at home and scrounge about in internet cafés or libraries. The value and productivity gains of access is completely discounted. Laptops are still considered luxury items for the elite. Folks here consider actually paying for shipping to be stupid and will spend entire an afternoon walking about in the sun shopping for second-hand books at road-side stalls etc in lieu of forking out hard earned cash just for convenience.

Interesting. The guy I work with lives/works in Pune but seemed quite familiar with Mumbai.

Do you order stuff online? If so, does it arrive as expected? What are shipping charges like for, say, a 5000 rupee (~ $100?) item weighing 1 kg? Is insurance included? I specified that price point because I think it's the maximum insurance payout included in UPS's basic pricing in the US. Just curious.

Yes, quite a few items this past year or so. No issues with any so far. Most items have been books, ps3 games or supplements in the 500 to 3k range, so nothing past 5k yet. Not too sure about insurance, but companies like DHL/BlueDart should have something I guess.

Shipping charges have ranged from free to Rs 50/ Rs 100 (for local items) to Rs 500/ Rs 750 (for US shipments). Shipment times range from a couple of days to about a month depending on if you're paying anything for it.

These prices certainly support your argument. Are online goods priced at least as competitively as in physical stores?

"a penny-pincher mentality"

I see this in the US among people who have limited opportunities to earn additional income beyond their current job. If you are an office clerk making $25K/year, your best means of "earning" an additional dollar might be to procure the same goods for $1 less. Unfortunately, way too many people in the US have few good ways to earn 10% more by working more.

1.You won't typically get "empty packets" but there can be mismatch between what you ordered and what you get. E-commerce sites(rediff, indiatimes) in India are usually terrible. But it is changing. Sites like flipkart provide excellent service.

2. Most payment services are also terrible (ICICI, EBS).They even have a captcha in the payment page!. Some like Citibank are nice though

Rediff and Indiatimes are the swamplands of online stores. Hesitant to even provide them my email-id leave alone banking details.

Not sure what issues you have with ICICI. I find them to be excellent. Not seen any captchas on their site. I think their number-grid security system is a decent one but would be happier with an SMS passcode system.

Are you talking abt ICICI's bank website or payment gateway? Their payment gateway is TERRIBLE. They have a captcha and the captcha code is apparently available in the source code

http://sushubh.net/2543-icici-bank-payment-gateway

I wouldn't trust ICICI with anything. Have found their systems to be typically poorly engineered. HDFC and Citi has been better

Hmm, I've not seen anything like that in payments I've made using them. Only used them for the past year or so and generally like their services (including their branch-less b2 service)

Edit: I'm asking a serious question here - the article itself mentions that the poorest people aren't able to get access to birth certificates or get their home connected to municipal water unless they pay bribes they can't afford. This seems pretty brazenly criminal to me. And the death penalty is legal. So...

Maybe a naive question - how hard would be to just have the government announce they're going to hang anyone who asks for a bribe, then make a big show about hanging 100 corrupt bureaucrats? Wouldn't that drastically cut corruption down?

I think punitive measures generally do not work. What is great about this is that it breaks someones sub-conscience, snaps them out of their behavior (hopefully), at the very moment of corruption.

It would reduce corruption - temporarily, at least, even though the killings would probably end up being very political (a bad thing! Consider how many would take it as a chance to get rid of their enemies). It would also scare bunches of people, and corruption would merely go underground as long as the hangings were enforced, before reappearing when enforcement slips. Not to mention the difficulties with getting the government - assumed to be filled with corruption - to do it. It is basically infinitely easier to educate the populace, make them refuse to give bribes when asked, and give them a way of responding to bribes which both refuses to do so, lets them feel part of an anti-bribe community, and reminds the officials that bribes are illegal.

Also, I doubt that anyone would argue that murdering anyone who asks for a bribe is better than eliminating the environment which makes people feel like they can ask for bribes.

how hard would be to just have the government announce they're going to hang anyone who asks for a bribe, then make a big show about hanging 100 corrupt bureaucrats? Wouldn't that drastically cut corruption down?

Thanks for asking a specific factual question. The policy you mention has not worked in China, where it is widely seen as a way to kill off lower-level officials who are insufficiently cooperative with the highest-level officials. China regularly has publicly announced executions for corruption, but it still has pervasive corruption.

Always carry a licensed Pistol for your personal safety if you wanted to fight corruption in India http://to./3h22

How will you pick the 100 corrupt bureaucrats? By lottery or by targeting your political enemies? Would you really hang your nephew's corrupt best friend, or would you target the guy most likely to be challenge to your party in the next local election (despite his crimes being relatively minor)? The end result wouldn't be a cut down in corruption, it would just make the corrupt more careful about covering their backs.

Capital punishment, though legal, has been reserved for the ["rarest of the rare"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_India#Law) cases by the Supreme Court of India. There have been instances when even serial killers have been pardoned. So it may not even be legally possible to pass such a law.

I took "hanging" metaphorically. Surely jail time or a heavy fine would serve a similar purpose?

While hanging out on LiveJournal's Bangalore forum, I've read several stories that make me think even the threat of legal prosecution in India can be mostly meaningless, with people taking years just to get a trial, and afterwards waiting years before there is a spot in prison for them.

Generally, wide enforcement with lenient penalties works better than narrow enforcement with crazy hard penalties.

catching 100,000 corrupt officials and putting them in jail for 6 months after a hefty fine and loss of position would probably work better.

And how would you make up for the sudden loss of 100,000 bureaucrats? I don't have to think too hard to come up with a number of scenarios where this policy will just make things even worse.

Discussed previously on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077548

Again, I'm finding that SearchYC recently is better at finding articles on the same subject (this earlier one from a different source) than a site-restricted Google search is.

There are both low-level and high-level corruption. Low-level corruption is the naive version that is handing over actual notes to officials to have small things get through the system. High-level corruption is a lot more subtle and transparent than asking for tea money, circling around anywhere where any people have some political power. The high-level kind of corruption is firmly rooted in western countries as well.

It might actually be easier to fight the low-level corruption because the tea money is clearly and undeniably out there, and such blatant bribery is easy to judge. On the other hand the high-level corruption isn't supposed to even exist. The status quo will tell us that there's very limited corruption in many western countries. Further, no physical notes ever change owners but instead agreements, benefits, rewards, slices of power, changes of opinion, and political agendas get from one side to the other.

And all that can be put under the cover of public relations as usual. It's just public relations between those who have money and an agenda and those who have political or journalistic or whatever power. Seemingly everything is immaculate. In reality, it's as dirty as it can be.

The best part about this is that you don't have to go find someone to get these notes. If you have a printer, you can just print them out yourself, how many ever you may want. I'm a bit sceptical of all the success stories though. I'm going to try this with the local traffic policeman the next time he pulls me up, and check his reaction.

you mean, you're going to try the bribe notes in india?

Yeah. Probably the most frequently bribed people in India would be traffic cops on the beat. They confiscate your keys and won't hand them back until you pay them.

It makes me think of the Salt March

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Satyagraha

where many small acts of non-violent protest brought about great change.

Printing Ghandi's mug on every single bill hasn't worked to shame anybody yet, so I'm very surprised that this works. Happy that it seems to though.

It might be more fear than shame...the note is a signal that the person is resolute, prepared, and part of a larger movement.

s/Ghandi/Gandhi/g

Ingenious. Where can I get them for my next trip?

It's not only in India where bribery of government officials and bureaucrats is commonplace, so this idea might spread elsewhere.

I like the way author addresses "non governmental organization" (NGO) as "good-government organization"

It's always nice to see technocracy is alive and well.

India is so cute sometimes I want to pinch it's cheeks.

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