Comment by captn3m0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by captn3m0 | Hacker News Reader

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Having lived in India all my life, I’ve never seen one of these notes, or known anyone who used these. They are not part of the cultural zeitgeist - no films or shows that have them for eg.

The only time I’ve seen them mentioned is in news reports about their existence as a campaign, never actual usage.

Another interesting campaign around corruption is ipaidabribe.com to gain some data around this. Unfortunately, both giving and taking bribes is illegal, thus you need anonymity for reports resulting in a lower data quality.

To fix that, there’s proposals to make it legal to pay “harassment bribes” (the ones where the bribe giver does not gain undue advantage).

> Giving complete immunity to the bribe-giver would ensure higher reporting and co-operation of the giver in bringing to justice the bribe taker. The present law acts as a deterrent to reporting of bribery.

https://prsindia.org/theprsblog/should-bribe-giving-be-legal...

In a nutshell, the government does not differentiate between bribery and blackmail. "Harassment bribes" is blackmail, plain and simple.

> “harassment bribes” (the ones where the bribe giver does not gain undue advantage)

Isn't that the point of the bribe? Why else would they pay it?

Harassment bribe sounds more like if an official were running some sort of unofficial protection racket. But feels like it'd be absurd to punish the bribe giver for that already, considering that the protection racket itself would be illegal.

This paper [1] seems to use the term to describe bribes given to obtain things you're already legally entitled to, which makes a bit more sense. There's an old Indian meme about pensioners having to pay a bribe to get their monthly payment for instance.

[1] https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/50335.html

Because they would otherwise be denied a service or freedom they are legally entitled to. "Undue advantage" is a bribe like "hey choose my company for this lucrative government contract." A harassment bribe is more like "hey here's some money for you to not charge me with a made-up traffic violation", or "hey here's some money in addition to the actual driver's license fee, so that you'll actually do your job and give me my license".

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