Aryan Nishad had a fairly straightforward idea: if Indians keep being asked for bribes at government offices, why not at least create a public record of those experiences?Then the internet did what the internet does best — it took a student project and gave it a much bigger audience than expected.Bribes.fyi, the crowdsourced platform created by Nishad to anonymously document alleged bribery demands, has now been shut down temporarily after an extraordinary spike in traffic. The team says it is taking a step back to put stronger legal and financial infrastructure in place, with plans to return.The twist is almost more interesting than the original idea.
From side project to “we need a CA”
When Nishad launched Bribes.fyi, the concept was deliberately simple. Users could anonymously report alleged demands for bribes while accessing public services, with reports organised around departments, cities and other details.The platform was never presented as an official complaint mechanism or a database of proven corruption cases.But it quickly became much bigger than a typical student-built side project.In a LinkedIn update shared during the surge, Manish Sahani, who said he had been helping with the product and strategy, described the scale as creating “real responsibility”. He said Bribes.fyi had recorded more than 5 million requests and around 200,000 new users in just 48 hours, while attracting coverage from news organisations across India.
The team subsequently paused new submissions and support.And suddenly, the project had a new problem: not how to build the website, but how to responsibly run one that thousands of people were using to make allegations about a sensitive subject.That is a rather serious upgrade from the usual “my college project is live” announcement.
Aryan Nishad asks for professional help
Nishad’s LinkedIn activity also shows the project looking beyond engineering.A request was made for lawyers and Chartered Accountants familiar with Indian technology issues to help the team establish the legal and financial foundations needed to operate the platform.That request prompted offers of assistance from people in the legal, accounting, technology and civil-liberties communities.One commenter offered CA experience despite not having a background specifically in Indian technology. Another offered pro-bono legal-tech support, including compliance, privacy, grievance-management and secure documentation.
The response illustrates how quickly the problem changed.At launch, the difficult question was essentially: Can this website work?After going viral, the question became: Can this website safely exist at scale?
The comments exposed the bigger problem
The reaction to Bribes.fyi also revealed why running such a database is considerably harder than building one.Some commenters raised concerns about fake submissions, political manipulation and the possibility of organised groups flooding the platform with allegations to make a particular department, city or political group look worse.One commenter suggested requiring video evidence and naming the person allegedly demanding a bribe. That suggestion, however, also highlights the privacy and legal complications involved in turning anonymous allegations into supposedly definitive evidence.Another commenter pointed to a different civic-tech model: documenting delays rather than alleging bribery. The argument was that recording promised versus actual timelines for government and other services could provide useful public data without directly attaching corruption allegations to individuals.The debate goes to the heart of Bribes.fyi’s problem.Crowdsourcing makes participation easy.It also makes verification difficult.
617 reports were only the beginning
Before the shutdown, the platform had already accumulated hundreds of reports.As of August 17, the database showed 617 reports from 253 cities. Police-related reports accounted for 336 entries, followed by RTO-related reports with 89, revenue and land records with 69, passport offices with 43 and municipal corporations with 29.The platform also reported that 37% of respondents said they refused to pay the alleged bribe and still managed to complete their work.Those figures made the project interesting as a snapshot of people’s experiences — but they could not establish which department or city was actually “most corrupt”.That distinction matters.A crowdsourced database measures what people report, not necessarily what happens in the real world.And when the subject is alleged corruption, that gap between reported experience and verified fact becomes especially important.
The shutdown may be Bribes.fyi’s most important update yet
For a project built around transparency, temporarily disappearing from public view may sound ironic.But the shutdown could turn out to be the most consequential phase of Bribes.fyi’s short life.Nishad and those helping with the project now have to think about questions that do not usually appear in a student coding assignment: data protection, moderation, legal exposure, financial structure, false submissions, platform abuse and what happens when a website becomes unexpectedly influential.The team has indicated that it is taking a break to put the necessary infrastructure in place and return.That means Bribes.fyi’s story is no longer simply about whether a student can build a website exposing alleged bribery experiences.It is about what happens after the website works a little too well.Nishad started with a question about why everyday corruption stories remain scattered and anecdotal.The internet supplied an answer of its own: collect those stories in one place and, very quickly, you may have a completely different problem.The next version of Bribes.fyi — if and when it returns — will therefore have to solve something much harder than coding.It will have to figure out how to turn public participation into useful civic data without allowing that same participation to become a tool for misinformation, political targeting or unverified accusations.For now, the bribe-reporting website is offline.The bigger experiment, however, may only be getting started.
