At I Paid a Bribe, we were laser focused on people reporting bribes they’d paid. We wanted to know what this black economy looked like, especially the one made up of petty bribes or what we called retail corruption.
Three months into my stint at Janaagraha, we were looking at over 15,000 reports of bribes paid. Procuring a driving license, passport + police verification, ration card, registration of a piece of land or house were the most common reasons for paying a bribe.
What emerged when we read through each of these reports was that most people who paid fell into two camps:

1. Those who didn’t have the time/inclination/patience to follow the process and see it through

2. Those who didn’t have the information they needed readily available and had to buckle under pressure from a government official

Introduction of How-To’s on I Paid a Bribe
There was clearly an unmet need of information not being readily available. Our goal was straightforward: Make information about these transactions — the do’s and don’ts, the documents needed, how long it takes for a transaction to be processed, etc — available in one place. And that’s how the How-To section on I Paid a Bribe was introduced.

The MVP version of How-To’s was a scraggly list compiled by culling together information from various government sites. We prioritized this list based on the number of bribe paid reports that were coming in for a particular department and its transactions. We realized the processes sometimes varied from city to city even for what clearly should have been a single unified process across the country. My favorites: Procuring a Driving License and the much anxiety causing Police Verification for a Passport.
A month after we rolled this out, traffic shot up by 30% and emails and comments thanking us started pouring in. Someone called our office and asked if he could get printouts. All of this for information that was already out there on various sites rolled out as part of India’s National e-Governance Plan but SO hard to find.

Here’s what the How-To section looks like now (heavily influenced by gov.uk, might I add):

Information was aggregated to be made available in a single place, by city (we focused on the metros) and wherever applicable, across India. We even added in details about how to track down PAN cards, Passports, etc.

India’s National e-Governance Plan (NeGP)
India’s National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) formulated by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology aka DEITy(The Goddess of Information?) has a simple but lofty goal: “Make all Public Services accessible to the common man in his locality, through common service delivery outlets and ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of such services at affordable costs to realize the basic needs of the common man.”
The NeGP is setup as a 3-tier structure which covers the delivery touchpoints for citizens(Common Service Centres (CSCs)), the infrastructure for Centre and State collaboration (State Wide Area Networks (SWANs), State Data Centers (SDCs)) and the mission critical projects themselves which form the e-delivery based services (Mission Mode Projects (MMPs)).

Dig further into the NeGP’s rollout plan and you’ll see how convoluted the path to this ideal state of e-governance is. While the proposed focus is on making it easy for a citizen to access services, the plan leans more towards serving the needs of the ministries than the end users’ needs. While there are SLAs for the processes themselves (normal passport in 3 days as opposed to 7–14 days), there are no clear outcomes and well-defined metrics for success for the ministries and state functions that form the MMP’s.

Despite all its good intentions citizens still have to scramble to find the information and process their transactions across portals that don’t share anything in common but the goal of being online. All the ministries and their extensions look, feel and function very differently from each other. In other words, the end user — a citizen’s — pain doesn’t go away, it’s just distributed and multiplied by the number of sites they have to access now. Where we were running from pillar to post in the offline world, we’re doing the same — only online! In the end, most people are still just as unaware and overwhelmed by government processes and at the mercy of touts just as it were before the e-volution took over.
What Urban Indian Citizens Want

Based on the data that came into I Paid a Bribe, this is how often an average Indian interacts with the government through his lifetime:

That the government has identified 27 Mission Mode Projects which cover most of these citizen interactions with the government is a step in the right direction. However, the impact of these would have been far greater if a holistic view towards unification and simplification of the entire e-governance model in India was adopted. If we take the anecdata from I Paid a Bribe to inform the larger plan for India’s e-governance or digital strategy, there are 4 explicit needs of these target users (as seen in the below) that should be addressed:

1. A Single Unified Responsive Online Portal
As part of making the process to record bribe reports on I Paid a Bribe easier, we’d listed out all the departments(30) and the various transactions that these departments handled (on an average, 10 each).

What we noticed was that there was no single definition of what department could handle what transaction. While the Department of Stamps and Registration handled marriage registrations in some cities, the local Municipal bodies handled the marriage, birth and land registrations in another. Here’s a sample from I Paid a Bribe of what Municipal Bodies across the country handle dependent on the state, city:

Here are all the transactions that BBMP Bangalore’s Municipal Corporation handles. However, if you head to another city or state you’d probably see a very different version of this:

Currently there is no single portal from where an Indian citizen could access all the information he needs and view it by city or state. The common man will never be able to comprehend why he has to go to one site to find information about passports, another about births and yet another about marriage registration. Imagine if there was no Google, how would this user reach the site? Add to this the cognitive load of figuring out a different design, a different navigation, different terminology every time this user lands on a government site.

2. Readily Available Information
Currently so much of the information is hidden away in PDFs or Excel sheets that aren’t easy to find or password protected. Just making it easy to find the information by way of an FAQ or search or even through a step-by-step wizard would right away address the needs of that 30% who come to I Paid a Bribe looking for information.
When I’d applied for the renewal of my passport, all I wanted was the list of documents I should carry to the PSK. And everytime I had to go through an unnecessarily cumbersome step-by-step process of identifying what kind of renewal I was looking for, yada yada. All I got in the end was a PDF.

I shouldn’t have to read up 3 different sites and ask 4 different people how many bottles of liquor I can carry into the country, or fall prey so naively to the Facebook rage around the Service Tax that restaurants charge.
3. Simplified Trackable Transactions
The charter for these 27 MMPs includes quicker turnaround times which is a great start. But for every person who applies for a passport via the MEA site or a PAN card online, there would be at least 3 others who go the “Agent” route.
Over at the MEA site, the process is overwhelming and complicated when it doesn’t need to be — fill up the form using Acrobat Reader, upload as XML. Think of the context in which an Urban Indian citizen lives: We can book a ticket anytime via Cleartrip for a flight that takes off in the next 4 hours but we must wait with bated breath for the Tatkal slots to open at 6 pm.
UIs have evolved to show timelines, on-boarding processes that make it simple to update and track transactions that are depending on multiple parties. Make it easy to apply for a driving license, track the PAN card, update the address on my Voter ID all from an inter-linked portal. Why, I should even be able to pay my electricity bills or even traffic fines from the same place.

Here’s a simple delivery timeline for my No Nasties package. How hard would it be to extend a similar experience to passport or PAN Card tracking?

4. Single Point of Identity Management
This is my biggest grouse: My identity as defined by the government manifests itself in multiple ways, none of which are linked to each other. I’m yet to apply for an Aadhaar Card but even the ID’s I have don’t work together seamlessly. The birth date on my Voter ID is incorrect, my Passport has my full name (with the 2 middle names included), the PAN Card just has initials for my middle names. Then there is the eternal problem with multiple addresses: Permanent Address vs Present Address. This in an era when most people can’t afford to buy houses and are perpetual nomads. In my particular case, I can’t even use one ID to help me process a transaction that involves the creation or renewal of another simply because of the discrepancy in how the middle names are shown on a piece of paper.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this. What if this single access portal could track and link all of these various identities of an Indian citizen in one place and create a unified profile? That is, allow me to link the income tax returns to my profile, track my passport’s expiry and then renewal. Or change my constituency when I move cities and want to vote.
Is Aadhaar the answer? I don’t know. It’s not a very ominous start if I can’t even apply for an Aadhaar Card online.

The Scale of Opportunity and Impact
There are about 377 million of us living in Urban India. According to an IAMAI report India was expected to have 185 million mobile web users in Urban India by June 2014. India’s broadband subscription base is pegged at around 55 million.
Going by pure reach, there’s a solid case for bringing various government processes online with an urban focus first. Increasing access either through greater broadband and mobile coverage or specifically staffed centers would only quicken the pace of adoption and usage.

The goal of making public services easily accessible to the common man can’t be fulfilled if it’s limited by definitions of how these can be accessed, who accesses them. The focus should remain on the experience and ensuring a DIY approach to whether it is accessing information or completing transactions.