Balconies, Bribes, and Us

While sitting on the balcony of my parents’ apartment in Delhi, my wife and I noticed that nearly every neighbor had enclosed their balcony to create an extra room. We thought, why not us?

The contractor’s first line item was blunt: Rs 1,00,000 for the Municipal Corporation. He said it had been standard practice for decades.

We backed out. We could, because it was a discretionary project. If it hadn’t been, we would have paid up.

That’s what sustains this kind of corruption: often, people can’t walk away and lack the stomach to fight the system.

It’s a familiar story. Yet reflecting on my recent trips to India and my years teaching in America, I’m more optimistic than pessimistic. The conditions that make corruption feel normal are shifting. 

Two Types of Corruption 

Every day, bribes grease routine tasks: getting a building plan approved, collecting an Aadhaar card from the mail carrier, dealing with the local police, and the like. 

These bribes are corrosive, but the more damaging ones are those that distort high-stakes decision-making and oversight, leading to substandard infrastructure and public services. 

America’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which I taught as an instructor, offers an illustrative contrast. It has historically been more tolerant of ‘facilitation payments,’ but not of payments that change outcomes, such as who wins a contract.

In India, that distinction has blurred in a harmful way. A culture that makes petty bribes routine makes the truly damaging kind more palatable. It’s just the next step.

We Are All Participants

The academic dishonesty policy of American colleges offers a relevant parallel. If a student gives unauthorized help and another receives it, both are penalized equally.

This policy surprised my Indian students. They blamed only the recipient; the helper was pressured or doing a favor.

Bribery works similarly. Under Indian law, the bribe-giver is also guilty, though those who are coerced and report it promptly may be exempted. But as with my students, many Indians offering bribes don’t see themselves as doing anything wrong. Often, with good reason, they see themselves as victims, someone just trying to get on with life.

But worryingly, not always. Sometimes, payers initiate the bribe and then boast about getting things done. 

The takers are a different story. Several of my engineering classmates spent their careers at electricity boards, public works departments, and the like, places where kickbacks have been the norm for decades.

Many chose these roles knowing what they entailed.

Oddly, some are vocal complainers about corruption in our WhatsApp group, conveniently overlooking their own participation. To them, the truly corrupt are always someone else.

This mindset is precisely what makes change seem unlikely.

And yet, based on my recent experience, change is happening — slowly, unevenly, but genuinely.

Something Has Shifted

Technology

To resettle my parents in India, I dealt with banks, tax offices, household services providers, and more. It was often frustrating, but less than I had feared and vastly better than it was decades ago. 

Technology is gradually eliminating physical service interactions at public offices. The first time I cleared a government process online, it felt exhilarating. By the third or fourth time, it felt routine.

That shift is important.

With technology chipping away at petty corruption, the more damaging kind will gradually lose its cultural cover. Pressure to tackle it will build as the ‘everyone does it’ narrative weakens.

AI could accelerate that pressure. It can track patterns of favoritism that leave a data trail, such as vendors that repeatedly win contracts in a single district and not elsewhere or consistently win by unusually low margins.

India now has the required digital infrastructure and, given its ambitions of becoming an economic powerhouse, the motivation to deploy AI to curb corruption.

AI can’t eliminate corruption, but it tilts the odds in favor of detection. And people respond when the odds shift against them.

Decades ago, I never imagined that India would become one of the world’s most connected countries within a generation. Technological leapfrogging made it possible.

AI could do the same for corruption, if institutions act on what technology reveals.

That’s a big part of why I am optimistic.

Privatization

Another positive shift is the privatization of front-end government services. When I had to update my father’s Aadhaar-linked mobile number, I feared the worst, but was pleasantly surprised.

A private contractor operated the counter just outside the government building, and the process was smooth.

Scaling this model will be a political uphill battle, but it replaces a system where bribe-taking is the norm with one based on performance evaluation.

Privatization may not reach the deeper layers of corruption, but it impacts the layer most people encounter daily.

But these changes can go only so far.

The Harder Shift

At least when each is seen in isolation. However, together, the cumulative effect of technology, privatization, and other initiatives, each reinforcing the others, can make the improbable probable.

America, relatively clean today, wasn’t always this way. No single reformer, nor any sudden shift in values, made America less corrupt. It was the accumulated changes that made the difference.

India may follow a similar path, perhaps accelerated by technology and economic ambition. 

But the shift that matters most is cultural.

The classmates who took kickbacks and still complain about corruption on WhatsApp — that contradiction should feel uncomfortable.

Right now it doesn’t. As AI makes corruption harder to hide, privatization reduces opportunities to practice it, and technology erodes its social cover, that discomfort will grow.

Corruption will fade when systems stop making it easy, and when the stories we tell ourselves, whether as reluctant victims, opportunistic fixers, or rationalizing takers, about our own role stop making it acceptable.