- Bribe Fighter
- 14 years ago
- 3982 views
I feel empowered and proud thanks to I Paid A Bribe!!
I reached the SUb-Rregistrar's office in Sarjapur at 10 a.m. exactly at the time they open. I met the person who inspects documents to make sure everything was in order and he mentioned a couple of them that were a little old and that things have changed in the last month!! Anyway he said he will consider us and asked us to go ahead with the registration process. The Sub-Registrar came in 12 p.m. because of **********. I immediately rushed to her room. We had already become very famous thanks to the builder who had told everybody that we are not prepared to pay any bribe. The first thing that she told us was that she will not ask us for any bribe considering that both she and my mother are women and my mother is old and she respects her, etc. We were treated like VIPs and she even made sure we got coffee in very nice mugs!! She said the reason they are all forced to take bribes is that they have to pay big bucks to get this position or she would have been shunted around to some obscure locations where she would be separated from her family, etc. She said the root cause of corruption is the way politicians get elected through money power and that Janaagraha should do something aobut that. So these politicians take money from people like her to make up what was spent in the elections. Also these builders are not being straightforward either. Most builders if not all, including my mother's have not declared the full value of the property. 1/3 of the property value was put as "Developmental Charges" for which we don't pay Stamp Duty. She pointed that out to me. The moment I noticed it I had asked my builder about it and he said he can't change it just for me because it will affect all the others in the development. This is not right. One thing all of us property buyers, especially the ones buying villas and apartments is make sure with the builder that the full value of the property is declared for calculation of stamp duty and registration charges. Otherwise the Government is losing money and we end up paying bribes to circumvent this. As Raghu says, let us pay taxes and not bribes!! Anyway I got my job done in no time after that. My builder told me that he has done over 1500 registrations and this is the first time he is doing without paying this extra cash, as he put it!! This website gave me the knowledge and hence the confidence to pursue this without paying a paise as bribe. Thanks Raghu and the whole team!!