New Delhi: The Indian anti-corruption website, bribes.fyi, announced it has shut down indefinitely.
“We are taking an indefinite break and have no plans to enable the submissions again,” read the notification.
The announcement further said that the decision was taken voluntarily to “sunset the website” as a “precautionary step” to avoid misuse of the platform, and not in response to any complaint.
“We will keep the status page live for some more time and finally shut it down forever, along with the permanent deletion of any recorded data”, it read.
48 hours of hype
Launched by 20-year-old engineering student Aryan Nishad on 2 July, the website first went offline “voluntarily” two days ago.
The earlier notification read: “We will be back shortly”.
On 18 August, Nishad and his colleague, Manish Sahani, announced in a LinkedIn post that they are working towards strengthening the legal and financial structure for the website.
“Pausing new submissions and support for now. Back soon”, wrote Sahani.
Nishad then asked if there were any lawyers or chartered accountants with experience in Indian tech or someone “willing” to help out.
Meanwhile, the website updated its status to: “This is a voluntary, precautionary step, not a response to any complaint.”
The website last showed that it had received more than 600 reports on bribes. In the last 48 hours, it received more than five million requests and over two lakh new users in the last 48 hours.
A similar platform, Ipaidabride, launched in 2010, faced a similar fate and was also shut down two years later. Former IAS officer T.R. Raghunandan, who ran and managed the initiative told ThePrint, “the funders started pulling out”.
“When these reforms really begin to take shape, the funders pull out. We were actually working with governments to reduce avenues of corruption and the funders did not like that, they wanted this to be a journalistic airy-fairy kind of thing whereas I was using the crowdsource reports as content for actually identifying patterns and trying to create processes that avoid corruption”, he told ThePrint over a call.
At the time the initiative had become one of world’s largest single source of crowdsource reports because the software was open and it was running in 40 countries, claimed Raghunandan.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)