If you’ve ever traveled to Southeast Asia or the Middle East, you’re probably accustomed to having to “grease the wheels” a little bit if you expect help from local officials. Known as “baksheesh” in the Middle East, these small tips (okay, bribes) are common throughout much of the world for anyone looking to park a car, avoid a traffic ticket, move to the head of a line, or awaken a sleeping bureaucrat.
Although for many travelers baksheesh is more a novelty than a nuisance– probably because of their limited exposure to it– for many locals baksheesh is a frustrating and costly part of daily life. So how to stop the bribery and corruption? An Indian physics professor thinks he has the answer: Shame.
Professor Satindar Mohan Bhagat, now a professor of physics at the University of Maryland, came up with the idea of a “zero-rupee note” after growing tired of the endless demands for bribes on trips back to his native India.
According to one article, “The notes, printed and distributed by a good-government organization called 5th Pillar, include the phrase that the bearer ‘promises to neither accept nor give a bribe.'” Citizens who are solicited for a “tip” are supposed to give the zero-rupee notes to bribe-seeking officials in the hope of shaming them into withdrawing their request.
Perhaps surprisingly, this technique has been already successful in hundreds of cases:
In one instance, a corrupt bureaucrat apologized and returned money he had previously extorted from a village to connect it to the electrical grid. In another, an official who had just asked for “tea money” from an elderly woman stood up, offered his seat to her, brought her a real cup of tea, and then approved the loan she needed for her granddaughter to go to college.
Whole thing here.