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Illustrations by Andrew Baker
Two Colgate students from India question pervasive corruption
in their homeland. Now they’re combining social activism and
academic techniques to cut it off at the grass roots.
By Aleta Mayne and Mark Walden
It was an elaborate plan. Flanked by five other college students, Bharadwaj Obula Reddy ’12 and Srikar
Gullapalli ’13 were plotting to disrupt the routine chaos in downtown Bangalore’s Jayanagar regional
transport office (India’s equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles). Armed with a guitar, Gullapalli
would make his way into the middle of the dilapidated room, while the others dispersed to the corners.
Together, they’d start belting out India’s national anthem, moving toward the middle of the room while
encouraging the citizens waiting in line for services to join them in song.
At least, that was their plan.
But security guards caught a
glimpse of the crew with a guitar
case and videocamera, and
pushed them back out of the
office. Undeterred, and knowing
the sacrosanctity of India’s
national anthem, the students re­
entered — this time, launching
into song from the moment they
opened the doors. “[Indians]
believe that if someone is singing
the national anthem, everyone
has to stand straight and sing
along — it’s a sign of respect,”
Reddy explained. Their
brazenness worked. The guards
allowed them to enter. Onlookers
froze in their tracks, a hush fell
over the room, and one by one,
the people in the room —
approximately 80 of them —
joined in, albeit quietly. When the
song ended, the students pulled
informational pamphlets out of
their bags, threw them on the
floor, and ran back out into the
windy August day. As they had
hoped, people followed them into
the street, pamphlets in hand,
wanting to know more. Reddy and
Gullapalli gleamed with pride. It
was the first time they had
distributed their findings about the
corrupt nature of government offices in India; they had piqued people’s interest, and incited an
impromptu patriotic act in order to protest government corruption.
Ultimately, they would come to name their efforts “Shudhify” — a combination of shudh
meaning “pure” and the English suffix “ify.”
The great awakening
“Very few Americans — probably no one in this country — leave their houses in the morning knowing
that, at some point during the course of the day, it’s probable that someone’s going to hit them up for a
bribe. But in India, they do,” said Michael Johnston, political science professor and the students’

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"[Gullapalli and Reddy]
may be in a position to put
information and tools in
the hands of the people
who really can change the
way [Bangalore] is
governed."
— Political science professor Michael Johnston
Left to right: Srikar Gullapalli ’13 and Bharadwaj
Obula Reddy ’12
adviser. This concept — that bribery is engrained in Indian society — gets at the heart of Gullapalli and
Reddy’s efforts to effect grassroots change in their homeland.
Corruption in post­independence India dates back decades, to the late 1940s, according to the South
Asia Analysis Group. But, during the summer of 2011 — as Gullapalli and Reddy were conducting their
research — the situation was boiling over. Well­known social activist Anna Hazare had launched a high­
profile hunger strike, campaigning for a strong anticorruption (Lokpal) bill. At the same time the bill
was proposed, the leadership of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came under fire for alleged financial
malpractices related to the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games and an alleged multibillion­dollar 2G cell
phone scam.
Growing up in India — Gullapalli in Bangalore and Reddy in West Godavari — both young men had
always been cognizant of their government’s corrupt practices. As Reddy explained it, corruption is
such a common theme that it oftentimes forms the plot lines of Indian movies. Awareness of corruption
was also discussed openly in both of the students’ homes. As school teachers, Reddy’s parents have
witnessed government unfairness firsthand, from limited school resources to increased job
requirements, depending on the party in power. And, although Gullapalli’s father isn’t directly employed
by the government, he does work for an electronics company that provides much of the technology
used by India’s national defense department. Gullapalli called that company “one of those few beacons
of perfect integrity where even the smallest infraction has a huge penalty.” He added that his father’s
“biggest watchword is integrity.”
Yet, it often takes personal experience to
bring the true meaning of something into focus.
For Reddy, the tainted system hit him directly
when he needed to obtain a driver’s license to
serve as identification when he enrolled at
Colgate. To do so, Reddy had to go through a
“middleman” who would be paid a bribe to
facilitate the process. “Basically, there’s a guy
for everything,” Reddy explained. “There’s a
license guy, a construction permit guy, a land
registration guy…” Reddy met his “license guy”
not at the transport office, but through an
arrangement set up by his father. In rural India,
the process to obtain services starts with the
middleman. The fee: 3,000 rupees, or
approximately $60 (not much for middle­class
citizens, but a deal breaker for low­income
families in India, home to the globe’s highest
concentration of people living below the World
Bank’s $1.25­per­day poverty line). Before
Reddy even set foot in the regional transport
office, he and his father had to meet this
middleman several times to fill out paperwork.
Although he knew that this was the way things
were done, Reddy was shocked when he and the
middleman went to the transport office and he
was told that he wouldn’t be taking his own test.
“I was prepared to take it. I wanted to take it,”
he emphasized. Despite Reddy’s protests, the
government official took the computer test for
him. Within two days, he was granted a license
that is valid for 20 years. “That was a moment
of insight,” Reddy reflected.
Gullapalli attributes his interest in corruption
to a confluence of his background and
experiences, which included interning for a
microfinance research firm in Bangalore after high school graduation and then joining the British
Parliamentary debate team his first year at Colgate. As he argued over big ideas in competition against
other universities, he was selected to join 60 students from around the world for the 2009 Global
Changemakers program in London, organized by the British Council. Through that program, he started
refining some of his ideas — one of them being the seed of Shudhify. He wanted to identify the extent
of Indian corruption at the local level and develop incentives for his countrymen to find new ways of
conducting business.
In London, Gullapalli pitched an early concept for Shudhify to a World Bank representative, who
loved it. That positive reinforcement, combined with the energy of other participants who were
brainstorming ideas for grassroots change, got him fired up. That spring semester, he enrolled in
Johnston’s Political Corruption course. “It was a conscious choice on my part, because Professor
Johnston is one of the world’s leading experts in corruption,” he said. (In 2009, as author of the book
Syndromes of Corruption, Johnston received the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving
World Order. Johnston has also served in various roles for Transparency International, a global
nonprofit organization that monitors corporate and political corruption.)
Speaking a common language
Reddy and Gullapalli became fast friends with their first namaskaram (hello) at Colgate. Although they
hail from two different states that are more than 400 miles apart in India, they learned soon after
meeting that they both speak Telugu, a dialect native to Andhra Pradesh — Reddy’s state, where
Gullapalli’s father grew up. It didn’t take long for them to discover that they also had shared interests
and motivations.

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“They have a level of energy that I can only dimly imagine,” Johnston noted of the friends. Their
ambition became apparent to Johnston in early 2011 when they approached him with an overwhelming
array of ideas on how to measure corruption, hold politicians accountable, and examine their country’s
system of corruption at its roots.
“To be indelicate, he was our bullshit radar,” Gullapalli said of Johnston. With the professor’s guidance,
they honed in on a manageable goal: that seed of an idea that Gullapalli had pitched at the Global
Changemakers program. They decided to survey Indian citizens outside of government offices
immediately after receiving services in order to gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of those sites.
Now, the students had to answer the nagging question of how to put their ideas into motion. They
discovered an opportunity on a poster hanging on the office door of political science professor Stanley
Brubaker, who had also been advising them. The sign prompted them to apply for the Lampert Summer
Fellowship in Public Affairs, coordinated by Colgate’s Institute for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics
(PPE). Established by Ed ’62 and Robin Lampert P’10 in 2009, the fellowship provides full funding for
Colgate students to research a public affairs issue of global significance during the summer. As director
of the PPE, Brubaker was one of the board members who approved Gullapalli and Reddy for the
fellowship. In addition, the pair secured funding from the World Bank and the British Council. Their
project would begin in the summer of 2011.
Making opinions add up
The students chose Bangalore — Gullapalli’s hometown and a place with which Reddy was also well
acquainted — as the starting point for their Shudhify project. Known as India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore
is “a developed, metropolitan city,” Reddy explained. “We wanted to do it in a place where people are
educated and socially aware.”
Added Gullapalli, “[The people in] Bangalore have a history of holding the government accountable
and of pushing for transparency.” One particular citizen feedback campaign, the Citizens’ Report Card
(CRC), served as a building block for the students. Over three years, the Public Affairs Center mailed
surveys to households to measure public satisfaction with various public­sector agencies. Gullapalli and
Reddy hypothesized that brief, on­site surveys would more effectively gather data and hold the
bureaucracy accountable.
Unlike the CRC, the students would conduct their survey directly outside of those government
offices whenever possible. The questions would delve into the customers’ perceptions of the service
they had received immediately after, rather than weeks or months later as with the CRC model. And,
unlike other surveys, they would conduct theirs more frequently and on a local scale, to keep it
logistically and financially manageable.
To achieve their goals, Reddy and Gullapalli created a survey that included five simple questions to
be rated on a scale of 1 to 10. The questions would ask about the ease and organization of the process,
the helpfulness and accessibility of the government officers, speed of service, cost of service in terms
of total money spent and work hours missed, and the cleanliness of the surroundings. Those questions
were followed by four yes/no questions to find out if a middleman was used, if they felt threatened, if
they were asked to pay a bribe, and if they would use that office again.
Although the two students drafted the questions, they didn’t trust the final product to their own
imaginations. They flipped on the B.S. meter and Skyped with Professor Johnston from their home base
in India. Then, they took their questions on the road and showed them to 30 random citizens in
Bangalore, 90 percent of whom thought that the questions would do the trick.
In terms of their academic interests and specialties, Reddy and Gullapalli move within each other’s
circles on campus and have taken several of the same courses. But, at the end of the day, Gullapalli is
the political science major and Reddy is the math/economics major. With the survey questions
developed, it was time for Reddy’s numerical skills to factor into the equation.
The goal of the Shudhify project is to produce a single score rating multiple offices throughout the
city. In order to produce that kind of final figure, Reddy and Gullapalli had to create an algorithm; in
other words, they had to give each rated question a point score based on its relative value. The
process had begun 9,000 miles away in McGregory Hall in the spring of 2011. At that time, Gullapalli
was taking Professor Dan Schult’s Applied Math for Social Sciences course (Reddy was already a class
veteran). Together, they approached Schult for a little advice.
“We went through the process just like in class and tried to identify what things could be measured
and what things would be important to measure,” Schult remembered.
To determine the relative value — the importance of each item measured for their rating system —
Reddy and Gullapalli convened focus groups in Bangalore early in the summer and asked
representative populations what they most looked for when they went to seek services at local police
stations, regional transport offices (RTOs), and utility offices. “We realized that perception is all that
matters,” said Reddy. “Because what the government needs to know is how happy the people are.”
Based on their research, they weighted the first five questions to determine the number of possible
points that could be awarded for each. In an ideal world, for example, a police station could receive up
to 20 points for a perfect rating on the service scale. But how would a customer know if his service
was worth full points if he used a middleman? He wouldn’t. So, if he said “yes” to the question of “Did
you use a middleman?” Reddy and Gullapalli took off a standard number of points when the final tally
was complete. If the survey participant didn’t use a middleman and was threatened directly as a result,
again, the offending agency was docked points on its final score. But, if the service was speedy and the
customer went unthreatened, an agency stood to gain. In this way, the yes/no questions served as a
check on subjective responses.
Having started with their gut instincts, Reddy and Gullapalli consulted professionals and nonprofit
organizations to test the soundness of their method. They reconnected with Schult and Johnston. They
also submitted their algorithm to the Public Affairs Center, authors of the Citizens’ Report Card. After
receiving an international blessing, they decided to go live with their survey.
Dividing Bangalore into zones, the students identified the city’s six RTOs and chose 45 high­traffic
police stations around the city as their survey sites. “The agencies we selected represent a mix of
essential and nonessential services, and denote what we saw as a cross­section of a citizen’s life in

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relation
to the
services
provided
by the
government,” the students explained in
their final report. Since then, they have
rezoned the city according to its 28
legislative constituencies so that politicians
can be, in the end, held accountable.
Organized in that fashion, the feedback can
serve as “a metric to judge a political
incumbent when he stands up for re­
election,” Gullapalli explained, noting that
“politicians promise better services when
they campaign.”
To gain permission to conduct surveys
in police stations, they sought the help of a
police commissioner, who also happened to
be the uncle of Reddy’s high school friend.
“He is pro­change, very innovative,” Reddy
explained. “He asked us to write a letter
that he signed, stating that we should be
given any help we needed.”
The pair also wanted to gauge the
public’s satisfaction with the government
agencies that manage electricity, land allocation and
infrastructure development, water and sewage, and
property taxes and town planning. Because the majority
of those agencies’ business happens in people’s homes,
those surveys were conducted by canvassing
neighborhoods near the selected police stations.
Gullapalli and Reddy’s team of graduate students in
Bangalore administered close to 2,000 surveys, and
more are still being conducted.
‘Middlemen suck’
Although data is still being collated, the students’ initial findings are dismal. None of the RTOs fulfilled
even half of the citizens’ expectations, with scores ranging from 3.93 to 4.8 out of 10. Yet, Gullapalli
and Reddy remain optimistic about the potential for change. “While this depicts the sad state of RTOs
currently, it also conveys another important idea: as excessive corruption and inefficiency are
desensitizing the people as a nation, this statistic tells us that people are still expecting better service
from the government and have not given up hope,” the students explained in their report.
The most corrupt RTO was found to be the Jayanagar office. For that dubious distinction, it was the
chosen site of the students’ peaceful protest by song. The pamphlets they dropped before fleeing
offered simple information and advice: “Middlemen suck. Why? For an average increase in speed only
from 4.276/10 to 4.492/10, is it worth all those extra 1000s of rupees they charge you?” Instead, they
suggested, the money is better spent on something else, like going to the theater.
Customer satisfaction with police stations was also low — meeting less than or barely half of the
expectations. What’s more, at the two stations that received the lowest ratings, between 60 and 100
percent of those surveyed said they had been threatened. Responses from all 2,000 surveys indicated
that close to 40 percent reported being threatened.
Gullapalli and Reddy are still collecting data regarding other types of agencies. From the early data,
they have found interesting patterns when comparing different government agencies in the same areas,
including correlations between high or low service efficiency and high or low corruption levels. For
example, in one zone, the police station ranked the lowest among all police stations, the RTO also
ranked the lowest, and 100 percent of respondents to surveys in the same zone reported being
threatened.
A plot to plot corruption
Once all of the data is collected, Gullapalli and Reddy will create a map depicting the corruption scores
around Bangalore. Different colors will indicate how much corruption or inefficiency exists in particular
zones of the city. Their goal is to inform citizens — of the city’s best police station with the least
instances of corruption, the location of the most efficient RTO, or the office that enables simple, hassle­
free home construction.
Between their own dissemination efforts and the press (the students have already garnered media
attention in two articles in the Times of India), Gullapalli and Reddy believe that the spread of
information will empower citizens as well as encourage government officials to elevate standards and
decrease corruption. After all, “the government’s goal is to meet citizens’ standards,” Gullapalli
emphasized.
Acknowledging that not all government officials are corrupt, the students have been interviewing
employees at various offices, asking them why they believe people were dissatisfied and gave them a
low score. Thus far, Gullapalli and Reddy have met a few local commissioners who have asked for
suggestions and are considering engaging with the other offices to improve their ratings. “The
willingness of these government officers to work with us and their desire to get a better rating is

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encouraging,” Gullapalli said. “The next plan is to draw specific directives.”
Taking a top­down approach has had its pitfalls, however, because getting access to
“those who are actually doing the paper pushing” has been what Gullapalli and Reddy
have called a “bureaucratic nightmare.” They did receive help from a transport
commissioner, who gave them an official seal of permission to conduct their interviews,
and they are hoping that other connections will pave the way in other offices.
Gullapalli and Reddy are planning more performance activism — “wacky, crazy,
attention­grabbing dares that are tailored to the trend that we observe in a particular
office or zone,” they said in their final report. For example, they’re already choreographing a zombie
dance mimicking Michael Jackson’s Thriller, to be performed at the government office that has been
deemed to have the slowest service.
Gullapalli and Reddy see the potential for change as three­pronged. Citizens will be less tolerant
and will be informed enough to be able to hold their government agency branches to the standard of
the best branches in the city. Officers will perform better because they will know they are being
compared to their counterparts in other parts of the city (they may also aspire to be transferred to a
more desirable branch). And, private investment firms will be more attracted to areas of low corruption
and high efficiency.
A new spring
As seen most recently with the Arab Spring, when everyday citizens join together, they can incite a
revolution within their country. In India, too, change is starting — and Gullapalli and Reddy are among
those igniting the fire.
In an effort unrelated to the students’ work, but that is making an impact in the same areas, a
nonprofit organization in Bangalore called Janaagraha started a website called I Paid a Bribe
(ipaidabribe.com). The site provides a platform for citizens around the world to report their stories
about bribery and corruption. In March, the New York Times wrote about the site and included the
encouraging story of Bhaskar Rao who, as transport commissioner for the state of Karnakata (where
Bangalore is located), used data from the site to push for reforms in its motor vehicle departments.
Now, licenses are applied for online, and Bangalore has the world’s first automated driving test tracks,
which monitor drivers’ skills with electronic sensors — to eliminate “the whims and fancies of the
motor vehicle inspectors.” A number of senior officers in the department were also “cautioned” and
underwent ethics counseling. “[The site] helped me get my colleagues to fall in line, and it helped me
persuade my superiors that we needed to do this,” said Rao, who is now the inspector general of police
for internal security.
And remember that dilapidated office where the students protested in song? Last January, with the
help of Rao, it got a makeover. As reported in the Hindu newspaper, the new 26,000­square­foot facility
boasts “Vitrified flooring, large windows, well­planned cubicles for the staff, chambers for officers,
clear, bilingual boards and signages for different sections, giving a distinct appearance to this RTO.”
Perhaps most notably, the renovations also included the installation of surveillance cameras to watch
out for “touts” — middlemen and other repeat visitors who might be engaging in illegal activities.
This summer, Reddy and Gullapalli will continue their own work in Bangalore. They have applied for
additional funding and, with Johnston’s help, will be meeting experts from various organizations who
are interested in supporting the Shudhify project.
“In the United States, we brought corruption broadly under control, but it took a century and a half,”
Johnston said. “India may not have that much time, but it also can’t be done quickly. [Gullapalli and
Reddy] may be in a position to put information and tools in the hands of the people who really can
change the way [Bangalore] is governed. That’s a major contribution.”
Reddy and Gullapalli have dared themselves to tackle a systemic social issue in the world’s second–
most–populous country. They have dared their officers to turn away from the graft that exponentially
increases public­sector salaries, and they have challenged their fellow citizens to stop participating in a
system that stratifies services for rich and poor, preventing everyone from enjoying the benefits of a
truly democratic society.
More dares are in the offing, and while another flash mob might provoke a smile or raise an
eyebrow, the intended outcomes are intensely serious. For Gullapalli and Reddy, what began as a class
project could — in the decades to come — produce a sea change in the way that Indian society sees
and conducts its public life. A renovated political system would allow Gullapalli to pursue one of his
dreams: running for office and serving his constituents without the ethical concerns that come with
navigating a system that runs, in part, on bribery. On the cusp of graduation, Reddy — instead of
following his father’s advice to work in the United States — could chase his entrepreneurial instincts in
India. He could found a business without budgeting the speed money that he would currently need to
ensure a quick completion of his licensing paperwork.
Like most college students, Reddy and Gullapalli have big plans for life after commencement. But,
unlike many of their American peers, they believe that they have work to do before they can pursue
their ambitions. They must shudhify their homeland. They began by singing with five friends, and
they’re determined to have a whole nation join their anthem before the chorus ends.