When Bharadwaj Reddy ’12 chose to attend 51 from India, he thought he would spend four years without ever hearing or speaking Telugu, his native tongue, to anyone on campus. But during his sophomore year he found Srikar Gullapali ’13, a friend and colleague who not only speaks his language, but has similar goals in life.
Funded in part by a Lampert Summer Fellowship from 51, they spent last summer researching corruption and bribery at government offices across Bangalore, India. The World Bank also supported their trip.
Their mentor was Michael Johnston, Charles A. Dana Professor of political science, one of the world’s leading authorities on corruption. In 2009, Johnston’s book Syndromes of Corruption was awarded the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.
Gullapali, a political science major, came up with the idea for the project in Johnston’s Political Corruption course. Reddy, a mathematics major, learned to build the project’s unique ratings algorithm in the Applied Mathematics course taught by Professor Dan Schult.
“These are two very imaginative guys with this great energy level,” said Johnston, who communicated with his students over the summer via Skype and email. “Part of my role was to rein them in, so they would pursue only nine ideas at a time, instead of 21. I helped them refine what they wanted to measure, and how to go about it.”
According to Reddy, the research broke ground because it was location based. “In the past, surveys were conducted in households, weeks or months after a transaction with a government office had taken place,” he said. “We went right into all the government areas, and asked what the people thought of the service they received, while the experience was fresh in their mind.”
Gullapali said: “And this is all location based, so it’s all on a map. You can say this area is inefficient and corrupt, and this area is efficient and not corrupt. It gives you a snapshot of the entire city.”
After surveying customers and workers at 20 police stations and six regional transport offices, they found that 40 percent of citizens encountered threats and were asked for bribes. They also concluded that it was statistically a waste of money to use a middleman to expedite garnering government services.
Reddy said: “What we found on the ground through our research was that there is only 19 percent chance that you would get your service any faster. So the 3000 rupees that someone is going to spend [to expedite a driver’s license] is actually not worth it. They are probably better off spending it on watching a Harry Potter movie, and that’s exactly what we told them.”