Makkal Saatchi, a website started by Chennai software engineer Deepak Sivakumar, a supporter of the ruling Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), has, in a little over two months, collected more than 1,310 citizen complaints about bribery across Tamil Nadu. The site, whose name translates to ‘People’s Witness’, has garnered information about alleged bribes totalling Rs 24 crore, spread across 38 districts. Thirty-two-year-old Deepak says he runs it all by himself, checking the live dashboard “about once every hour”, to pull down whatever looks obviously fake.
The idea, in his telling, came to him after the state’s new Chief Minister — actor-politician Vijay — was sworn in on May 10, 2026, and spoke about tackling corruption. Deepak’s first thought wasn’t land offices or police stations. It was about Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (TASMAC) shops, the government’s liquor outlets, charging Rs 10 extra a bottle. “That’s where it started,” he says.
He built and launched the site the very next day. Within 10 days, he says, it had drawn hundreds of complaints — the exact count shifts even within his own account, from “around 300” to “around 450” — which made him realise that the problem wasn’t confined to liquor shops. He expanded it into a bigger portal covering, by the site’s current count, 98 categories of government service, from patta transfers to school salaries to police FIRs.
The pitch is seductive in its simplicity: whether it’s Rs 50 or Rs 10 crore, as the homepage puts it, every bribe leaves a trail. The pitch is that it takes less than two minutes to log a complaint, which includes details such as district, taluk and village, as well as the names of the department and the official concerned, details of the complaint, and proofs, if any. The complainants can choose to be anonymous, if needed.
Tamil Nadu already has an official channel for this — the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC), reachable on the toll-free number 1064. What Makkal Saatchi offers instead is visibility. Publicness. A running public ledger that, its founder hopes, embarrasses government departments into acting where private complaints disappear into files.
But there is a problem. Though initially many believed that the portal was an effort by the government or at least by the TVK, the party in power, it turned out to be an individual’s effort.
Joint Commissioner of Police (South Zone) Dr P Vijayakumar told TNM that a complaint against a sub-inspector in his range had surfaced on the site. “I don’t check the site nor do we have any official understanding with them. But when someone tagged me on X about the complaint, I got it checked. The SI had already been transferred on another count,” he says.
This officer is active on social media platforms and was therefore intimated. But a complaint on Makkal Saatchi does not mean it will necessarily lead to any legal or punitive action.
One thing is, however, clear – people are looking to vent. Another such India-wide site ‘bribes.fyi’ was shut down in just two days after it went public. The students behind the website claimed on LinkedIn that they got over 5 million requests and 2 lakh new users within 48 hours. There is speculation on social media that they were under pressure to close down.
The numbers are growing fast. But there are no checks.
Makkal Saatchi’s trajectory alone is a story. Days after its launch: it got around 70 complaints, as per DT Next’s reporting in late May. Three weeks in: around 400, Rs 6 crore in claimed bribes, per a Free Press Journal report from late June that also noted that the site had logged 25,000 visitors. By the time of writing: 1,310 reports, Rs 24 crore, 38 districts, 87% anonymous.
These numbers are a running count of what citizens have chosen to type into a form. But they are not verified, and Deepak does not dispute this.
The site’s own disclaimer says that the reports are submitted by citizens, are not independently checked by the platform, and don’t establish that any offence actually occurred.
TASMAC overcharging is the single largest recurring category — 136 reports in one recent snapshot — which tracks with something Tamil Nadu residents have long known anecdotally: small, routine overcharging at government liquor outlets is close to universal. The Electricity Board and the Registration Department follow.
Chennai leads the district count by a wide margin, but that likely says as much about internet access and awareness of the platform as it does about where corruption is worst — a caveat Deepak himself doesn’t contest when pressed.
What about privacy?
When asked how the platform protects the people named, both complainants and officials, Deepak says that there is an automated system in place. If a name is filled in the field designated for an official’s name, it is automatically detected and masked with randomised asterisks. But if the name is typed in any of the other fields, including the main complaint box, it remains visible.
“We have an additional detection layer that is supposed to catch names typed into the field meant for complaint descriptions, but it is a work-in-progress,” he says, adding that only “the incident” — department, place, circumstance — should be visible to the public. At present, Deepak manually removes any names that are mentioned in the complaint.
One recently published complaint from Coimbatore, filed under ‘Certificate bribe’, names a specific government employee in full, her exact job title, the village she is posted at. It also separately names her father, along with his former government employer, as part of an allegation that he was orchestrating the alleged corruption through her. Nothing in that complaint is masked.
Deepak concedes some names “slip through” in unusual formats and that he is “still working on improving that detection”.
Advocate Alok Prasanna Kumar, co-founder of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, says that platforms like Makkal Saatchi are not violating privacy.
“R Rajagopal v State of Tamil Nadu of 1994, famously known as the Auto Shankar case, is a landmark Supreme Court of India ruling on the right to privacy, freedom of the press, and prior restraint. The court held that the government cannot stop the media from publishing articles or autobiographies about public officials beforehand based on fears of defamation.
When it comes to public officials, they have to prove that they didn’t do any mistake instead of the other way around. If an allegation is raised against them, the complainant has to furnish proof but the responsibility is on the concerned officials to show that they have not committed any crime.
There is no privacy issue in this case, even if their names are disclosed. At best, it is about reputation – a defamation case. These things are not about the person as such but relates to their public function.”
One viral post, not a system
Deepak says he isn’t sharing the complaints with any of the departments. But like the police officer pointed out, citizens are posting screenshots and tagging concerned officers. This, however, is no guarantee that a probe will follow.
Deepak too posts some complaints on X and tags the relevant authority. “Whenever I find something significant, I post it on Twitter,” he says. “Something usually happens.” He offers the instance where JCP Dr P Vijayakumar messaged him directly asking for details of a complaint that alleged that a Saidapet police officer had taken Rs 50,000 to help settle a cheating case.
On the evidence available, this is the only instance that a complaint on the platform triggered official action — and it happened because a story went viral, not because any department has a standing process for acting on complaints on Makkal Saatchi.
A new system for filing complaints
Deepak says he is building a proposed system called the Confidential Verified Reporting and Governance Intelligence System (CVRGIS) to address some of the problems people face when filing complaints.
The idea, Deepak says, is simple: citizens should be able to report problems without fear that their identity, phone number, or personal details will be exposed. Their identity would be verified but kept separately in an encrypted “identity vault,” while officials handling the complaint would see only the information needed to act on the case. Any access to a citizen’s identity would require senior approval and would be recorded in an audit log.
The system would also bring complaints into a clear, trackable process. Reports would be checked for personal information, duplicates and risk, then reviewed by humans before being sent to the appropriate district or department. Citizens can track whether a complaint was received, under review, routed, escalated, or closed, while senior officials can see pending cases, repeated complaints and problem areas. Evidence such as receipts or screenshots would be stored separately, and reminders would be generated when cases remain pending beyond their deadline.
AI, according to the proposal, will be used to assist the process — understanding Tamil, English, and Tanglish reports, removing personal information, identifying duplicates, classifying complaints, and preparing summaries. It would not decide whether a complaint is true, punish anyone, expose identities or replace human verification.
Deepak says that the larger goal is to create a system where “the citizen is verified, the identity is protected, and access is accountable,” while turning individual complaints into useful information about recurring problems across districts and departments.