Abstract
Petty corruption is normally understood to be corruption faced by citizens and the private sector on a daily basis to receive basic services such as connections to utilities, obtaining passports, school admission and dealing with trade related customs’ formalities. As opposed to grand corruption that involves millions of dollars, petty corruption is ignored largely in corruption related research. This is probably due to the belief that it does not impact on development and the provision of infrastructures the way grand corruption does. The scant attention may also be driven by the view that if grand corruption is reduced this in turn would have a knock on effect on petty corruption. As to whether this will be the case is highly debatable. This paper therefore focuses on petty corruption and argues that it also undermines development and examines the use of Information Technology (IT) creatively to reduce opportunities for engaging in petty corruption using ‘Bhoomi’, a project devoted to the digitization of land registration services in the state of Karnataka in India as an illustration. On the basis of our analysis of a number of surveys of Bhoomi that have been carried out since its inception this paper concludes that IT has the potential to introduce efficiency and transparency. However this potential can only be realized when the ‘people’ part of the e-governance equation change their attitudes to the soliciting of and the giving of bribes and public officials refrain from abusing their office.