by Alecks P. Pabico

IT'S JUST two years old and still a somewhat small operation, but no one can say that India's Tehelka.com is obscure. At least not after it caused the resignation last year of that country's two top officials. Equipped with hidden cameras, some of the journalists working for the investigative online news site posed as arms manufacturers and caught the president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, Bangaru Laxman, on video counting bribe money in exchange for cornering a deal in their favor. The report, including the damning footage later shown on national television, so enraged Indians that Laxman and George Fernandes, the defense minister, were forced out of their posts.

Tehelka.com did take some flak for using questionable methods, including the use of sex workers (which editor Tarun Tejpal later acknowledged as a "transgression") to compromise Indian army officers involved in the arms deal. But it has since gone on to expose widespread anomalies in national-security projects and other government deals in a country that independent surveys rank along with China and Vietnam as the most corrupt in Asia. In so doing, it has helped rouse the Indian citizenry long lulled into accepting corruption as part and parcel of the affairs of government.

Tehelka's online efforts are but Indian renderings of what global corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) chair Peter Eigen calls a worldwide "anti-corruption eruption." In fact, TI, the erstwhile lone voice in the civic anti-corruption wilderness, now has over 100 national chapters worldwide, fighting corruption at the national level. Many of the national chapters also boast of Internet presence that helps popularize TI's groundbreaking work in curbing corruption, like binding governments and business entities to the Integrity Pact, a tool TI developed to govern the award of public contracts.

Here in Southeast Asia, "anti-corruption" as a key political battlecry emerged in the wake of the 1997 financial contagion that saw most Asian economies tumble. It did not take long before the "socially conscious" applications of the Internet and other technologies became crucial tools in ferreting out the corrupt in the bureaucracy.

Weak transparency and accountability in governance, fertile breeding grounds for corruption, were largely acknowledged to have exacerbated the Asian economic crisis. Indeed, in recent years, multimillion-dollar corruption scandals involving some of the region's leaders—Indonesian presidents Suharto and Abdurrahman Wahid, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and our very own Joseph Estrada—helped fire up the popular outrage against corruption. Of those mentioned, only Thaksin has not been pushed to resignation or ouster from office. But especially in Indonesia and the Philippines, the Internet played a key role in exposing official wrongdoing.

Many cybercrusaders in the region and elsewhere make special mention of TI as being more than helpful in their anti-corruption effort. TI, for one, maintains a Corruption On-Line Research and Information System or CORIS Portal, which is acknowledged as one of the most comprehensive databases on corruption and governance. Ease of access to materials is guaranteed by a fully searchable bibliography (of about 8,000 documents) and with more than 200 corruption-specific keywords. Online researchers are also treated to full-text documents, best practice examples, and a listing of the "best of" essential corruption readings.

With its national chapters, TI likewise provides the public with a host of initiatives from which they can derive inspiration. A "Corruption Fighters' Tool Kit," downloadable from its site, compiles such diverse efforts as introducing corruption controls in public procurement, monitoring of election-campaign financing, monitoring of public institutions, awareness raising and education through seminars, conducting surveys on corruption, strengthening access to information, doing civic and investigative journalism.

Then there is its Integrity Pact, which is meant to ensure that bidders/ contractors abstain from bribe paying, and that government offices reduce what TI claims as the "high cost and distortionary effect" of corruption. At present, features of the Integrity Pact are being adopted in key cities in Argentina, Colombia, Italy, Korea, and in municipalities of Nepal, Panama, and Argentina.