Success Stories - Zero Rupee Note

Mr. Ashok Jain got his car towed in Chennai. When he went to the C1 police station, he was asked Rs 800 as fine. He was ready to pay the amount in return for a receipt, which they were not willing to give. After much talking and convincing, he called his friend Vinod Jain. When Vinod came to the station and saw what was going on, he handed a Zero Rupee Note to one of the policemen who was asking for bribe. They realized that he was a part of the 5th Pillar organization and without any further questions they asked him to pay the marked fine of Rs 150 and handed him the receipt immediately. Zero Rupee Note reminds people of an organization that is willing to back them up in a dire situation relating to corruption, which motivates them to stand their ground when faced by corrupt officials.

One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success. Had the zero rupee note reached the old lady sooner, her granddaughter could have started college on schedule and avoided the consequence of delaying her education for two years. In another experience, a corrupt official in a district in Tamil Nadu was so frightened on seeing the zero rupee note that he returned all the bribe money he had collected for establishing a new electricity connection back to the no longer compliant citizen.