What happened
On June 13, after a seven-hour meeting with deputy commissioners and police chiefs, Karnataka Chief Minister D K Shivakumar declared the state would go bribery-free and promised a helpline number displayed at every taluk and district office. Nearly a month later, a senior officer told Deccan Herald 'we don't have clarity as yet' on the standard operating procedure — including who fields complaints, how to filter serious callers from those settling scores, and how the line won't just duplicate the Lokayukta's job. That overlap looks worse next to the Lokayukta's actual track record: 104 raids and 91 traps against senior IAS/IPS/KAS officers since September 2022, resulting in zero convictions, with 219 prosecution-sanction requests still sitting on the state government's own desk. For now, Karnataka's anti-corruption helpline is itself a small case study in the thing it was built to fight.