Many reasons in my opinion (having lived in both countries) 1. Income disparity: Gov. officials are mostly lower middle class even from Indian standards. So th

Many reasons in my opinion (having lived in both countries) 1. Income disparity: Gov. officials are mostly lower middle class even from Indian standards. So they are probably making a few thousands Rupees which is not quite there with the cost of living there specially in cities. Some people however are so rich that they can easily pay the bribe which gets the job done in no time. Again, there are efforts to bridge this gap but not easy for a country of the size of India. In the US, income disparity b/w rich and poor is not that bad (even though it seems like the gap is increasing b/w the so called super rich and rest) 2. Enforcement of law: In India, there is pretty much a law for everything like any other developed country but the enforcement is almost none. So people taking bribes are less scared and more confident that no one is going to do anything. Yes people are trying to fix that but it's a long haul. 3. Resource availability: Most basic resources like cooking gas etc. are a big pain to get. Lot of smaller cities/towns and villages still rely on getting cooking gas cylinders from the vendors etc as one example. There is no integrated pipeline. Thee is a fight for pretty much everything even when you have the money. It is changing as well but not there yet. 4. Mentality: Indians are brought up seeing bribery as part of a life. Most of them don't even realize how bad it is until they get exposed to more developed countries like the US etc. So there is this saying "chalta hai" which literally translates to "it's ok to do this".