What that guy said is true. Indian customs is terrible. And tracking anything in India is a crazy challenge - that includes people as well.
The biggest thing that pisses me off every time I travel there is the inter-state crossings where you have to pay a small "toll." Nothing like your 50¢ auto-vending one.
The most interesting bribe chain is perhaps the driver license (DMV) anything. The bribes for those are so bad that a significant percentage of drivers even avoid getting a license. And if you are getting a car license, you will most likely need a broker - as in you would need to learn to drive from a "driving school," which will broker for your license at a "fee." The best/sad part is that upon bribery you don't even have to drive to pass the test. Of course, this may not be everywhere, but just speaking from observation.
As about bribery punishment, there have been literally thousands of movies with the theme.
Btw I can attest to the fact about having to bribe indirectly in order to get a driving license (learner's permit actually).
I go to the DMV/RTO office and submit my application and the guy just throws away my application form stating I don't have a valid address proof. I showed him my rental contract. I showed him a mobile phone bill, bank statement proof, etc but none of those were acceptable to him.
So I go downstairs and find a driving instructor and pay his fees. This time he files a separate application just 30 mins after my application gets rejected and this time the guy doesn't even bother reading anything in the application. He just signs it and it's all taken care of. Basically the driving school guy pays the DMV officers a commission for every application that they approve.
This is exactly the same experience I had while getting a driver's license in 2 places - Chennai and Hyderabad. I remember thinking how much of a joke it was.
You don't pay a toll at inter-state crossings if you're a private vehicle. What I think you might have experienced are just the ridiculous number of toll booths setup on highways to collect fees for newly constructed sections of the highways. These road project contracts are handed over to external construction companies and they recover the costs by collecting toll for the next 10-15 years. A 5 hour journey from Bangalore -> Chennai includes 6-7 stops at toll booths each adding 5-10 mins to the journey depending on whether the cars before you have the exact change or not and how lazy the toll booth operator is.
Customs is terrible only because people don't want to pay the actual customs duties as set by the government and will try anything possible to avoid paying including indulging in corruption.
Maybe Indian Customs has gotten better and is not acting petty but try importing USD $500k worth of equipment/machinery from Germany and then see how many ways Customs figures out to hold the goods and cause unnecessary delays and somehow everything magically works when you fly to their office in Kochi and do what's necessary to please them :)
If that's a genuine incident you're talking about, you could try contacting Shashi Tharoor (the local MP, who's on Twitter and seems very accessible) to see what can be done for the future.
Nothing's going to change if you don't atleast try to fix them.
The biggest thing that pisses me off every time I travel there is the inter-state crossings where you have to pay a small "toll." Nothing like your 50¢ auto-vending one.
The most interesting bribe chain is perhaps the driver license (DMV) anything. The bribes for those are so bad that a significant percentage of drivers even avoid getting a license. And if you are getting a car license, you will most likely need a broker - as in you would need to learn to drive from a "driving school," which will broker for your license at a "fee." The best/sad part is that upon bribery you don't even have to drive to pass the test. Of course, this may not be everywhere, but just speaking from observation.
As about bribery punishment, there have been literally thousands of movies with the theme.