NEW DELHI: One out of every three families living below the poverty line in India paid bribes last year for basic public services such as police, hospitals, water and electricity, according to a private research group.

The Center for Media Studies said poor people in India paid an estimated $220 million in small bribes last year to police, postal workers, loan officers, school officials, hospital workers and more.

Indian officials and lawmakers are often caught accepting bribes, but a report released on Saturday night by the group suggests that corruption is also pervasive at the lowest levels of government.

“The poor are disproportionally affected by corruption since they depend more on public services,” said N. Bhaskara Rao, chairman of the group, which conducted the report with Transparency International India.

Indian Vice-President Hamid Ansari released the report at a ceremony in New Delhi, where he called corruption “pervasive and cancerous”.

“The level and extent of misgovernance is horrifying in legal and moral terms,” Ansari said, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

The researchers surveyed 22,728 randomly selected poor homes from November 2007 to January 2008. One third of the families said they paid brides, with the total amounting to about $11 million, the report said. Reachers then extrapolated those findings to the entire poor population to reach the estimate of $220 million in bribes paid by poor families.

Roughly 300 million people live below the poverty line of $1 a day.

Police demanded more bribes than any other sector and had the worst reputation for corruption, according to the report. An estimated 2.5 million poor families bribed police officials, usually to get their complaints lodged. Police were followed by officials responsible for land records, housing and water, the report said.

Transparency International India is the local arm of the Berlin-based watchdog group that releases an annual ranking of perceived corruption in countries around the world. India ranked 72nd out of 163 in the 2007 index.—AP