About GhatGaya
Built because nothing
should just disappear.
GhatGaya — colloquial Hindi for "got ripped off" — is India's first crowdsourced corporate accountability database. A public, searchable record of what brands quietly do to consumers.
A single voice is anecdote. Five is a pattern. A pattern is what journalists write about. A pattern is what regulators act on.
— Our founding principle
What we stand for
The four pillars.
Community-sourced
Every report is submitted by a real, email-verified person. No bots, no scraping, no fabrications. Your account makes your report credible and traceable.
Two-tier evidence
Reports are either Documented (with proof — screenshots, receipts, news links) or Community (personal experience). Weight comes from numbers, not just paperwork.
Recurring Report
When five or more people independently report the same issue against the same brand, it's automatically flagged as a Recurring Report — the kind of signal regulators and journalists can actually use.
Permanent record
Reports stay permanently visible and publicly searchable. Nothing expires. Nothing gets quietly scrubbed. The record only grows.
The story
It started with a 170-gram pack.
In late 2025, one of our founders noticed her favourite biscuits had quietly dropped from 200g to 170g — same wrapper, same price. She tweeted about it. A hundred people replied with their own stories: smaller Maggi, vanished platform fees appearing overnight, hospital bills with line items nobody could explain.
None of those complaints had anywhere to go. They scattered into the feed, got buried under newer outrage, and disappeared. Brands counted on exactly that.
GhatGaya is our answer to that disappearance. A permanent, public, searchable record of what Indian consumers actually experience. We believe complaints that survive long enough — and meet enough other complaints — stop being “bad luck” and start being evidence.
We're a small, independent team. We take no money from brands. We do not sell data. We charge companies for dashboards that show them their own complaint data — and we never hide reports from the public in exchange.
The team
The humans behind the records.
Journalists, engineers, and consumer-rights advocates. We're small on purpose.
Principles
How we decide.
Neutral by default
We don't take sides. We publish what happened. If a brand responds, we publish the response next to the complaint — not instead of it.
Evidence over volume
We don't rank by outrage. Documented reports weigh more than community ones. Recurring reports emerge from independence, not noise.
Corrections, not deletions
If a brand successfully challenges a report, we mark it disputed and leave the record. Nothing is scrubbed silently.
Open to public scrutiny
The full database is public. Our submission guidelines are public. Our methodology is documented.
FAQ
Good questions.
Can brands pay to remove a report?+
No. Never. Our revenue model is analytics dashboards we sell to brands that want to see their own complaint data — but reports themselves are public and permanent.
How does a Recurring Report get flagged?+
When 5 or more independent reports reference the same brand and the same issue type, all matching records are automatically flagged as a Recurring Report. It's a hard numeric threshold — no editorial discretion, no manual intervention.
What if someone submits a false report?+
Every submitter is email-verified, reports are traceable to a real person. If a brand believes a report is false, they can challenge it by contacting legal@ghatgaya.com. False reports that are successfully challenged are marked disputed and remain visible with that label. The submitter's account is flagged for review.
Is this available only in India?+
The database is India-focused today — all 28 states + 8 UTs. We'll consider expanding once the Indian record is comprehensive.
How can I help?+
Report your own experiences. Upvote reports that match yours. If you're a journalist or researcher, request aggregated data from press@ghatgaya.com.
Help us make the record bigger.
Submit your own experience. Upvote reports that match yours. Together we turn stories into patterns.