I agree that the bribes are horrendous. But they're also what you get from a system that incentivizes corruption. You can't expect Indian bureaucracy to be like German bureaucracy, because the incentives are so different for the players at ground level.
The alternative is to pay public servants well and charge a very large fee for the permits to finance that. Then, deal corruption on top of that without impunity.
However, the culture itself has to support that. The culture of demanding bribes for documents shows that there's a parallel market in play to which the bureaucratic system has been subverted.