Arrest 20 Years Later: Why Does India’s Criminal Justice System Need Decades To Arrest White-Collar Criminals?
On June 21, 2026, the Central Bureau of Investigation arrested two men, Brijbhushan Prasad and Kartar Singh, on the outskirts of two different Indian states; one in Kopargaon, Maharashtra, the other in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. Both had been living under assumed identities for nearly two decades. The case against them traced back to August 2005, when the CBI registered a complaint alleging that the two had siphoned more than ₹1.25 crore from the State Bank of India’s main branch in Dhanbad, Jharkhand, between November 2002 and June 2005.
They fled to Nepal soon after, were declared Proclaimed Offenders, and had Red Corner Notices issued against them. Then, for roughly 20 years, nothing; until a coordinated, technology-assisted operation finally tracked them down, allegedly through digital footprint analysis that exposed the new identities they had built across Indian states.
It is a story with a satisfying ending, where persistence pays off, fugitives are found, justice grinds forward. But step back from the headline and a more uncomfortable question emerges. Why did it take 20 years? And is the Dhanbad case an outlier, or is it representative of something structural in how India investigates, prosecutes, and ultimately closes financial crime?
The honest answer is that it is closer to the rule than the exception. What we can see is a pattern, that recurs across a long list of Indian bank fraud cases; where an offence is committed, an FIR is registered, accused person(s) disappears, and the case effectively goes dormant, sometimes for 10 years, sometimes for 20, occasionally for 30, until a breakthrough, often technological, finally closes the loop. This Dhanbad example can be used as a lens to examine a larger and more important question: why does India’s system for bringing economic offenders to justice take so long, and what does that delay actually cost?
When we look closely, we realise that this is a Pattern, and Not an Anomaly!
It would be both inaccurate and unfair to conclude that every multi-decade delay reflects investigative incompetence. In many of these cases, the read from public reporting is that accused persons deliberately and effectively evaded the law, fleeing the country, forging identity documents, changing names, or relocating repeatedly to stay ahead of investigators. The CBI’s own statements in several of these cases credit the eventual breakthroughs to “technical inputs,” digital footprint analysis, and identity-tracking databases, which are tools that simply did not exist, in their current form, when most of these cases were first registered.
The more defensible line of inquiry, then, is not “why are investigators slow” but rather: why does India’s broader system of investigation, prosecution, extradition, and trial allow economic offenders to operate productively in the shadows for 10, 20, or even 30 years before facing consequences? That is a systemic question, not a question about any single officer’s diligence, and several long-running cases, reported separately in Indian media, illustrate the pattern clearly.
The CBI’s own confirmed account of the Dhanbad case is instructive on this point. Officials there stated that the accused had been absconding for nearly 2 decades, living under assumed identities, and that the eventual breakthrough came through “advanced technical surveillance, digital footprints mapping, and deep-cover local tracking”, which means that the earlier years of the investigation lacked the tools that ultimately cracked it.
A similarly instructive case is that of Dinesh D. Gehlot, arrested by the CBI in August 2025 in a Bank of Baroda fraud case that had been registered back in May 2004. Gehlot was accused of fraudulently securing a housing loan using forged documents; a charge sheet naming him as a conspirator was filed in 2007, but he failed to appear for trial and went untraceable for years afterward.
According to the CBI, Gehlot frequently changed residences and misled local communities about his identity, which made him difficult to locate even after non-bailable warrants and a formal proclamation order were issued against him. He was eventually found in Noida, not through a single dramatic break, but through what the agency described as a sustained combination of digital-footprint analysis and old-fashioned, on-ground inquiry. The agency itself framed his arrest as a case study in how “technology-driven intelligence platforms” combined with “persistent and coordinated efforts” can eventually close gaps that traditional methods alone could not.
Other cases reported in Indian media over the past few years follow a strikingly similar arc; where a fraud is committed, often involving forged documents or a misused position of trust within a bank; the accused absconds, sometimes abroad, sometimes simply to another Indian state under a new name; the case is formally frozen in the form of a Proclaimed Offender declaration, a Look Out Circular, or a Red Corner Notice; and then, years or decades later, a combination of technology and dogged investigative work finally closes it.
Reported examples in this category include an alleged ₹8 crore fraud case in which the accused, Mani M. Sekhar, was reportedly traced using AI-assisted image search after changing his identity; an SBI Hyderabad fraud case involving an accused, V. Chalapathi Rao, who was reportedly even declared legally dead before eventually being traced and arrested; a Bharat Overseas Bank case in which a former bank manager, Krishnamurti Raghunath, was reportedly arrested after evading the CBI since 2005; and a separate Bank of Baroda case involving an alleged ₹3.77 crore fraud, in which a company director was reportedly arrested at Goa airport years later after living abroad under a changed identity.
Older reported cases stretch the timeline even further — one bank fraud conviction from 1993 reportedly saw the convict, T. Ravindranath Gupta, returned to India from the United States through Interpol channels nearly three decades after the original case, while one of the oldest reported examples, dating to 1985, allegedly involved an accused person who produced fraudulent death records to avoid arrest for roughly thirty-five years.
None of these later figures should be read as independently verified to the same standard as the Dhanbad and Gehlot cases, which carry direct, on-record CBI statements; they are included here as part of a broader, separately reported pattern rather than as confirmed fact in every particular. But taken together, even allowing for variation in sourcing quality, the pattern is unmistakable: long absences, changed identities, and breakthroughs that often depend more on the eventual availability of better tracking technology than on any single investigative failure or success.
Five Anticipated Systemic Failures Behind the Delay.
1. Economic crimes are rarely investigated with the urgency of violent or political crimes
Indian law enforcement, like most systems globally, allocates investigative urgency unevenly. A violent crime or a politically sensitive case tends to generate immediate institutional pressure, of daily media coverage, oversight from senior officials, and resource prioritization. A multi-crore bank fraud, by contrast, often unfolds through paperwork, forensic accounting, and inter-agency coordination that produces no dramatic visual story for the public to rally around.
The financial harm is frequently dispersed, borne by a bank’s shareholders, depositors, or the public exchequer, rather than concentrated in an identifiable victim whose suffering generates sustained public pressure. The result is that economic offences, even those involving tens of millions of rupees, often slip into a slower investigative lane, where the case can survive for years as a file rather than an active pursuit, simply because nothing forces it back onto anyone’s desk.
2. India’s “proclaimed offender” system is structurally weak
India has, on paper, a reasonably thorough toolkit for compelling absconding accused persons to face trial, which includes Non-Bailable Warrants, Look Out Circulars that flag a person at ports and airports, formal Proclaimed Offender declarations under the Code of Criminal Procedure, and Interpol Red Corner Notices for international fugitives. Yet the recurring pattern in these cases is that none of these mechanisms, individually or together, reliably produces an arrest within a reasonable timeframe. A Look Out Circular only works if the person attempts to cross a monitored border checkpoint under their real identity.
A Red Corner Notice depends on the cooperation and capacity of foreign law enforcement, which varies enormously by country and bilateral relationship. A Proclaimed Offender declaration is, in practice, often a procedural milestone rather than an operational trigger; it formally acknowledges that someone cannot be found, without necessarily marshalling the resources needed to find them. Interstate coordination within India compounds the problem: an accused person who simply relocates from, say, Jharkhand to Chhattisgarh or Maharashtra can often disappear into a different state’s administrative and policing apparatus with relative ease, particularly in an era before unified, searchable identity databases became widespread.
3. Identity changes have historically been easier to sustain than they should be
A recurring thread across these cases is the relative ease with which accused persons reportedly built entirely new identities, like new names, new addresses, new social ties, and sustained them for years without detection. Before the widespread rollout of Aadhaar and other unified digital identity systems, India’s patchwork of identity documents (ration cards, voter IDs, locally issued certificates) offered multiple, loosely verified paths to establishing a new identity, particularly for someone willing to relocate to an unfamiliar state where no one would recognize them.
Several of the cases referenced above allege fugitives changing names, shifting states, or even, in at least one widely reported instance, procuring fraudulent death documentation to formally close the loop on their old identity. The contrast with the present moment is instructive: the same agencies that once struggled to trace these individuals for decades are now explicitly crediting digital-footprint analysis, AI-assisted image matching, and identity-tracking databases for the recent string of arrests. This reflects actual criminological history and technological shifts, but if we say technical advancement is the primary solution, perhaps, we are ignoring the reality, as, human error, biometrics, and international cooperation were equally critical.
This suggests the bottleneck is mainly investigative will and cooperation, followed by the absence of technical infrastructure capable of cutting through a deliberately obscured identity.
4. Justice loses real value the longer it is delayed
Even when an arrest eventually happens, a twenty- or thirty-year gap between offence and consequence extracts a cost that an arrest alone cannot repair. Witnesses die, relocate, or simply forget the granular details that a fraud trial requires — the specific conversation, the particular document, the exact sequence of approvals. Physical and documentary evidence degrades or is lost entirely as banks undergo mergers, restructuring, and digitization that does not always preserve historical paper trails with archival care.
Investigating officers retire or are transferred, taking with them institutional memory of a case file’s nuances that rarely transfers cleanly to a successor. Victims, whether individual depositors or, in the case of public sector banks, the public exchequer itself, receive no timely closure or restitution, and in many cases, recovery of the actual defrauded amount becomes increasingly unlikely as decades pass and the funds are dispersed or spent. And cumulatively, each high-profile case where an accused person evades consequences for decades chips away at public confidence in the ability of investigative agencies to make economic crime carry real, timely risk for the people who commit it.
5. An arrest after twenty years: institutional success, or institutional failure?
This is the genuinely difficult question these cases pose, and it does not have a clean answer. On one hand, the CBI and other agencies plainly deserve credit for refusing to let these cases simply lapse — formally declaring offenders as proclaimed, maintaining Red Corner Notices for decades, and ultimately deploying new technology to finally close cases that might otherwise have been written off entirely. There is real institutional discipline in keeping a file alive for twenty years and eventually solving it.
On the other hand, a justice system that requires two or three decades to bring an accused person to trial is, almost by definition, failing the deterrence function that criminal law is supposed to serve. If the realistic expected cost of committing bank fraud is “possible arrest, decades from now, if you are unlucky,” that calculus does very little to discourage the next person contemplating the same crime. Both things can be true simultaneously: the eventual arrests are a genuine institutional achievement, and the systemic delay that necessitated them remains a genuine institutional failure.
The Bigger Picture: When “Justice” Stretches Across Decades
The pattern visible in proclaimed-offender bank fraud cases is, in some ways, a smaller-scale version of a problem that has played out even more visibly in India’s highest-profile economic offence cases. Diamond merchant Nirav Modi, accused in the multi-billion-rupee Punjab National Bank fraud case that surfaced in 2018, has remained in the United Kingdom for years as extradition litigation has wound through British courts — a process that, even when ultimately successful, illustrates how cross-border extradition can itself become a multi-year saga layered on top of an already lengthy domestic investigation.
Mehul Choksi, Modi’s co-accused, has spent years contesting extradition proceedings from different jurisdictions, adding further years to a case that was already complex before any fugitive left Indian soil. Liquor baron Vijay Mallya, wanted in connection with unpaid loans to Kingfisher Airlines, has likewise remained outside India for the better part of a decade, with recovery and extradition proceedings continuing to unfold slowly.
Sahara Group chief Subrata Roy‘s case, centered on investor fund mismanagement, dragged through enforcement and recovery proceedings for years, illustrating that even when an accused person does not abscond, the machinery of recovering defrauded funds and securing meaningful consequences can itself consume a decade or more. And the Amrapali Group case, in which thousands of homebuyers waited years through extended litigation before securing even partial relief, demonstrates that delay is not confined to criminal prosecution alone — it extends into the civil and insolvency processes meant to make victims whole.
None of these cases is a direct parallel to a twenty-year-old proclaimed-offender bank fraud case; the legal mechanisms, jurisdictions, and procedural postures differ considerably. But they share a common thread with the Dhanbad and Gehlot cases: India’s institutional response to serious financial wrongdoing — whether through investigation, prosecution, extradition, insolvency, or enforcement — tends to stretch across years and often decades, regardless of which specific procedural path a case follows.
Conclusion: What Should Change
The recent run of arrests in long-dormant bank fraud cases is genuinely encouraging, and it would be wrong to read this article as a wholesale indictment of the CBI or India’s investigative agencies, many of whom have invested real effort and ingenuity into finally closing files that had sat open for a generation. But the more important lesson from cases like Dhanbad’s is not that persistence eventually works — it is that persistence alone took twenty years to work, and that the technology which ultimately cracked these cases has existed in usable form for only a fraction of that time.
The honest takeaway is structural. India needs investigative and identity-verification infrastructure that closes the gap between offence and consequence in years, not decades, with wider deployment of the same digital-footprint and identity-tracking tools that finally cracked cases like Dhanbad and the Bank of Baroda fraud, earlier and more consistently applied; tighter interstate coordination so that relocating across a state border is not, in effect, equivalent to disappearing; and a recognition, at the institutional level, that economic offences deserve the same investigative urgency routinely reserved for violent crime.
Until that gap closes, India’s justice system will likely keep producing more stories like Dhanbad’s — satisfying when the arrest finally comes, but a reminder, each time, of just how long “eventually” can take.
