On Wednesday afternoon, TV channels across India began flashing a “breaking news” ticker. A top Bollywood actor was to be questioned by the Enforcement Directorate, the headlines read. The probe was to do with the Mahadev app scam, an allegedly illegal betting ring to the tune of ₹5,000 crore. It wasn’t the first time the little-known app had caught attention. In August, Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel’s political adviser and two of his officers on special duty (OSDs) were questioned.

Read here: Juice-tyre shops to ₹200 cr/day: Betting app owners’ story from rags to riches

But as the case gains notoriety by the day, the man the federal agency really wants is a 26-year-old from the sleepy town of Bhilai in Chhattisgarh, one of the two promoters of the company, and the brains behind the Mahadev app. He worked in a local garment store to make ends meet as a boy; was a betting fiend even when he was young; grew up to become someone many in Bhilai looked to for help, even if that meant breaking the law; and married his childhood sweetheart from a village in Chhattisgarh in a ₹200 crore wedding at Dubai that boasted a glitzy Bollywood guest list. The man who Bhilai knows as Saurabh “Mahadev” Chandrakar.

How it all began

Thirty kilometres away from Raipur, Bhilai is a city that grew in post-Independence India around the Bhilai Steel Plant set up in 1955. Its streets are wide, green and quiet, designed to service the plant, and it was off one of these roads that Chandrakar’s father lived in a dilapidated home while working as a Grade 4 employee at the Bhilai Municipal Corporation. He studied till Class 12 in a local school, but by 2014, at just 17years of age, he started to work.

“By 2014-2015, he worked at commercial complexes like the ready-made garment shops at a building called Akash Ganga. He earned between ₹12,000 to 14,000 a month, but he was already betting and gambling on his phone — a practice that is not uncommon for young men of his age. He had no criminal record at this point,” said Samit Mishra, a police officer of the Durg district cyber cell who has tracked him closely.

It was in Akash Ganga, Chhattisgarh police officials believe, that Chandrakar got pulled into more organised forms of illegal betting. He was always interested in cricket, and would bet money on games across the world. “Akash Ganga has a host of garment stores, and several people, including bookies, pass their time and supplement their income by organised betting. It is likely that this is where Chandrakar met Ravi Uppal (now 50), the other promoter of the Mahadev app,” Mishra said.

By 2017, Chandrakar was beginning to be known to the police. A political leader who HT spoke to once said he received a frantic phone call from his father. “He said that his son had gone mad betting on his laptop, and had been arrested by a few policemen. He beseeched me to intervene, and because I knew his father, no case was registered. It was a small thing. I did not know at the time what was to come,” the leader said.

How the app started

Uppal was 24 years older to Chandrakar, and by the time he met Chandrakar in 2017, had run several small-scale businesses in Bhilai, Pune and Bangalore, come across a betting network, and developed an app. In 2018, impressed by Chandrakar’s nous about the game, he roped him in, and they began to build a network. Within months, Chandrakar opened a restaurant called Juice Factory in Bhilai’s Nehru Nagar.

In 2021, the police investigated an illegal detention complaint at Talpuri International Colony, at a time when Covid-19 was raging, and first came across signs of organised illegal activity when they came across a room with computer systems. “They were running the racket out of there, and had already set something up in Dubai. But the issue was that the moment there was a 10-minute period of inactivity, the system would log out from Dubai, leaving nothing substantial on the screen in India. We suspected, but had no concrete evidence that it was betting,” an officer aware of the probe said.

Eventually, the Durg Police conducted a second raid at a location in Mohan Nagar on March 30, 2022, and while neither Chandrakar nor Uppal were present, it became clear that the operations were indeed a betting racket, and had outgrown just cricket.

In October 2022, the Enforcement Directorate got into the act and registered a case. Their investigations alleged that the Mahadev app provided an online platform for illegal betting in different live games such as Teen Patti and poker, opportunities to bet on live cricket, badminton, tennis and other sports, and even bets on Indian election results. The agency identified Chandrakar and Uppal as the primary promoters, and said that they lived and worked in Dubai.

The investigations further said that the accused would advertise contact numbers on various websites and lure people in with the promise of profits. Once interested, a unique user would be routed to multiple betting sites, depending on what they wanted to put money on.

On August 24, 2023, ED arrested four people in the money laundering case from Chhattisgarh — Sunil and Anil Dammani, Satish Chandrakar, and Chandra Bhushan Verma, a police sub-inspector. Alleging political linkages, they also questioned people close to chief minister Baghel, including his political adviser Verma and OSDs Manish Banchhor and Ashish Verma. No arrests have taken place thus far, and all three have said that they have nothing to do with the app, and they were victims of a political witch-hunt.

Read here: ED summons actor Shraddha Kapoor in Mahadev betting app case

“The Mahadev application is start-up of Congress government only. Congress government had given protection to the many people related to the scam,” said Ajay Chandrakar, former minister and BJP spokesperson.

Meanwhile, Congress claimed that it was Chhattisgarh police which busted the scam. “Our police unearthed the scam and arrested 500 people from across the country. We have evidence that BJP gave protection to Chandrakar and I have photographs of a senior BJP leader with Saurabh Chandrakar,” said Sushil Anand Shukla, chief spokesperson of Chhattisgarh Congress.

Man who made dreams come true

In the leafy streets of Bhilai, there is acceptance that Chandrakar made his money through betting, but almost a grudging admiration for his meteoric rise. Over the past four years, Chandrakar arranged for scores of young men to move to Dubai and work for him, locals said. One person who lived in Chandrakar’s locality, Camp,where the family home now lies shut because everyone has moved overseas, said that Chandrakar hired close to a thousand people to work for him. “There are at least a thousand young people from Durg and Bhilai who are now all over the world, and they were all inducted by Chandrakar. Most were doing menial jobs like he was when he started, and were in contact with him from his early betting days,” one neighbour said.

One such young man who returned from Dubai and refused to be named, said that the first batch of trainees numbered around 150. “I worked on a salary of ₹30,000 a month in the accounting section, which I used to send back to my parents. There were young people from all over India, and my group lived in a palatial villa in Sharjah,” he said.

In his 10 months in the UAE, the person quoted above never saw Chandrakar, but as his wealth grew, so did the folktales around him. “We heard that he was paying sheikhs for his protection. Someone said that he had 40 bodyguards. Others that he now hung with Bollywood celebrities,” the man said.

In more than one way, his wedding added to his legend. One, it was a lavish party in Dubai on September 18, 2022, with a fleet of Bollywood superstars who are all now being questioned about how they were paid, ED officials said. Two, he was marrying his childhood sweetheart from back home despite being successful overseas. “That is why investigations are difficult. He keeps his trust with people, and doesn’t break promises. That is why they stay loyal to him. With the money he has now, he could have married anyone — even a model or actress — but he chose his first love,” a Chhattisgarh police officer said.

While ED continue to tighten the noose on the operation in India, Chandrakar is still on the run.

Read here: All you need to know about Mahadev app case

Asked where they believed Chandrakar was now, one Chhattisgarh police officer said, “We have tracked his movement to 40 countries in the past year. He once stayed in Dubai, but he has now decentralised his operations. He never stays in one place for long, has a bunch of security and keeps Uppal close to him. He would once communicate to people in Chhattisgarh through an app called BOTIM but that has now stopped. The heat is on, and he’s being careful.”