A board beside a modest home in a congested area in Jhungia Bazar in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, proclaimed ‘Gaurav Kumar Singh, IAS’. Neighbours say a lot of pemehople in cars would visit the house, which was rented by a 27-year-old six months ago.
On the morning of December 9, Gaurav Kumar Singh alias Lalit Kishor, 27, from Bihar’s Sitamarhi district, was arrested. The Gorakhpur police had received a tip-off from the Railway Protection Force.
In Bihar, Lalit was driven around in a white multi-utility vehicle fitted with beacon lights and displaying forged government nameplates. He had a 10-member entourage, and his men were trained to create an atmosphere of officialdom.
Later, the police found that he was paying ₹30,000 to each of his 10- to 15-member security staff every month. His brother-in-law, Abhishek Kumar, a computer software professional, who he addressed as “Steno Babu”, got a monthly ‘salary’ of ₹60,000.
His other aide, Parmanand Gupta, from Lachhipur area of Gorakhpur, was allegedly paid per job. The ‘job’ was to conduct inspections at private schools and extort money from their operators. The police also found fabricated media clippings showing Lalit seated in a District Magistrate’s chair in an office.
“Several forged IDs, mobile phones, laptops, jewellery, cash, bank passbooks, and many AI-generated photos in which Lalit Kishor had replaced real officials’ faces with his own were seized at the time of his arrest,” Gorakhpur Superintendent of Police Abhinav Tyagi said. Lalit had allegedly been spending about ₹5 lakh a month on convoys and personnel.
During the Bihar Assembly election in November 2025, Mukund Madhav, a contractor from Mokama in Patna district, was arrested from the Gorakhpur railway station. He was carrying ₹99.09 lakh cash. His story led the police to Lalit, the police say.
Lalit had allegedly taken a bribe of ₹5 crore from the contractor, promising him a government tender worth ₹450 crore. “When the tender went to someone else, the contractor exerted pressure on Kishor to return the bribe money. It was a part of that returned money he was caught with at the Gorakhpur railway station,” Tyagi elaborated. “It was also found out that he had paid ₹1.7 crore and two Innovas to him for the tender.”
Back in Bihar’s Sitamarhi town, in the eastern flank of Mehsaul area in ward number 37, his family lives in poverty. They say Lalit left in 2017, and returned just once for a day in 2020, when his father Chalitar Ram, a cobbler, died.
Lalit is the fourth of five sons. The other brothers work as part-time masons, agricultural labourers, and cobblers. They live in a home that is part-concrete, part-mud-and-thatch and extended irregularly as the family expanded. The oldest in the home is their mother, Jahari Devi, a septuagenarian, who works as a house help.
All the brothers living in the village are married and have two children each. “We do not know anything about Lalit Kishor, where he lives, and what he does,” said Sangeeta Devi, whose husband Raj Kishor Ram is Lalit’s brother. “All 17 of us live in this rickety dwelling, and somehow we manage with our husbands’ meagre incomes. We do not have even a small plot of agricultural land to cultivate anything,” she said.
She added that when he came for a day in 2020, he said he could not live in the squalor they lived in. The house is off the road, down a dirt track. Sangeeta sat on a tattered bamboo mat outside their dwelling, a faded jute awning hanging at the front door, talking to the two other wives of the brothers.
“Hum logon ko koi matlab nahi hai us se. Jaisi karni waisi bharni,” (We do not have anything to do with him. What he sowed, so shall he reap), said another sister-in-law, from behind her veil. “He hasn’t given even a single penny to us; nor have we ever sought anything from him. Even his mother says she wants nothing to do with him. He has only brought us trouble.” The family is tired of the media hounding them.
Sanjay Kumar, a neighbour who dabbles in local politics, said Lalit was good at his studies and he could also easily strike up a conversation with anyone. He had the ability to ferret out information even from strangers. Kumar laughed, saying, “Today Lalit has made Mehsaul famous or even infamous.”
After finishing school, Lalit had opened a coaching institute close to home. He was allegedly charging students a fee of ₹30 a month and tutoring those who couldn’t afford this for free.
Sangeeta remembers Lalit from when she was married. “Lalit was the only brother who went to school,” she said. “He was about 14 or 15 years old then. In a couple of years, one day he just left. He eloped with a girl he was tutoring.”
The Gorakhpur police found that the girl, a Class 10 student from the nearby Ram Nagara area, came to his coaching institute. He later married her in the famous Janaki temple of Sitamarhi town, the police said.
Mandakini Devi, the girl’s grandmother, says, “Our family snapped all ties with her. We do not know whether she is alive or dead after her marriage,” she said. The girl has two brothers and parents, who now live in Gujarat. She and her husband live in a single-storeyed concrete house with a bamboo boundary wall and a tin front gate.
“She was going to his coaching institute on a bicycle every day. They must have fallen in love and decided to marry there,” Mandakini added. She too is fed up of the media gaze. She goes into the compound and slams the tin gate shut.
The police also found Lalit’s chats with other girls while going through his phone. “During our investigation we found three of them are pregnant,” said SP Tyagi.
Lalit shifted his base to Banka district after he left town, some 340 km south-east of Patna, say the police. In 2019 he got a Master’s degree in mathematics.
In Banka, he opened another coaching institute, called Aaditya-50, for students aspiring for government jobs. This was allegedly his first brush with taking money. He promised a girl student a government job and allegedly took ₹2 lakh for this.
Since he couldn’t make it happen, a police case was registered against him by the deceived girl and her family members. Before leaving Banka though, he duped several other people, including his then landlord of the rented home he lived in, for ₹10 lakh, say the police. “Then he went underground,” said Mr. Tyagi.
When he resurfaced, he declared that he had cracked the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exam and took on the persona of someone from the civil service’s 2022 batch. “He kept shifting his base among four States: Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Madhya Pradesh,” Mr. Tyagi said. “ Lalit, Abhishekh and Parmanand have duped at least 40 people and got crores of money. All three have been arrested,” said the SP. The officer asked anyone who had been duped by them to come forward and file a complaint.
amarnath.tewary@thehindu.co.in