Sourabh Chandrakar's rise to infamy: A shop worker to organiser of illegal betting app

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), along with other agencies, extradited Sourabh Chandrakar — the mastermind behind the ₹6,000-crore Mahadev online gambling syndicate — from Oman on Sunday. One of the most-wanted individuals in connection with the racket, Chandrakar built the Mahadev betting empire with co-founder Ravi Uppal.

Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officials with Sourabh Chandrakar, the promoter of the Mahadev App illegal betting syndicate, after his extradition from Oman. (CBI)In 2023, HT travelled to his hometown of Bhilai in Chhattisgarh and spoke to police officers, neighbours and former associates to piece together his journey from a garment shop worker to the promoter of a sprawling illegal betting network.

As Chandrakar returns to the spotlight following his extradition, here is a look back at his rise from a small-town gambler to the man behind one of India’s biggest online betting syndicates. 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 in Dubai that boasted a glitzy Bollywood guest list.

The man who Bhilai knows as Saurabh “Mahadev” Chandrakar. 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 17 years 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, 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.

Uppal was 24 years older than Chandrakar, and by the time he met Chandrakar in 2017, he had run several small-scale businesses in Bhilai, Pune and Bengaluru, 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 then-chief minister Bhupesh Baghel, including his political adviser Verma and OSDs Manish Banchhor and Ashish Verma. All of them have said that they have nothing to do with the app.

“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, at that time.

Meanwhile, Congress claimed in 2023 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...