What happened
In October 2023, Girish Rai — a clerk in the Superintendent of Police's salary section in Jagdalpur, posted there since 2012 on compassionate grounds — began quietly editing soft copies of salary records before they were processed, inflating his own pay and that of two constables, Rajkumar Katlam and Hemant Mathew. The scheme ran for two and a half years and moved between ₹1.5 crore and ₹2 crore through the department's own payroll system, undetected by manual checks. It finally surfaced when auditors facing roughly 2,000 personnel records decided to run an AI tool over the salary data for the first time — and it flagged the anomaly immediately. All three have been arrested, charged under India's new criminal code for cheating, forgery and criminal breach of trust, and remanded to 14 days' judicial custody. The detail nobody in the department is advertising: it took a machine's first pass to catch what humans missed for three years running.