A dhaba cook from Madhya Pradesh's Bhind district was in for a shock of his life when he received an income tax notice of Rs 46 crore, turning his life upside down.
The man, who earns barely Rs 10,000 a month, has been forced to leave his job and now spends his days shuttling between income tax offices and police stations.
The victim, Ravindra Singh Chauhan, originally from Gandhi Nagar in Bhind and working as a cook in Gwalior, says he had never seen such money in his life.
"I work in a dhaba, there has not been a transaction of even three lakh rupees in my account in a year, then how did this notice of crores come?" he told NDTV.
The mystery dates back to 2017-18, when Ravindra worked as a helper at a toll plaza run by a private company.
A supervisor named Shashi Bhushan Rai, originally from Bihar, convinced Ravindra to open a new bank account in Delhi, promising him faster PF withdrawal and an additional monthly incentive of Rs 5,000-10,000. Tempted, Ravindra and three other employees accompanied him to Delhi in November 2019, where the accounts were opened.
But the promised money never came.
When Ravindra tried to close the account months later, he was told it required approval from the GST branch.
Trusting Shashi Bhushan again, he left the matter to him.
By 2022, the supervisor had quit the job and disappeared.
Ravindra, too, lost his job when the toll contract ended and later moved to Pune for work.
On April 9, 2025, a notice from the Income Tax Department reached Ravindra's house in Bhind. The poorly educated cook and his wife could not understand the English letter.
When a second notice arrived on July 25, Ravindra rushed home and consulted a neighborhood lawyer, Pradyuman Singh Bhadoria, who broke the shocking news: a massive Rs 46 crore transaction had been reported in his name.
Subsequent checks revealed that Ravindra had two accounts: one in Bhind and another in Delhi. While his Bhind account showed transactions under Rs 3 lakh in three years, the Delhi account was linked to a firm called Shaurya Trading Company, through which transactions worth Rs 46 crore had been routed.
Around Rs 13 lakh remains deposited in that account.
Lawyer Bhadoria helped Ravindra approach the Income Tax office in Gwalior and later filed a complaint with Siraul police station.
The lawyer alleged that Ravindra was duped into opening the Delhi account and had no knowledge of how it was used.
However, Gwalior police expressed helplessness, saying the fraud fell under Delhi's jurisdiction.
"The complainant had opened the account in Delhi with his supervisor. The financial transactions also took place in Delhi. No crime has taken place in Gwalior. The applicant should go to Delhi and file a complaint," police officials said.
With his life thrown into chaos, Ravindra has quit his cooking job and now spends his days running from one office to another. His family's already fragile financial condition has worsened.
"I had to leave school after Class 6 because of poverty. I started cooking to survive. Now I don't know why I am being punished for something I never did," he said, his voice trembling with despair.
For Ravindra, the battle has just begun, a fight to prove his innocence in a fraud that used his name as a front, leaving him to bear the crushing weight of a Rs 46-crore tax notice.
