"The Great India Bank Heist" | Witness of Witness, Episode 285
₹29 lakh crore. That's $340 billion — more than India's entire defence, health, and education budgets combined — vanished from your public sector banks. Not in a single dramatic robbery, but systematically, methodically, and with powerful help from the inside.
Investigative journalist J Gopikrishnan of The Daily Pioneer exposes the biggest financial scandal in India's history. Eleven PSU banks. Over 1000 court cases. Five fugitives living freely abroad on stolen money. And a CIBIL defaulters database that mysteriously went offline within 24 hours of this story breaking.
The playbook was brazen: 21 identical loans from the same branch. Shell companies registered in servants' names. Borrowers using two different name spellings to fool CIBIL's automated checks. A bankruptcy code twisted to let brothers buy each other's collapsed empires for pennies on the rupee. And political patrons — sitting MPs — whose connections made it all possible.
The names are familiar. Anil Ambani. Nirav Modi. Vijay Mallya. Era Group. Videocon. Bhushan. But the scale will stun you.
This isn't just a story about fraud. It's about who protected it, who buried the data, and why — a decade later — almost none of the money has come back.
The money that was stolen belongs to you. It's time you knew exactly how it was taken.