It’s been more than a fortnight since a team of journalists from TNM and Pratidvani broke the story about Chilume Trust, a shadowy private trust that was illegally collecting sensitive information from the public under the cover of a voters awareness campaign in Bengaluru. Four government officials have since been arrested, six officials suspended, the trust's founders have been arrested and there has been relentless media focus on the scam which has become a major issue for opposition parties ahead of the Karnataka Assembly elections.
The trajectory of the investigation was anything but straightforward, and with every field visit, TNM’s team discovered a new layer of the massive operation.
While the reaction to our investigation was every bit as explosive as we had imagined, we had no inkling of how massive the entire operation was until the official investigation started. Police officials now estimate that Chilume had deployed around 15,000 workers across Bengaluru for the illegal data collection drive.
Given the scale of his operations and the backing he enjoyed, Ravikumar Krishnappa, the kingpin of the scam, must have felt invincible until the sudden disruption caused by our expose. Left to the system, he could have still been running his vast illegal operation. The only mistake Ravikumar made was ill-treating the people who worked for him. They became the cause for his downfall by providing us with the proof we needed to expose him.
We started our investigation based on a tip-off from one such disgruntled worker in late August who Chilume hadn't paid after several months of work. He revealed how the entire scam worked but could provide us with very little evidence. He gave us a partial copy of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), (BBMP is the municipal corporation of Bengaluru) order granting Chilume permission to conduct voter awareness campaigns, an advertisement issued by the trust seeking workers for data collection and an ID-card of a booth level officer (BLO), which he claimed was fake.
We needed to speak to more data collectors, collect more testimonies, see more ID cards, perhaps revisit the areas where the illegal survey was conducted and speak to voters. But all the worker could tell us was that the biggest operation was in Mahadevapura constituency. He was too scared to provide any further leads or contacts. He claimed that the private trust was a front for powerful politicians.
Our early attempts to find out what happened in Mahadevapura failed. It was just too vast an area and we did not know where to begin. We couldn't possibly start knocking on people’s doors at random.
Our team then ran a background check on Ravikumar Krishnappa and made a discovery about his portfolio of work. In addition to the trust, he also ran an election management company called Chilume Enterprises Pvt. Ltd. as well as a mobile application called Digital Sameeksha that compiled voters’ data. The clientele, according to their website, included MPs, MLAs and political parties.
It was a conflict of interest that could endanger the entire election process and a clear violation of the conditions on which the BBMP had granted the NGO permission. But we still didn't have proof of the bigger issue involving the theft of private data of thousands of voters. Throughout our quest, though, officials of the State Election Commission (SEC) and the BBMP either feigned ignorance or revealed far less than they knew.
We made our first visit to the BBMP headquarters on September 20, where we met a group of officials from the election section and asked if they were aware of any agreement signed with Chilume to collect data from citizens. The officials claimed they knew nothing about Chilume or the permission granted to them. They asked us to approach the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) of Mahadevpura assembly constituency for further information.
One of the men from the group we met at the Election Tahsildar’s office in BBMP followed our reporter out of the building and approached her seeking to know what she wanted with Chilume. He identified himself as Maruthi, and to her surprise, said that he worked for Chilume and not the BBMP. Clearly, the officials who claimed not to have heard about Chilume knew more than they let on. Maruthi is now in police custody along with the other top executives of the trust.
In his interaction with us, Maruthi appeared supremely confident and said that Chilume had done nothing wrong. He claimed that all their data collection activity was being conducted transparently and under supervision of the authorities.
After the meeting with Maruthi, we proceeded to the Mahadevpura ERO but once again hit a dead end with the officer asking us to direct our questions to the Election Commission.
For the next month, we made repeated visits to various offices of the BBMP and the SEC and met several officials. While we got no more information on the illegal survey, by early October we managed to ferret out a golden lead.
A complaint had been filed against Chilume by a manpower agency over unpaid wages. At the time, we didn't know who had filed the complaint or who had received it. We spent a few more days coaxing officials at the BBMP and the SEC until one senior officer finally revealed that the complaint was filed with the Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Kumar Meena.
Armed with this information, we approached the SEC’s Grievance Redressal officer, Kotesh, asking about the complaint. He said the SEC was aware of Chilume’s activities and it was an “internal matter” that was under investigation. He asked us to talk to the BBMP Commissioner who is also the District Election Officer for further details.
On October 31, we met Tushar Giri Nath, the BBMP Chief Commissioner, and asked about the complaint against Chilume. We also asked him about Ravikumar Krishnappa’s conflict of interest and the claims about the illegal data collection. The BBMP chief deflected our questions to Special Commissioner S Rangappa, who was present at the meeting.
We now know that it was Tushar Giri Nath who signed the August 20 order expanding Chilume’s operations from just Mahadevapura to all 28 constituencies in Bengaluru. But on the day of our meeting, he admonished Rangappa for allowing them to operate. “How can we just give voter awareness work to anybody? How can they provide this service for free? Who are they, how did they get permission? Cancel their permission,” he said to Rangappa, sounding unhappy. He also directed Rangappa to give us a copy of the complaint against the private trust. After running from one desk to another for three days, we were finally allowed to access the complaint on November 2.
The complaint had been filed by a rural development NGO called Samanvaya Trust that had supplied manpower to Chilume for the survey work. In addition to unpaid wages, the complaint also spoke about the data collection and sought to know if it was legal. This was the first credible lead we had found in weeks. We knew we had to meet the complainant.
The next morning, as we prepared to visit the office of Samanvaya, one of our senior editors got a phone call from a man called, Srinivas Ucchil, who claimed to have powerful political connections. In the call, which we recorded, he claimed that BBMP Special Commissioner S Rangappa had given him the phone number of our journalist. Srinivas said he was a social worker as well as a media person associated with a right-wing publication. He started the call with the classic Sangh Parivar greeting, “Hari Om.”
Srinivas dissuaded us from pursuing the story and claimed that senior ministers had intervened to stop the cancellation of the permission granted to Chilume. Hinting at a bribe, he then offered to broker a compromise between us and the Chilume management, and invited us for a meeting later that day at the government’s Balabrooie Guest House.
Instead of Balabrooie, we visited the office of Samanvaya Trust on November 3. The head of the trust, Sumangala, helped us find the first pieces of material evidence to show that Chilume was collecting data from voters. She gave us copies of maps of neighborhoods in Mahadevapura in which surveyors had laboriously marked out information about every single property. This was completely new information. Until now, we only knew about the voters survey and the Digital Sameeksha app into which data was uploaded.
Just as we were about to leave the Samanvaya office, we had a surprise meeting with the very person whose illegal activities we had been trying to expose. Ravikumar Krishnappa walked into the office along with his aide Dharmesh, who has also been arrested by the police. They were there to convince Sumangala to withdraw her complaint.
As we sat in their midst, not knowing whether to leave or stay, Ravikumar and Dharmesh alternated between pleading with Sumangala and bragging about their connections. We got a sample of how well-connected Ravikumar was when he managed to identify one of our journalists on sight.
They had never met before. It is impossible for Ravikumar to have checked the reporter’s social media handles for photos because he hadn't shared his full name with anybody in the course of reporting for this investigative project. When we reflected upon it later, we wondered if one of the many officials we had approached over the last weeks had shared CCTV footage of our visits with them.
At one point during the meeting, Ravikumar said that he had been arrested for the same survey work in the lead up to the 2014 elections and boasted about how he was released because he had not done anything wrong. He also tried to convince us that collecting voters data was completely legal. We left after the conversation started going around in loops.
We contacted one of the fieldworkers who had been hired for Chilume by Samanvaya. He spoke to us about the horrible condition of the workers and described how they were stuffed beyond capacity into paying guest accommodations. He said many had not been paid their salaries after being severely overworked. He gave us directions to an area in Hoodi where he said several PG accommodations had Chilume workers. “Ask anybody where the survey people are staying and they’ll tell you,” he said.
While the fieldworker’s testimony was crucial, he couldn't provide us with any hard evidence we could use, such as the fake BLO identity cards (ID) they were issued. We were also not sure how we would prove that the maps had been filled out by teams deployed by Chilume.
This was still our first major breakthrough after weeks of shuttling between opaque government officials. We split up into three teams. Using the maps, one team hit the ground in Mahadevapura to speak to voters whose houses had been marked out. Another team went in search of the PG accommodations in Hoodi. A third team visited the office of Chilume Trust in Malleshwaram.
In Mahadevapura, we met a local resident who said that he had helped the survey team at the behest of his uncle who was a worker in the BJP.
Things were just getting interesting when we had to retreat in haste after we were confronted by two men who claimed to be supporters of the local BJP MLA and former minister Aravind Limbavali. Behaving aggressively, the men demanded that we leave even after we said we are journalists investigating a story about voter fraud. “Let the police or the BBMP do that job, you get out of here,” one of the men said threateningly after which we decided to pack up.
Meanwhile, at the Chilume office in Malleshwaram our team got further confirmation that we were on to something big. We met three women there who were relentlessly working the phone lines. They were telecallers whose job was to screen fieldworkers for the survey work. They said the office next door belonged to Digital Sameeksha and on the floor above was DAP Hombale, another company owned by Ravikumar. Strangely, none of the offices had a name board.
The real breakthrough was made by the team that found the PG accommodation at Hoodi on November 12. The owner of the property said that Chilume had not paid him because of which he made the fieldworkers vacate, however, he did share the contact numbers of the workers who stayed there.
The workers, who had shifted to PG residences in Mahadevapura, said that they had been doing survey work for Chilume since August. They put us in touch with dozens of other workers, who showed us more maps of neighbourhoods. The maps were marked out in incredible detail showing each commercial and residential property and whether they were vacant or occupied. They shared what we were looking for all along – more copies of the fake booth level officer ID cards.
Meanwhile, Sumangala of Samanvaya also shared with us a copy of an unsigned agreement between Samanvaya and Chilume in which Chilume clearly says that booth level officer ID cards would be given to field workers.
We finally had the proof we needed.
We thought we now had enough evidence to make senior officials sit up and take notice.
When we met Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Kumar Meena, he said, “Anybody can do voter rolls revision. It just means you are helping voters upload their documents like Aadhaar, voter identity card. Even you can do roll revision,” he said casually pointing to one of our reporters.
We started asking him what action was taken against Chilume and BBMP officials, Meena responded that the BBMP was probing it and he had sent two reminders.
Towards the end of the conversation, we laid out our trump card – the fake BLO cards with the signature of a BBMP official. Asking us to send him a copy of the photographs we had, Meena said he will order an inquiry and for the first time admitted that there was a crime committed.
Just hours before publishing our investigation on November 16, we made a last-ditch effort to get the response of the BBMP Commissioner. Though the government order on Chilume was cancelled on November 2, Tushar Giri Nath had not acted against any government officers. We told Giri Nath that we intend to publish the story without his response. Once again, the fake BLO cards did the trick. The Commissioner then called the Special Commissioner Rangappa, and for our benefit, put the call on speaker phone. He instructed that within the day Chilume should be blacklisted and a police complaint should be filed against them. Within hours of us publishing the investigation, the BBMP Commissioner's office issued a press release disowning Chilume and warning the public against them.
The voter data theft is being investigated by the police and by a senior IAS officer appointed by the Election Commission of India. Lower rung officers of BBMP, who are being grilled by the police, have threatened to go on strike if the alleged harassment continues and have claimed they were following orders of their superiors. Speaking to the media, Amruth Raj, the head of the BBMP Employees Association has repeatedly blamed senior officials of the BBMP and SEC for the scam.
Who instructed the senior officials to instruct the juniors, is a question that may never be answered. What we know through our investigation is that the operation did enjoy the support of a section of leaders from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
After we published our first investigation, residents from Kallanayakahalli village in Nelamangala, the place that Ravikumar hails from, visited our office. Following a lead provided by them, we found that several farmers in the village, most related to Ravikumar, had got mysterious deposits of money into accounts in 2020, which Ravikumar and his people had allegedly withdrawn.
Read the second part of the investigation here.
The team: Dhanya Rajendran, Pooja Prasanna, Prajwal Bhat, Samrah Attar, Shivakumar S, Shivani Kava, Sudipto Mondal
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