Exposing Corruption in India's IAS System: The Shocking Case of Puja Khedkar

[00:00:07] Kiran, I am very upset. What has triggered this off now? I realise I was sitting and doing this podcast, trying to write books, scripts. What are we doing with our lives? Why couldn't we be like this, Puja Khedkar, you know, report disability, crack UPSC exam

[00:00:27] on some quota and then make a killing by misusing public office? I even had the disability until I did LASIK. I had like a flying status. But I gave it up. But listen, what a story. How deep is the rot in the Indian IAS?

[00:00:46] And she knows how to game it because her parents have been there, her parents are both bureaucrats. UPSC exam, general category or I'll have to take it 6 times. And if you are in OBC then? 9 attempts. And if you have a disability quota then? 11.

[00:01:02] So basically, 99 attempts, physically handicapped belonging to general and OBC have 9 attempts. And for physical handicapped belonging to SESD it's unlimited. So basically, if you can get yourself a certificate, which of course we live in India, we know

[00:01:18] it's easy to procure that you have some sort of disability and you start taking the UPSC exam at the age of 23 by 34, you're certain to crack it. And you can be a civil servant for life with all the perks and privileges. And there is no retesting after that.

[00:01:37] If you become a doctor every few years, you have to re-qualify. You have to re-qualify. But here once you're in, you're in. And you're set for life. And look at the number of certificates she has given to prove her disability. It's not just one. Multiple certificates.

[00:01:51] So first it starts with the visual disability which you also had, which means myopia. Of course in her case, they said it's 40% disability. Which is given to her by Ahmed Nagar. Yeah. And then in 2021, she first cleared her UPSC exam in 2019 under visual impairment. Impairment disability.

[00:02:17] Persons with benchmarks. And then she was posted to the Sports Authority of India as a trainee, IAS officer. But for some reason she wasn't happy with that. So in 2021, she got herself a certificate to qualify her as somebody who had locomotive disorder along with mental disability.

[00:02:38] Firstly, I have mental disability. I am very suspicious of what you wanted to get into the bureaucratic service. But so then they declared that she had 20% disability of depression. Okay. And then misuse of public office, which is in her genes because her father has already

[00:02:59] had some corruption cases against him. And the mother held a gun to some villagers as a land grabber. And has just been here. Is the mother also an ex-civil servant? Yes. Okay. So she comes from the stock of the rot runs deep but it's also genetically passed on.

[00:03:13] And to think that Sardar Patel said that the bureaucracy was going to be the steel frame of India. The steel frame of India is rotting if this is what it is. It is. You know, I wanted to quote this Subbarau who has written a book.

[00:03:27] So this is our ex-RBI Governor D Subbarau, former IAS officer naturally. And he writes in his book that 25% IAS officers are corrupt, incompetent or inefficient. The middle 50% who are not that corrupt are complacent. So basically only 25% that means are effectively working honestly and trying to bring about a

[00:03:54] change and do service as public servants. Whereas people like Pooja, even as a trainee, look at the level of entitlement. Can you just take us through all the demands? The demands were for a red beacon for a car, a private Audi car, which was not owned

[00:04:12] by her, which was owned by some company. An office with all the furniture she wanted changed. She as a trainee wanted a cabin for herself, a cabin for herself, stuff for herself. And she also apparently called up a high ranking police official to get somebody, get a case

[00:04:29] of somebody who was a person. No, no, there was an incarcerated relative of hers in Dubai. She called the DCP Vashi and said please release him as a trainee IAS. That's when I think people started noticing also when this Audi was out and it had some 26,000

[00:04:47] in traffic fines against it. And I think questions were raised as to how a private Audi could have a government and a Maharashtra government sticker on it. And not just that. That reminds me there's just so much here that I think we need to do a proper PPT

[00:05:01] on this. She by the way also you tried to use the OBC quota because they declared for the non cream layer of this country to apply for UPS, for the quota. You have to have an annual income of less than 8 lakhs.

[00:05:17] But her father contested the looks of elections and his declared income at the time was 40 CR and above. Her personal income is 17 CR and mother has her own bank balance. She also went on record to say in an interview and there's live interview,

[00:05:33] there's footage from that interview available online, her IAS interview, that she comes from a broken home. Her parents had separated and she has no relationship with her father. She hasn't even seen him in years.

[00:05:45] But it was her father who rang the office, the collector's office in Pune where she was interning and demanding a cabin which is not a pork and a trainee guest. A trainee IAS.

[00:05:58] And as soon as the senior colleague went out of town, she removed his name plate and put her name plate there and went and occupied the cabin. Look at the cheek of this woman. She sounded like a psychopath to me.

[00:06:16] Yeah and I'm glad this is all coming to light because as she all this is coming to light you know about her and also we've forgotten the fact that she has taken the exam multiple times and she's also changed her name multiple times.

[00:06:26] Oh also between 2019 and 2023 she grew only one year. She aged only one year according to her paper and documents. According to her papers, trainee IAS officer Pooja Khedkar aged only one year between 2020 and 2023 and used different names on applications. Different names on applications.

[00:06:44] To try and get the fake medical certificate, also different ration card, also different home address and Ames kept calling her to verify her mental disability for an MRI scan six times. She missed all six appointments.

[00:06:59] All six because she said she cited claustrophobia and finally she went to a private nursing home clinic in Pune and did her MRI scan. I don't know how claustrophobia went away over there. So maybe claustrophobia is geographically specific for her. That's true. In Pune she gets it.

[00:07:17] She doesn't have claustrophobia. Really she has claustrophobia. And her father was suspended twice because he was, when he was in service, he asked for a bribe to supply water and to resume the electrical connection of some sort of a factory or industry there. Okay, some company.

[00:07:43] And they had lodged a complaint against him and he was suspended twice. So here's my question. Why are such people suspended and reinstated? Is it written in a constitution that once you're in IAS, you can never lose your job. You can never be suspended forever?

[00:07:58] I think there have been cases of those who have been suspended and there have been serious cases. But now I am very curious to see what happens to Pooja Khedkar. Keep her father aside and keep what's happened to the father aside.

[00:08:12] But this can of worms that has opened with her. And if she's just been recalled back, she's been taken off for training, where is she right now? At some place, she was in a training and wash him in the Vidarbha district. She's been called back to Masuri.

[00:08:26] To the academy. Yeah, to the academy pending further inquiry. Now that pending further inquiry remains to be seen as to what is going to emerge from that further inquiry when so much of material is already out there.

[00:08:39] But there were already a complaint against her mother for holding a gun up on poor farmers to grab land. How is that what I'm seeing? Till a story like this breaks and someone has the courage to complain and somebody else has the courage to take action.

[00:08:56] There was thousands of such cases that go unreported or even if they're reported, they are not really brought into the limelight. You know, ever since this broke on social media, I think there have been many who have

[00:09:08] they've taken out cases of officers who have gotten to the bureaucracy by claiming various disabilities and photographs of them having completely normal kind of life. Yeah, I would send this to me and put some names down. So there is Asif Yusuf. Yeah, he fought some income certificate.

[00:09:25] Nikita Khandelwal, who claims to be blind. But if you look at her Instagram, she's driving a car and she looks anything but blind. Maybe share Lasik Dantu. Blindness, it can be cured with Lasik. Hi, my Opa can. OK, fair enough. OK, I'm giving them better.

[00:09:41] Anu Benival, dad is in IPS, but she says she come from economic class, maybe they're separated also like Pooja Kedil. Yeah, I'm giving everybody benefit of doubt. Yeah, too much benefit. Can you just hold off on some benefit?

[00:09:54] Abhishek Singh who posts his gym pictures and he's done some camios in some films also lovely. I don't know on duty or on duty, the locomotive disability. Then there's Priyanshu Khati. He is some sort of a bodybuilder, but he has some serious orthopedic disability. OK.

[00:10:13] And I also heard the story of Rinku Duga and her husband a few years ago. They had emptied the Delhi stadium to walk their door. To walk that door. Yes. They threw kids who were playing trinket and football or whatever out of there.

[00:10:26] Inspectors were sitting in the on this in the stand. And some athletes who were training for an upcoming meet, which got me annoyed. Yeah. So now they haven't used a disability quota, but they've just shown typical entire level entitlement.

[00:10:39] And you know, Kiran, I'll tell you as an army daughter, this is what upsets me. Just two days ago, some officers in Javan's have died again in Kashmir. You know of that. Two weeks before that, that young officer, newly married officer had passed away.

[00:10:56] So the thing is that they are both working for the country allegedly. But one is risking his life on the line. And the other is just becoming a fat cat. You know, when I watched well, one will get suspended in a heartbeat and loses job forever.

[00:11:15] At the slightest of, you know, you get caught, Marshall in the army. Yeah. And the other has nine lives. I'm taking the cat metaphor too far. Cat, cat, nine lives. But you know what I'm getting at?

[00:11:28] You know, and when you one has more power, you look at any collector, any commissioner, you look at anybody in the IES, they feel a lot more power than for G's unless you become army chief. Yeah, or G or C. But even then just look at the whole.

[00:11:45] But the rank is if you have to compare the bureaucrats with the chief and the other senior ranks in the army, you can't compare them to a why not to a colonel, why not to a Brigadier?

[00:11:55] Yeah, you can compare them to colonel and I'm not comparing them to soldiers. Yeah, you can't. But I'm seeing enough officers die in offices. They live away from families, suffer, die. You know, when you look at some movie like

[00:12:12] in the line of duty is what I'm getting at the line, die in the line of duty. And these guys and they get away with it. My problem is not that they are cut up.

[00:12:20] My problem is that they have so far only gotten away with it for the most part. They've gotten away with it for the most part, should not be because it is so deeply entrenched. The rotters, not just them.

[00:12:29] It is a nexus between them and the politicians who are giving them support and power. If anything happens to them, they know that they will be reinstated and brought back. Yeah. Because that can of worms there cannot be opened. Do you think it happens in isolation?

[00:12:44] Do you think this corruption happens only through them? No, no, no. It is an entire problem. But I'll also tell you that a very, very dear friend of ours, family friend, and he's a senior bureaucrat. He's held a lot of senior positions in UP and Uttarakhand.

[00:13:02] Now he's retired, but he's been reinstated because he's a genius and they need him. This gentleman is so honest that one day his daughter, who was flying down from London, she lives there, wanted to book some tickets to go somewhere and this website kept crashing.

[00:13:22] So then she was speaking to me on the phone. She think, you know, I've just not been able to do it from here. So I say, why don't you ask your dad's office? His assistant will do it.

[00:13:31] She said we are never allowed to call my dad's office or the assistant for even the simplest of things, even if there's a crisis, if there's a fire at home also. The assistant is not expected to anything because the father is that rigid about not misusing public office.

[00:13:47] I know I have a friend. And they literally if you see their lives as bureaucrats versus how well the bureaucrats live, you can see the difference. I have a friend whose husband is an IS officer and his office is just like a five minute walk from home.

[00:14:02] So the car and driver is almost never used. But do you think the car and driver will go to drop the kid to school or drop the kid to school class? No, he does not allow that at all.

[00:14:12] And sometimes my friends is like, you know, it's just lying there and just sitting there. No, that is official duty car. I cannot have it for private reasons. So there are those bureaucrats who are also very honest and very straightforward. And so they are managing to work.

[00:14:26] They're managing to make a difference and hold positions. So it's all impossible and unthinkable. But temptation must be too great, Sonali. Look at the temptation. Look at the hundreds of crores that are at stake. I think that you know, I wonder for these upright bureaucrats

[00:14:40] like this Mr. Pandey, who I'm talking about. When you see others thriving and their lives are getting better, their wives jewelry, clothes, vacations, amazing. Even then under those circumstances and the pressures of a government salary and its limitations to hold on to your values.

[00:14:59] So my father-in-law was not an IS officer, but he was in the government service. He was in the he was the Joint Commission of Import and Exports. OK. But don't you need to be an IS for that?

[00:15:10] I think he climbed up or something, but I am not sure of that. He's very highly qualified. He was double MA and law and everything. But one of his colleagues, I don't know the names

[00:15:21] and this was all before my time and before I got married into the family. But my mother-in-law says that man had a house in Kapperid. There you go. And these guys are staying in a little pocky hole in Kandivli because that was all my father-in-law could afford.

[00:15:36] But his colleague was staying in Kapperid. Yeah. And the wedding of the child, I believe, was on such a lavish scale that my mother-in-law says we had never seen anything like that back in the day. Kiran, but this is what I'm saying.

[00:15:49] There are bureaucrats in Delhi who have Chhattarpur's sprawling farmhouses with Raza, Hussain, Burman, art hanging on their walls. And that is not possible on a bureaucrat's side. And these are not this. I'm not this is not some guesswork that I'm doing.

[00:16:04] These are people that whose house is one has heard of. So where does the bureaucrat officially legitimately justify this kind of an income? They don't justify it. It just is. But because there is no precedence or no recurring precedence

[00:16:19] of some punitive measures taken of somebody permanently being suspended, this continues. People will just become more careful about hiding their sins. So I think there are some bureaucrats who have really been taken to task and suffered the consequences.

[00:16:33] I'm just going to read out a list of their names. Sameer Vishnoye Chhattiskar Khada, 2009 batch was arrested by the ED in a large-scale corruption case involving the collection of bribes for mining operations. OK, over a period of 16 months, more than 500 crores was collected as bribes

[00:16:53] in a year, a little more than a year, 500 crores. Pooja Singal, Jharkhand Khada, 2000 batch, IS officer arrested by ED in connection with the money laundering case. Are they still in jail? Or they were released on bail one month later. That I don't know.

[00:17:11] K Rajesh Kujar, Khada, 2011 batch, bribery case, dubulous land deals while serving as a collector of Sundar Nagar district. Neera Yadav Uttar Pradesh, land scams, allotting land plots and posh localities to politicians and businessmen in exchange for large sums of money.

[00:17:29] Two years in prison, sentenced to two years in prison, convicted. Babu Lal Garwal, 500 crore assets during IT raids, including money in 446 Benami bank accounts and ownership of 16 shell companies used for Havala transactions. What greed? T.O. Suraj Kerala Khada, multiple controversies, undeclared properties

[00:17:51] worth 30 crores in cash of 20 lakh assets included luxury flats in Cochin and Dubai. Amazing, IS people owning flats in Dubai. But it's the same with the politicians. That's the thing. So they are just aspiring. I mean, like you said that politicians one expects corruption from.

[00:18:10] Not from the bureaucracy. Now, listen to this chapter. Akesh Bahadur Uttar Pradesh Khada, 4000 crore land scam in Noida. He was suspended in 2009. Despite these allegations, what you're saying, he was reinstated and appointed as chairman of the Noida Development Authority after a change in state government.

[00:18:28] This is it. So the upright guys get quickly transferred out. If the politician is not being able to work with an upright bureaucrat, then they will get transferred to some more fossil down. OK. And if the guy is exiled like this, pliable,

[00:18:47] if not just pliable, greedy and very more than just pliable, then he'll be reinstated after such a big scam. And then once you have 4000 crores in your bank account or your varied Benami accounts, you're set for life. Then even if you are suspended from service, you don't care.

[00:19:03] You're sorted. So I think suspension is enough. I think long term incarceration is called law. But listen, who is paying them? They're being paid from our money. It's what we pay in taxes. Absolutely. And it's this is the taxed money.

[00:19:21] This is our hard earned money that is feeding these people and their families that making a fat cats again. We're back to catch. Yeah. I'm just saying that it it infuriates me. It should infuriate everyone, not just you

[00:19:36] because, you know, for too long, this has been going on. And I think this is only the tip of the iceberg. The level of entitlement you see with some of them. I was at a lit fest a few years ago and it was organized

[00:19:48] as a government thing for the state that the place it was happening in. And there were these IS bureaucrats who were in charge of the show and who came to give their speeches and Vagara. And my son at that time was, I think, quite young.

[00:20:04] He wasn't even college at that point. He was taken aback at the amount of jeehozuri that was going on, that somebody is walking around, people are falling in the feed. The attitude with which they were talking to the people who adjoin

[00:20:17] into them, he's like, how can we talk so rudely to everyone? I said, because people take it and they will take it because they are in charge of the IS bureaucrats. Yeah. I'm sure not everyone is like that.

[00:20:26] But that was my first glimpse at the amount of power they have. And then I contrasted with what I saw in 12th field. The struggle that people have to get into the IPS and the IS or where all they come, the lives they come.

[00:20:41] Then I think you go through all that and then you become that. Yeah. You don't have to wave like a sahab even after that. You can still work with some humility. When you've come, I wish they would really understand

[00:20:52] what is the meaning of a servant, a public servant? You know, our vocabulary is all wrong. Even for governments, we say those in power. We should say those in service. Yeah. See, look what happens in Scandinavian countries. They're actually public servants. There's a wonderful.

[00:21:08] And there's so much accountability there. And there is no standing to show or pump. There's no standing to tension with them. When the Prime Minister of Denmark, or I think I forget if it's Scandinavian country was leaving office, he quietly got onto a cycle and cycled home. Correct.

[00:21:25] You know, there will be a retinue of 20 cards. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I think there should be tribunals and these people should be tried. And then there should be some sort of we should be able to track down

[00:21:35] who is doing where and for how long they were in prison. And I think the more the more the public demands, you've seen what happened. They were filling thousands of trees in the Redund recently and people were up in arms against that environmentalist local population.

[00:21:49] Those trees have been saved. I think that passive action, just armchair, armchair activism doesn't work. I think people need to use their voices. Okay, I guess in a situation like this, all you can do is talk about it, write to editors, tweet about it, put posts on Facebook.

[00:22:09] But I just think that change begins with that one person having the courage to stand up and say, look, enough is enough. This is wrong. This cannot continue. And as a citizen of this country paying my taxes, Yeah. I'm not going to tolerate this. Yeah.

[00:22:23] But hopefully we'll get there somewhere. So fully our kids will see a less corrupt nation.