Mumbai Police’s Economic Offences Wing executed the arrest of two high-profile contractors, Sunil Upadhyay, director of SNB Infrastructure Private Limited, and Mahesh Purohit, partner in MB Brewers Firm, on Wednesday, marking a major breakthrough in the Rs 65 crore Mithi River desilting scam that operated undetected for an entire decade from 2013 to 2023. The accused allegedly siphoned off enormous sums from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation by claiming payment for silt removal work that was never performed, directly jeopardising the city’s ability to combat monsoon flooding.

Investigators uncovered a meticulously planned deception involving forged Memorandums of Understanding with fabricated landowner signatures, counterfeit permissions for silt disposal sites, and staged photographs and videos purporting to show heavy machinery in operation. These falsified documents were systematically submitted to BMC’s Storm Water Drainage department to generate and encash grossly inflated bills, while the river remained choked with silt year after year.

Between 2021 and 2024, tenders were deliberately rigged by inserting highly specific clauses requiring rare silt-pushing equipment and truck-mounted excavators that only select contractors possessed, thereby eliminating genuine competition and guaranteeing pre-determined winners exorbitant per-metric-ton rates. This engineered manipulation, combined with non-existent ground verification, enabled the fraud to escalate unchecked and inflict losses exceeding Rs 65 crore on the civic exchequer.

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Upadhyay and Purohit now join three previously arrested individuals—middlemen Ketan Kadam and Jai Joshi, along with contractor Shersingh Rathore—who had been detained for preparing forged paperwork and routing payments. Produced before the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate, the latest accused were remanded to police custody until December 16, with senior officers confirming that several more arrests, including potentially BMC officials, are imminent as forensic audits and financial trails are pursued.

The scandal has triggered intense scrutiny of the BMC’s procurement and oversight mechanisms, amplifying demands for sweeping reforms in tender transparency, mandatory GPS tracking of machinery, and real-time third-party verification of desilting operations, while the Enforcement Directorate prepares to attach assets linked to the illicit gains.

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