Ahmedabad contractor wanted his Rs 45 crore dues. A ‘fixer’ took Rs 3 crore

The Indian Express · Pragynesh · 2026-11-06 07:50 UTC

An Ahmedabad contractor spent 13 years trying to recover Rs 45 crore owed for work on the Ahmedabad Metro project. A man claiming to have contacts in Delhi’s government ministries promised to get the dues cleared — and conned him instead.

In 2025, Bhupendra Singh, a mining and construction contractor from Ahmedabad, finally got what he had been pursuing for 13 years: a letter from the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) sanctioning the payment of Rs 45 crore owed to him for a high-profile government project and 23 government treasury cheques.

Police said these were handed to him by Kushal Sameer Mehta, who he had been told worked with government ministries in Delhi and could get his work done. By then, he and Mehta had been in touch for eight years, over the course of which he had paid Mehta over Rs 3 crore, desperately hoping that Mehta would quicken the pace of the bureaucratic process.

When he had first been introduced to Mehta in 2017, police said, he had already been waiting for his dues for five years. His 23 firms had supplied sand, silt, stones, and stone powder for the ambitious Ahmedabad Metro project and he had yet to receive a promising response from the Gujarat Metro Rail Corporation (GMRC).

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