A bid in December
Published 3 October 2026
Governments do not hand out deposits at random. They run a process, with eligibility parameters, a list of empanelled banks and a finance department notification that says how much any single department may park with any single lender. The process is where this story's numbers first become public, because the bank itself described its application to the CBI.
The invitation
According to Anish Kapur, IDFC First Bank's regional head for government banking, whose statement to the CBI was reviewed by ThePrint, the Haryana government invited proposals from banks in November 2023. A team of three, Kapur, zonal head Abhijit Singh Toor and government banking business head Guljiv Sawhney, submitted the bank's proposal on 14 December 2023, a Thursday. The proposal carried data on the parameters the state had set: net worth, capital adequacy ratio, NPAs and branch spread.
The numbers the bank put forward
Kapur told the CBI the bank reported a capital adequacy ratio of 16.11 per cent and net NPAs of 0.60 per cent for FY 2023-24. It submitted that it had 79 branches in Haryana across 18 districts, 23 of them rural and 56 semi-urban or urban, with a credit-deposit ratio of 38 per cent as of December 2023. Its profit, per the same account, was Rs 452.28 crore in FY2021, Rs 145.49 crore in FY2022, Rs 2,437.13 crore in FY2023 and Rs 2,957 crore in FY2024.
Nothing in that list is unusual for a private lender bidding for state business, and nothing in it is alleged to be false. It is the presentable face of a bank in a good year. The profit column is the one a reader should hold on to, because it will matter in February 2026, when a single fraud is compared with a quarter's earnings.
In March 2024, Kapur said, the state asked banks to update their data to 31 March. The bank did so on 4 April 2024.
The notification
The bank was then empanelled, by a notification dated 12 July 2024 from the Finance Department, with a limit of Rs 50 crore on deposits by any one department of the Haryana government. July 12, 2024 was a Friday. The same instruction, per the FIR that Haryana's anti-corruption bureau later registered, set the fund limits for the two banks that became the centre of the case: Rs 50 crore at IDFC First Bank and Rs 25 crore at AU Small Finance Bank for a particular scheme, in line with the Finance Department instructions dated 12 July 2024.
That cap is the quiet protagonist of this file. A per-department limit of Rs 50 crore is a risk control: no matter how persuasive a branch manager is, a department can park at most that much with a newly empanelled bank. The investigators' case depends in part on what happened to the money inside that limit and, later, on what happened when the limit disappeared.
Before the list, the proposals
The CBI told a court, when opposing Rishi's bail, that Rishi had "approached senior Haryana Government officials and initiated banking proposals with various departments even before the bank was empanelled for government business in the state". It also alleged that he falsely represented higher interest rates to officials and got them to invest funds in the branch where he was posted. These are allegations in a bail opposition. They are a prosecution's description of intent and sequence, and the court that heard them dismissed the bail application. They are not findings of fact.
Kapur's own account, which sits in the same case file, offers the bank's side of the order of events. He said the bank had won empanelment through a proper submission, and that the cap was in place. What he says came later, in March 2025, is the moment the bank's own people began to see something.
Why Chandigarh, and not Panchkula
There is a question that sits underneath the whole case, and ThePrint put it plainly in May: why did government departments headquartered in Panchkula open accounts at particular Chandigarh branches of IDFC First Bank and AU Small Finance Bank? Norms required accounts to be opened at the nearest branch, and investigators were probing whether a network of private operators directed public money to those branches. The Haryana Finance Department had written to department heads on 7 July 2025, months before the fraud became public, flagging non-compliance with account-opening guidelines and calling out Panchkula offices for opening accounts in Chandigarh without valid justification. Departments were asked to audit their accounts within 15 days and send compliance reports by 30 July 2025. Whether the audits happened has not been confirmed publicly.
So the process produced a list, the list produced a cap, and the cap produced a spread of accounts across a border. The next chapter looks at what the investigators say was built on the other side of those accounts: the firms that received the money.
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