Railway police and the Railway Protection Force arrested a 19-year-old man from Bikaner district in Rajasthan at Secunderabad railway station after finding fake currency with a face value of roughly Rs 60 lakh in his bag. The seizure was made during a joint check in Telangana.

The accused is Shivarajan Mahiya. Officers picked him up around 1:30 pm while he was travelling in the general compartment of the Mumbai LTT Express, train number 18519. When they searched his bag, they found 12 bundles of counterfeit Rs 500 notes. Officials confirmed the total value at Rs 60 lakh.

A teenager with that kind of money, travelling in an unreserved coach, is the detail that stops most readers. The amount is large enough to fund a serious operation, yet the courier was barely old enough to vote in most of India’s elections. Investigators now have to work out whether he was a carrier or part of something bigger.

A trail that crossed three cities

Police say the teenager had got to know a 25-year-old man named Om Prakash, also from Bikaner, a few months before the arrest. According to the preliminary investigation, Om Prakash offered him a commission of Rs 2 lakh if he could carry the bag of fake notes safely from Jaipur to Mumbai.

According to the police’s preliminary investigation, the 19-year-old was promised Rs 2 lakh to carry the counterfeit bag safely from Jaipur to Mumbai.

The handover happened on October 28 at Jaipur railway station. Om Prakash gave the bag to Shivarajan and told him to first reach Kacheguda, and only then head on to Mumbai. The plan was to keep the bag moving rather than deliver it in one go.

On October 30, the teenager arrived at Kacheguda by Mysore Express and checked into a lodge. His onward journey did not go as first planned. Floods caused the Konark Express to be cancelled. On Om Prakash’s suggestion, Shivarajan boarded the Mumbai LTT Express instead. That train is where railway police caught him.

Why the route matters

The sequence shows how a courier chain can bend around disruption. A cancelled train did not stop the plan. It simply changed the timetable and the rail line. Officers have so far pointed to this as part of the preliminary account of how the bag travelled, and the case rests on that movement across Rajasthan, Telangana and Maharashtra.

For Telangana, the arrest is a local story as well as a national one. The seizure happened at Secunderabad, and the joint operation was carried out by Telangana Railway Police alongside the Railway Protection Force. The bag passed through Kacheguda, a station in the state’s rail network, before the teenager was detained on the Mumbai-bound train. That places the bust squarely on the Telangana railway map and shows how central these stations are to movement of contraband cash.

The man police want most

The alleged mastermind, Om Prakash, is still at large. Police have said he is absconding and have deployed special teams to track him down. His role, as described so far, was to recruit the carrier, set the payment, and direct the route. Whether he was acting alone or for others has not been established in the material available.

Police have registered a case and are digging into where the counterfeit network operates from. Investigators are also checking whether other people are linked to the racket across the country. Those questions will decide whether this is a single courier arrest or the first visible piece of a wider supply chain.

What is still unclear

Several gaps remain. The reports do not say how much Shivarajan knew about the contents of the bag before he set out from Jaipur, and they do not describe where the notes were printed or who produced them. Police have not yet named anyone beyond the teenager and Om Prakash in the account released so far.

Those gaps matter because the amount involved is far above what a casual courier would normally be trusted to carry. A Rs 2 lakh commission for a single trip is a strong incentive for a young man with limited options, and it is also the kind of payment that suggests the people behind the scheme know how to recruit people who will not ask too many questions.

For now, the story turns on a simple but unsettling fact. A 19-year-old from Bikaner was holding a bag worth Rs 60 lakh in fake Rs 500 notes, and the man who gave him that bag is still free. Police say special teams are working to close that gap, and the next arrest could show whether this network reaches far beyond one train, one station and one teenager.