The business of fake deaths in Assam

Excerpted with permission from Scamlands: Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud That Preys on the World by Snigdha Poonam (Penguin India, October 2025)..Aisha Nasrin wasn’t surprised that her husband gave her a divorce; what unsettled her was that he killed her first..Sometime in early 2022, I set out to find Aisha, mainly because I had seen her death certificate a few days earlier. According to this official document, issued on the letterhead of the eastern Indian state of Assam, she died of “natural causes” on 21 October 2016 at her husband’s home in Faluguri village, a few kilometres from where the two of us now sat facing each other. We were perched on opposite edges of her bed. There was nothing spectral about the atmosphere. The bedsheet was crumpled, and a mosquito net covered three-quarters of the bed. If I extended my arm, it would touch her shoulder. She was quite definitely alive..Fatigrah, her village, is tucked away in a remote corner of Assam. The easiest way to reach it was by crossing a river. We chose the longer, winding route, navigating a labyrinth of paddy fields and clusters of thatched-roof houses. She lived, with her two children, in a cluttered room facing a mud courtyard in her parents’ home..I asked her to tell me how she came to be declared dead. She began with the bizarre story of her marriage..In 2015, Aisha had moved in with her in-laws in Faluguri, another village in the same district, after a wedding her husband didn’t want. She had been to the house before, as a friend of his sister from school. When they began dating, it made sense to keep it a secret. That Manzur was a few years older than her, having already graduated from high school and joined the world of working men, was one reason. That no one would approve of an unmarried boy coming anywhere close to an unmarried girl was another. One day, when she knew that her whole family was going out for a wedding, she invited him to her house. They sneaked into an empty room and wrapped themselves in each other’s arms. The lovemaking didn’t last long, however. An uncle swung by to pick up something he had forgotten at home. He barged into the room and caught them red-handed; a full-blown scandal followed. Her family returned to the house fuming. Manzur fled through the main door, but he was chased by a group of Aisha’s male relatives, who caught him in a nearby rice field and dragged him, kicking and screaming, to the courtyard. Aisha’s father then called up Manzur’s father. Their marriage was arranged before he hung up..I wondered if we were sitting in the same room in which her uncle had found her with Manzur. It was hard to imagine this homely space as the secret meeting point for lovers. At this point, the room was overrun with children – not only her daughter and son but a horde of kids from across the neighbourhood, all dropping by to witness the interview. Children’s clothes lay strewn on the chairs, and their toys were scattered on the floor. Even the plastic chandelier was stripped of its decorative value, its branches serving as pegs to hang children’s underwear and socks.After being caught in Manzur’s embrace, Aisha wasn’t allowed back into the house. The same night, she was taken to the house of the headman of Manzur’s village, a friend of both families. There, she endured four days of punishing isolation while the two families prepared for the wedding..When I prompted Aisha to describe her wedding, she didn’t mention anything remarkable. Of that night she only remembers that Manzur looked grumpy.When morning broke, she went to her new home. The marriage was doomed from day one – at least for her. Manzur spent most of his time outside the house – roaming with friends, making business plans and drinking into the small hours. When he was home, he happened to be in a sour mood. Then, the beatings began. One time, a family friend told us he even had to take her to the local clinic, where she was treated for minor injuries. Finally, when Manzur could not bear being in the marriage any longer, he told her he was in love with another girl. After a fierce argument, he asked her to go back to her parents’ house; she packed her bags right away. Some days later, he rang her up to say he wouldn’t be bringing her back. Aisha accepted his wish and stopped thinking about him – that is, until she saw her own death certificate..Six months after returning to her parents’ house, she found herself alone in the house again. She was sweeping the courtyard when a man – an investigator sent by an insurance company – entered the open gate. He was dressed formally and carried a plastic folder. After spotting her, he took a step back, as if unprepared for her presence. He then pulled out a form affixed with a passport-sized photo. The stranger held up the document in front of her. ‘He asked me if I knew the woman in the photograph,’ Aisha recalled. ‘I said it was me. He said Aisha Nasrin was dead. I said, “I am Aisha Nasrin, and I am alive.”’ She had every right to be shocked. Manzur had never told Aisha that he had purchased a life insurance policy in her name. Nor did he disclose any of the other crucial facts: that he listed himself as the nominee, and later submitted a forged death certificate, among other fabricated documents, to claim the payout.I first learnt about Aisha’s fake death from an anti-corruption activist in Guwahati, the nearest city to Barpeta and the capital of Assam. He came to meet me and my colleague, Sadiq, at a table on the lawn of a plush hotel. He carried before him, like a standard, a thick folder stuffed with reports of fabricated deaths across Barpeta and adjoining districts.Ripun Barua looked exactly what he was: the sort of missionary social activist that is the plague of indolent Indian officialdom, with an ironed shirt and trousers, neatly combed hair, rimless spectacles and a thin moustache. He sat down briskly, refusing our offer of tea. Nor did he waste time on small talk; he immediately opened up his folder and straightened the pages..Flipping them with the dexterity of a magician performing card tricks, he launched into stories of people who were shown as dead while being alive or shown as alive while being dead or shown as first alive and later dead when they had never in fact existed.Until then, I was under the impression that the faked-death scam mostly happened in distant parts of the world. In the United States, life insurance fraud accounts for approximately USD 74.7 billion annually, making it the second biggest category of insurance fraud..In the United Kingdom, the Association of British Insurers detected 72,600 fraudulent claims worth almost USD 1.1 billion in 2022. India was lagging well behind the technological frontier here. One need hardly wonder why: with 44 percent of Indians living below the median poverty line of USD 3.65 a day, life insurance can seem like a luxury. The fear of red tape is another deterrent. The vast majority of Indians are ill-equipped to be even clients of the formal economy, given the paperwork and bureaucracy involved..Therefore, my knowledge of life insurance scams was limited to the Western context, where a handful of odd deaths would go unnoticed amid the larger volume of genuine claims. For example, in California, in 2009, a gang of four women led by Jean Crump, a 67-year-old ex-mortuary worker, invented a man by the name of Jim Davis only to promptly arrange for an accident leading to his death. They followed it up with an elaborate funeral featuring a designer casket and professional actors to mourn the loss. Then the ingenious all-women gang filed claims worth millions of dollars. After they collected a total of USD 1 million in insurance payouts, one of the defrauded companies became suspicious and hired an investigator. When word reached the FBI, the women had no choice but to dig up the casket and take out its hair-raising contents, which included a mannequin and chopped-up parts of a cow. They went on to stage a cremation and scattered the counterfeit ashes over the Pacific Ocean. Eventually, two of them were indicted and pleaded guilty to orchestrating not one but two fictitious deaths. The authorities suspected the women of having concocted at least seven fictitious people in all, only to turn them all into ashes..Intrigued by stray newspaper reports, Sadiq and I were looking for similarly ambitious cases of life insurance fraud closer to home. Just one would have sufficed. Even though pitifully small in the Indian context, the middle class boasted millions of people whose top tier could easily afford INR 1–2 lakh in annual insurance premiums. In 2021, 3.2 percent of the Indian population, or 45 million people, had bought life insurance policies, making up USD 81.3 billion in total written premiums across twenty-four companies..Just then, a welfare programme supported by the Government of India had begun to introduce life insurance to largely excluded parts of the population. The prime minister’s Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana (PMJJBY) offered a basic life insurance policy to rural low-income citizens aged between 18 and 50. It cost about INR 350 a year and roughly paid out INR 2 lakh when a policyholder died. Anyone could take out a policy by going to a local state bank. There they would be asked to fill out a form and enclose documents to establish their identity. Eager to set a new standard for delivering welfare, the government emphasised the minimal documentation required and the speed at which claims were paid out. The process was fully digitised, cutting out the need for physical verification; the money was to be transferred into a beneficiary’s account seven days after the death certificate was uploaded..It is hard for major banks to open full-service branches across the vastness of India. So, if you don’t live close to one of them, you go to the nearest customer service point (CSP). A CSP is a common destination for every villager: this is where they go to open a bank account into which any benefit the government might owe them arrives, from old-age pension to fertilizer subsidy. All anyone needs to start a new CSP centre is a high school certificate and two local references. If your application is accepted by the banks, you can then become the authorized provider of essential banking services in your area. Start-up costs are low: a laptop, a printer, a generic biometric machine that reads fingerprints and a room in which to conduct your business. Despite this modest set-up, in most rural areas – home to 70 percent of Indians – the owner of the local CSP represented the awesome might of the Indian state. By being the entity in front of whom all villagers made their appeals, the government was no less powerful than God, and the CSP owner God’s local emissary. .Associated with not one but two CSPs in Faluguri, his own and his brother’s, Manzur took this role seriously. In the scheme’s first two years, he insured 500 people under the PMJJBY, the state’s low-cost insurance scheme. The government wanted its benefits to reach as many people as possible so that the cumulative goodwill would help it return to Parliament. Over the financial year 2020–21, 120,000 claims, amounting to INR 2403 crore, were settled under PMJJBY across the country, aided by an impressive disposal rate of 99 percent.Aisha was proof that some of the dead were, in fact, still breathing. Manzur had insured other people under the scheme who had no knowledge of it..One of them was a neighbour’s wife. Razia Begum did not know that Manzur had lured her husband into signing her up under the PMJJBY programme. She had opened a bank account at Manzur’s shop; he quietly used the same documents to take out a policy in her name. She had no idea that Manzur then reported her as dead. A string of collaborators helped, according to the paper trail we were able to access. Her death was registered at the local record office on account of her husband’s signature on the form. A “cause of death” certificate was issued from the primary health centre, carrying the signature of the presiding doctor. No one knew whether Manzur forged their signatures or offered a commission..If Manzur hadn’t bragged to his friends, Razia would have remained dead on paper for the rest of her life. But someone picked up on it from the steaming chain of village gossip. When the police began to collect reports of bogus insurance cases in and around Barpeta, enthusiastic informers pointed them to the robustly alive Razia Begum. At one level, what was happening here wasn’t that different from the set-up I had already seen in Jharkhand: remote villages wrapped up in fraudulent activity that promised to uplift the whole community. Like a white-collar business but perhaps more meritocratic, with more opportunities for a clever person to succeed irrespective of where they stood on the social ladder..But here, in Assam, the stakes were much higher. While the cyber thieves in Santhal Pargana targeted random, mostly powerless, people, Manzur and his associates were instead stealing from a fund supervised by the all-powerful Government of India. The scam wasn’t taking place over quick phone calls but over months of meticulous planning. Moreover, the chances of getting caught were far more real. There, the scammers could change their SIM card or throw away their mobile phones. Here, no simple means of digital escape applied..Fake deaths could be traced back to those who filed the claims. Everything was on paper – signed and stamped. In Jharkhand, the fraudsters relied on geography to hide them, but in Assam, their colleagues put their hope in community solidarity. If an investigator asked around, they hoped nobody would reveal village secrets. But some things unite villages all over the world. Jealousy is the most universal of emotions, and in Manzur’s village, his family’s dramatic rise in status was begrudged. Some speculated in hushed tones about the number of rooms in their new house and the number of motorbikes parked outside. Many were offended by the family’s arrogance. Some felt betrayed because their promised commissions never materialised..Rezaul Karim, part of Manzur’s late-night circle, spoke to us because he had a grudge against Manzur’s brother, Shakil Hussain, who ran the other CSP in the village. It went back to the time Shakil spotted a golden opportunity for a false claim. He had found out Juran Ali, a 45-year-old man in a neighbouring village, was about to die of a heart condition. Promptly, he purchased a PMJJBY policy by faking Juran’s identity and showing him in good health. When the man died, Shakil approached Rezaul to sign the claims form as a witness to his supposedly unforeseen death. He and other witnesses were promised INR 10,000 each in commission, and Juran’s wife was to receive half of the total amount for acting as nominee..After the claim was filed, Shakil paid Rezaul and the other witness their dues without any delay. All fair up to this point. Eventually, though, when the State Bank of India deposited INR 2 lakh into the nominee’s account, Shakil, who had the ATM card, didn’t honour his word to the widow. Rezaul told us he raised a moral objection, but Shakil refused to listen. Nothing changed. Life chugged along in the village. Faked deaths continued alongside. .Aminul Haque scoffed at the sight of people who had faked their deaths. “When I see them walking in the streets, I stop to ask if they aren’t supposed to be resting in their graves,” he recalled with a burst of laughter. As an ex-village president to whom people still went with their myriad issues, he ran on deep reserves of goodwill, yet some people did not appreciate his jests about their supposed demise. “Take Azad Ali’s family, for instance,” he said, leaning back in an unmade bed in his living room. “This man has two sons. The older one died. That was ten years ago. Normal death. The younger one was called Abdul Ali; he is alive. Two or three years after the older one’s death, the family created a new son. They named him Abdul Awal Azad.”.In the region’s vocabulary, “creating” a person was code for bribing local record-keepers to produce a birth certificate for someone who had never been born. This fictional person would then be insured, with the listed age matching the one on the forged certificate. “After a year, they showed him as dead. In the claim, the family said he had died far away from home, in an accident at a train station.” When the investigators came, some villagers told them the truth. The insurance company rejected the claim. To this day, however, the Azad Ali family insists on its version. “If anyone questions him in the village, the man will say, ‘It’s nobody’s business to tell me how many sons I have.’”.The Barpeta scammers, whether defrauding the government or big private insurers, had one less thing to worry about than those in Jharkhand and elsewhere: guilt. Undoubtedly, every successful false claim made them richer, but they asked themselves, who exactly was losing? Not the government, for whom every new beneficiary – real or fabricated – counted as a political gain. And certainly not the insurance companies, whose financial losses amounted to a negligible fraction of their annual profits, profits that, the scammers told themselves, were often bolstered by denying legitimate claims from their own policyholders. If the scammers lost any sleep, it was from the fear of getting caught, not from remorse over stealing someone’s hard-earned income. Manzur was similarly unbothered about how others might view his schemes. Aisha had already left Manzur’s village when he insured her life. Since she had taken all her personal documents with her, he forged her birth certificate to buy the policy. Raising a false death claim was more complicated. A living person couldn’t be proved dead until a chain of people was bribed, including the record keeper, the village head and the local doctor..Old forms of corruption intersected with new avenues of deceit to benefit those who knew how to navigate the slippery rules of success in the new political economy. Manzur knew the drill, but he let his ambition get the better of him. He took out policies for his wife not only under PMJJBY but also from two private insurers, as evident in the documents Barua, the activist, had shared with us. The private companies offered payouts that were ten times higher than the government in the event of her death. But they were also more meticulous. As part of due process, one of them sent an investigator to check out the claim, and that’s how Aisha found out about her husband’s scheme. Till death do us part..The following week, their families came to a meeting presided over by influential elders from both the villages, the ex-village president told us. Their brief was to provide justice to Aisha, who had agreed to Manzur’s family’s request to not involve the police. The elders’ council pronounced him guilty and ordered him to pay her INR 2 lakh as compensation. He agreed. Making use of the solemn occasion, he put forward his wish to seek divorce from Aisha. She consented, and the meeting was adjourned..***.Everyone scams those better off than themselves. In doing so, they are trying to rewire history and fate. They tell themselves that they are redressing the natural inequity that separates their lot in life from those they defraud. This, however, felt different. Within a few days of reporting, my colleague and I could see that this wasn’t just a story about a mind-boggling life insurance scam. The perpetrators weren’t merely stealing money from a government scheme; they were altering the nature of the social contract between the state and its most deprived citizens, one successful payout at a time..Since the establishment of independent India’s first government, welfare has followed a rigid template: the government identified the needs of a specific group, decided how it was going to help and fixed the amount to be disbursed as “benefit”. Approximately 940 million people depend on government welfare in various forms. Subsidised foodgrains are made available to 75 percent of the rural population and 50 percent of urban residents. And the government’s flagship employment guarantee scheme – 100 days of wage employment per year – covers 154 million rural households, with INR 357 per day as the highest rate paid by any state.10 Housing assistance in rural areas is capped at INR 1.2 lakh in plain areas and INR 1.3 lakh in hilly areas.11 There is a direct cash transfer of INR 6000 per year to farmers given in three equal instalments of INR 2000 each..Every political regime took pride in the fact that large segments of the Indian population relied on it for survival; the payout of benefits would be held up as the key index of their service to the public. Modi, a savvy brand-builder, took that idea to epic heights. Under him, government departments raced to break the record of previous regimes on beneficiary numbers, and every new scheme was advertised as a personal favour from the prime minister. By his second term, in 2019, his popularity was universally attributed to his welfare push. No section of the population was ignored, his cheerleaders said to defend him against allegations of prejudice against religious and other minorities – women thanked him for free gas cylinders, and poor farmers appreciated the cash transfer. Even Muslims were generously included in his vision for India’s development..But a counterargument was also in circulation: the obsessive focus on welfare masked the government’s failure to provide a decent quality of life to most Indian people. The handouts, critics argued, were meant to “compensate” for the lack of investment in health and education, dignified jobs for non-elite sections of the labour force, and economic systems that reward hard work and aspiration. What if the people in these target groups needed more – more funds to build a house, pay hospital bills or cover farm expenses? What if they wanted more? No longer content with being passive recipients of state patronage, some of them were now exploiting the chronic incompetence of India’s public sector..Consider the risks involved if an unassuming villager decided to defraud the Indian government. Few would undertake such a mission without a deep understanding of the system they intended to exploit. Manzur went about it like a veteran, according to several people who helped him pull off these scams.