Kanakapura Road

Ranga Rachappa

Bengaluru

gold

A rented villa in, a car and property in his village --was living it up in Bengaluru. A native of Pushpapura village in Chamrajnagar district, he had come toin 2011 and was working as a labourer while pursuing PUC at Seshadripuram College.Rachappa had struck it rich (more about that later) and perhaps wanted to clean up his act. In 2015-2016, he started filing income tax (egged on by the promise of nation-building, perhaps? One doesn’t know) and declared Rs 40 lakh as his annual income.That’s when the income-tax officials got suspicious. There was no source of income and the taxman sent a notice. Rachappa (34) contacted his advocate who managed to get him a Class I civil contractor licence. The same was submitted to I-T officials, who smelt a rat and asked the Koramangala police to investigate.The police learnt that Rachappa was working as a construction labour when he came to Bengaluru after studying up to Class 10. He was simultaneously pursuing his studies and in 2011, somebody asked him to get ganja (cannabis) from his village. This was when Rachappa struckSoon, he was peddling drugs in a big way and had also recruited youngsters as agents. He was rolling in cash and in 2013 quit his job as a day labourer and went full-time into drugs.When the police got information that Rachappa and his associates were on 80ft Road in Koramangala on January 20, they rushed to the spot and caught him and his associate Srinivas, 47, a resident of Chandapura. Another associate of the duo who has been identified as Sashu is at large and efforts are on to nab him. At the time of his arrest, Rachappa had 28 kilos of ganja and Rs 5 lakh in currency notes, an SUV and a mobile phone on him. He told the cops that he was paying Rs 40,000 as rent.