New Delhi: On a dark winter night last year, a 33-year-old software engineer left his house in Delhi’s Shakur Basti, and went untraceable. His parents feared the worst, with his history of mental health issues. After multiple futile attempts to find him, they filed a missing persons report with the police.
The first clue came only in February 2025—his last location and banking activity placed him over 2,100 km away, in Bengaluru. But this breakthrough didn’t come through the police. It came from Sanjeev Kumar, the CEO of DDS Detective Agency, a private firm.
Kumar’s company not only helped the missing man’s parents with clues about his whereabouts, but also connected them with a lawyer to approach the court. The parents filed a habeas corpus petition in the Delhi High Court through a lawyer “empanelled” with DDS. This petition, seen by ThePrint, asked the court to direct police authorities to track down their son.
The high court acted swiftly, pulling in police authorities in Delhi and Bengaluru, as well as the cyber cell, in an order passed days after the petition was filed. In a subsequent order, the court urged Delhi Police to contact the Bureau of Immigration to find out if the man had left India.
The man was then traced to Thailand, under the court’s close watch, including a video call between him and the judges. He also came down to the court for the last hearing.
The case was solved as a result of an unusual collaboration between the man’s parents, the private detective agency and the police authorities. While the petition filed in the Delhi High Court does not mention Kumar or his company, their footprints are all over the case—from the man’s last location to any other independent attempt to trace him.
“Police manpower is limited. A lot of their focus is on heinous offences. So, they often don’t have the resources to allocate to finding missing persons, especially if an adult is missing. That gap is filled by private detectives,” Kumar tells ThePrint.
With the police often overburdened with cases, private detectives have stepped in to fill the gap as an invisible arm of the legal justice system in India, unearthing evidence that often finds its way to the courtroom.
These detectives have emerged as a critical, but invisible, player operating in the shadows across a range of cases from missing people and corporate fraud, to custody battles and tracking fleeing billionaires.
India has dozens of such agencies that dig into cases by tapping into external sources, undertaking research, conducting background checks, and gathering evidence through field inquiries, surveillance and financial sleuthing to provide information that often becomes critical in court proceedings.
However, with no regulatory mechanism in place for private investigators in India, they often function in a legal grey area.
Also Read: Luxury cars, big deals & 6-figure fees, evolution of the boardroom lawyer in India
Booming business
But detective agencies say the business has been good.
DDS, officially registered as DDS Management Solutions Private Limited, is one of many agencies that have been thriving. It was founded in 2013 by a retired police officer. Kumar, also an ex-police officer, joined the industry in 2018. “Since 2018, by the grace of God, work has increased five to six times, so I foresee the work of private detectives will rise astronomically in India,” he tells ThePrint, attributing the increase to “awareness” among people.
An obvious area of operation for such investigating agencies is matrimonial disputes, although it is not limited to proving cases of cheating. Maintenance applications also involve digging into the finances of both sides as both spouses seek to estimate the other’s exact income.
In one case, advocate Rytim Vohra Ahuja recalls, a private detective helped locate a child at the centre of a custody battle. “The father had picked up the child and left the country without the consent of the mother,” Ahuja, a senior associate at law firm Karanjawala and Co, tells ThePrint.
More details were revealed once she filed a habeas corpus petition in the court, armed with the details that the investigator had uncovered. “The minute the court saw what was happening, the judge put the police to the task,” she says.
It isn’t just matrimonial cases where private detectives have found a niche. Kumar says that a significant part of their work comprises intellectual property rights (IPR) cases. “We take authority letters from big companies, authorising us to investigate, hire lawyers and file complaints on their behalf. So we conduct our investigation, reach godowns and factories manufacturing such fakes.”
The detectives then approach the police district investigation units, which focus on IPR cases. “We even assist with raids on such godowns and factories, and file FIRs on the company’s behalf as well,” he says.
‘Special’ relationship with lawyers
Apart from family and IPR disputes, private investigators are also playing a key role in corporate litigation.
Mukesh Bajaj, director and co-founder of risk consulting firm CIGAER, says that the company handles a range of corporate matters that may require digging up information, including conflict of interest, internal fraud, data leakages, embezzlement, bribery and kickbacks, vendor collusion, sexual harassment (POSH) cases, and shareholder disputes, among others.
Lawyers usually reach out to his company at different stages in their litigation, he says. This could be pre-litigation, where a lawyer may ask his client to assess the opposing party before taking up a case to better understand them and identify any potential leverage points.
Bajaj calls the relationship between lawyers and private investigators “special”, saying that the latter were the former’s “enforcement wing”.
“It is the investigator’s job to engage with external sources, undertake research and inquiries, identify witnesses, locate witnesses and convince them to testify. Apart from the witnesses, the investigator is focused on obtaining evidence through meticulous research and inquiries with relevant sources,” he explains.
Private agencies have access to plenty of resources. Bajaj says that CIGAER has a team of 35 full-time employees—divided into “open source” and “human source” teams—across India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Open source teams are investigators who use various desktop tools, database aggregators, proprietary databases, in-house datasets, country-specific databases and media resources to obtain information.
As for human source teams, Bajaj calls them “masters of social engineering skills”—trained to engage with sources for obtaining first-hand information.
“The team has reached out to more than 50,000 sources in the last 15 years. Social networks, like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc, along with CRM (customer relationship management) tools that are used internally, are useful in identifying sources who may have information that may be of use to our clients,” he explains.
Fleeing billionaires
Another area where private investigators play a key role is “asset tracing” in large loan defaults. “Once you get a domestic or foreign award or decree against a private individual or company’s assets, these guys try to alienate their properties or make it benami. And they will, of course, not declare it. These transactions are routed through their companies or through related parties, or there are multiple layers of transactions,” a Delhi-based advocate, who has worked on cases of recovery and enforcement, tells ThePrint.
That’s where asset tracing companies come into the picture—conducting due diligence, and going through layers of records to zero in on the beneficiary of the transferred funds.
In one such case, Bajaj’s firm helped a financial institution trace the assets of a client from Europe, the Middle East and the African region, who had defaulted on a loan. All they had were the defaulter’s passport details. “Our team suggested mapping out the individual’s extended family with their leads and assets, so that our client could approach the court with the necessary crucial evidence,” the CIGAER website reads.
And that’s exactly what happened.
According to CIGAER, while property records are not searchable online in India and centralised asset registers do not exist, its team has developed a “detailed proprietary method” to collect actionable intelligence to identify the hidden assets of an individual. This intelligence, which revealed the assets of the defaulter, then allowed the financial institution to approach the court for appropriate relief, backed by evidence.
‘No photos, please’
Private investigators work from the shadows, exercising abundant caution. Kumar says that he refrains from allowing media personnel to take his pictures.
“This isn’t a profession where you’re in the limelight or get awards. I go on projects myself three or four times a year. Why would I expose my face?” he asks, seated in front of a wall in his office, with a collage of words, like ‘covert’, ‘clue’, ‘authenticity’, ‘detective’ and ‘intel’, painted on it.
The cost of hiring a detective could vary from a couple of thousand rupees to lakhs.
For instance, for a background check before marriage, the fee could range between Rs 45,000 and Rs 50,000, a private investigator tells ThePrint on the condition of anonymity. However, the amount varies depending on the agency, as well as the logistics of the operation. Costs go up if the case involves travelling to other locations.
For cases of extra-marital affairs, the usual range is from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh.
Services for corporate clients can range from Rs 25,000 for simple employment checks, to several lakh rupees for more complicated intelligence.
Also Read: Foreign lawyers and law firms set to enter India. But red tape and caveats await them
Making evidence acceptable
Once a private investigator does his job, it is for all the parties involved and their lawyers to find creative ways to use that information in court. There are ways of “manufacturing evidence”, too, a private detective tells ThePrint, requesting anonymity.
For instance, he says, they are mindful of the legal requirement for a certificate under Section 65B of the Indian Evidence Act 1972—now replaced by Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam—which deals with the admissibility of electronic records.
The certificate identifies the electronic record, describes how it was produced, provides details of the device used for the record, and confirms that it is a true and accurate copy. “So when we know we need to record evidence, we just take the client’s phone to record videos and take pictures. A 65B certificate can easily be obtained after that, so that way it is acceptable,” he explains.
In cases of cheating spouses, his agents meticulously track him or her until they have enough to catch them in the act. At that point, he asks the client to confront the spouse, while an associate dials 112. “Although I know the police won’t do anything in such cases, the police have to file a diary entry for every PCR call. And this is very sound evidence,” he says.
The lawyer who has engaged asset tracing companies explains that the evidence collected through these private detectives has to be used strategically: “We take it as a starting point, and make it in the form of interrogatories, or file very specific applications. So, for example, we file an application saying…‘we suspect he has hidden these assets, and we suspect that these assets are his, so kindly ask him to give it on affidavit whether these assets are his or not, or appoint a local commissioner to verify’.”
The responses to such specific questions in applications often provide crucial evidence before the court.
Operating from the shadows
However, the law on the source of such evidence obtained through private investigators remains a grey area, experts say.
Delhi-based advocate Harsha Azad recalls a case in which the other side presented some still images and videography during trial, which “were admittedly obtained from a private investigator”.
“I objected to these being taken on record as they were obtained illegally and were in violation of my client’s right to privacy,” she says. “However, the law as it stands is simply that if evidence is relevant, it will be admissible, no matter how it was obtained.” In her case, the court ended up relying on this evidence in the family partnership dispute.
Advocate Chitranshul Sinha, who specialises in commercial disputes, tells ThePrint that as long as the information obtained by such detectives is verified and is available from public records, it is acceptable to courts.
“But some detectives try to get documents which may be confidential or not in public domain, and when they get it, it becomes the fruit of a poisoned tree,” Sinha says, adding that the law on this aspect is “very unclear”.
“In some cases, courts have used such evidence, and in others, courts have said we can’t rely on it if it’s not legally procured, as we don’t know the veracity of it. So it depends on a case-by-case basis,” Sinha further says.
Bajaj asserts that private investigators operate in the realm of intelligence and their work is discreet in nature. “Our endeavour is to ensure that the team does not get any unnecessary exposure or have the need to testify.” He claims that over the last 15 years, several of CIGAER’s reports have been tabled as evidence, but none of the team members have been asked to testify.
Lack of regulation
The Private Detective Agencies (Regulation) Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha for the first time in 2007. It sought to prescribe a licence for every such agency to operate. These licences were proposed to be granted by regulatory boards established at the central and state levels.
The statement of objects and reasons of the bill spoke about the growing concerns over the manner of functioning of private detective agencies. The bill, therefore, proposed to prohibit a detective from violating the rights of an individual to privacy and freedom, and any such violation could be punishable with a six-month jail term and a fine of Rs 50,000, along with suspension or cancellation of the licence.
However, the bill was initially referred to a standing committee and then withdrawn in 2020. This lack of regulation has often been blamed for detectives being arrested for illegally procuring sensitive information like call detail records (CDRs).
Advocate Sinha asserts that it is essential to have a legal framework in place that legitimises such fact-finding. “Today, people escape scrutiny by hiding assets. Then the hard work and the grunt work is done by people like us to engage investigators to find this. But this is currently a grey area,” he says. “It is a very important functional role that these guys perform, as far as asset tracing is concerned.”
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
Also Read: 50 years since Emergency: How judges, lawyers enabled & resisted Indira Gandhi’s crackdown
isn’t this dangerous to intrude into someone’s profile and personal details? how is the law quiet on this? for sure such private firms hold lots of personal info, and what not!!