“India’s first AI fraud”: New mega-library bought thousands of suspected fake books

What’s going on

A scandal over suspected AI-generated books in public libraries has broken out in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. At its center is Periyar Arivulagam (“World of Knowledge”), a new mega-library in the city of Coimbatore. According to the BBC, it cost around 3 billion rupees, or about $34 million, and Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay opened it on October 16, 2026. It’s named after the social reformer Periyar E. V. Ramasamy.

Its shelves apparently held hundreds to thousands of books with unknown author names, glaring factual errors, suspiciously high prices and questionable ISBNs. The ISBN is the international identifier that uniquely registers every book. The Madras High Court has ordered the state’s anti-corruption agency, the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC), to investigate the purchases and freeze the bank accounts of one of the accused publishers. School education minister A. Rajmohan is calling it possibly “India’s first AI fraud.”

A novelist raises the alarm

The case wasn’t uncovered by the government. It was exposed by the internationally known Tamil novelist Perumal Murugan (“Pyre”, “One Part Woman”). Here’s the twist: Murugan himself sat on one of the committees that were supposed to recommend books for the new libraries, covering modern literature and literary criticism. After visiting the library, he wrote in an online magazine that almost 1,800 books in the Tamil collection came from a barely known publisher called Agal Vilakku Pathippagam.

Some of the errors he and others found are absurd:

• The book Naladiyar Vaazhvin Vazhikatti (“A Life Guide Through Naladiyar”) cost 1,445 rupees for 300 pages. It presents Naladiyar as a poet and philosopher. In fact, Naladiyar is a classical Tamil work of 400 four-line verses on morality and ethics. It’s a collection, not a person.
• Another book credits the ancient poem Madurai Kanchi to the wrong author.
• According to ThePrint, other titles mention a Tamil chief minister who never existed and show a fake photo of a Nandi statue linked to the Keeladi excavations.

These are exactly the kinds of mistakes you’d expect from poorly supervised language models, which make up facts and sources when they don’t know better (the technical term is “hallucinations”). But the BBC stresses that it hasn’t been established whether AI was actually used to produce the disputed books.

Invented authors and an economist who wrote nothing

The author names stand out most. According to the Indian Express, minister Rajmohan presented a whole series of similar names. “Nivedha Paulraj” supposedly wrote books on law, economics, equality, technology, elder care, women’s safety, agriculture and space travel. Then there are “Nivedha Anbazhagan” and “Nivedha Mohan”. More variations include Pavithra, Pounambal and Kamalambal Karunanidhi, Surya Balu, Vijay Balu, Vijay Pal, Vijay Adithan, Sreelekha Vijay and Trisha Vijay. The minister mocked:

“Not even Scotland Yard could track down these authors!”

The Indian Express notes, however, that names alone don’t prove wrongdoing.

The case of well-known economist Jean Drèze is more concrete. A library in Madurai holds the book Democracy and People's Rights in the Contemporary World, published by Phoenix Publishing House, with Drèze listed as the author. He told The Hindu that he didn’t write it. According to Rajmohan, the book entered the Kalaignar Centenary Library in Madurai back in 2023, so the problem apparently goes back further.

When BBC Tamil reporters visited the Chennai address listed for Agal Vilakku and Phoenix, they found no company signs at all. A woman confirmed that Agal Vilakku operated there. The owner, Mohan, declined to comment, citing the ongoing proceedings. The minister says around 20 different publisher names were used as fronts. One book he held up names several companies at once: Agal Vilakku as publisher, “Sigma” for the cover and Phoenix for distribution. Rajmohan compared the scheme to counterfeit money, saying AI had been used to remix material from different authors into new books.

Numbers, investigations and countermeasures

According to ThePrint, about 20 crore rupees (200 million) of a 50 crore budget has been spent so far on Periyar Arivulagam, covering just over 60,000 titles. Up to 2,000 of them could be among the questionable books. The minister cites around 3,000 suspect books that were packed into boxes and sealed in Coimbatore.

At the historic Connemara Public Library in Chennai, one of India’s oldest, 523 books were removed. Rajmohan broke them down by date of receipt in 2025: 40 on January 3, 54 on January 29, two deliveries in April of 90 and 85 books, and 254 in November. But he conceded, according to the Indian Express, that this library receives legal deposit copies from publishers. So the books there only show they were received, not necessarily that the state bought them.

Libraries in Madurai, Tiruchi, Salem, Cuddalore and Tirunelveli, as well as the Anna Centenary Library, are also reportedly affected. The government has:

• filed a complaint with the DVAC, which according to the minister started investigating the very next day,
• ordered an internal audit of all library holdings,
• instructed libraries to keep Agal Vilakku books separately as evidence,
• canceled orders for the Kamarajar Library in Tiruchi,
• announced a committee of writers, publishers, educators and retired officials to oversee transparent purchasing starting in December.

The Madras High Court has ordered the DVAC to open a formal criminal case (FIR) and freeze the accounts of Agal Vilakku’s owner. In a joint statement, more than 160 writers, researchers, artists and publishers are calling for an independent inquiry, publication of the purchasing records, an audit of all library holdings in Tamil Nadu and recovery of public funds.

A political fight over who’s responsible

The case has turned into a slugfest between the ruling TVK party and the previous DMK government. Rajmohan says an order for thousands of books was placed with a single publisher on February 14, with delivery within seven days, and that payments were released in March ahead of the election. The TVK government itself, he says, didn’t buy any books.

The DMK dismisses this as politically motivated. Its politician I. Paranthamen asks why the government didn’t withdraw the books immediately and demands the release of bank transfers, order data and committee recommendations. He claims the books only received library stamps in June 2026, after the change of government. Would the DMK really have approved books by “Trisha Vijay”, he asked pointedly. The name apparently plays on the new chief minister’s surname.

In ThePrint, commentator Mukund Padmanabhan, a former editor of The Hindu, finds the DMK’s defense unconvincing. He describes the multi-stage selection process: a 137-member recommendation committee, a 13-member selection committee, plus two committees of officials for price negotiation and final review. What’s unclear, he says, is where the system failed. Either the books were slipped in at the administrative level, bypassing the expert committees, or committee members signed off on lists without checking them. He considers a conspiracy involving everyone unlikely, but a “colossal failure of oversight” obvious.

Our take

The case shows a dark side of cheap text generators. AI lets you churn out masses of books in no time that look legitimate at first glance, complete with a cover, ISBN and author name. Platforms like Amazon have been fighting such titles for years. What’s new here is that they apparently made it into public libraries at scale through government procurement, and taxpayers footed the bill.

Still, caution is warranted. So far, AI involvement is a claim by the minister, not a proven fact. You don’t need AI to produce invented authors, inflated prices and fake ISBNs. At its core, this could be a classic procurement fraud in which AI at most made the writing easier. Then there’s the campaign context: both camps have an interest in blaming the other, and their timelines contradict each other. Clarity will likely only come from the DVAC investigation and the purchasing records.

Even so, it’s a warning for libraries and publishers worldwide: if you buy books, you’ll need to check more carefully whether the author, content and publisher are real.