The video appeared days before the NEET-UG leak was confirmed. A man is seen asking two girl students if questions from his coaching centre’s mock tests had figured in the exam. The students, breaking into smiles, confirm that most of their biology, chemistry and physics questions had indeed appeared in the mock tests.
The man is Shivraj Motegaonkar, and the girls were among those who did their NEET preparation at Renukai Career Centre (RCC), the popular coaching centre he founded some 25 years back. Motegaonkar is now under arrest in the exam leak case and the video — shot as a publicity stunt — is perhaps the strongest indication of his wrongdoing, CBI sources say. But Motegaonkar was not the first suspect with a Latur link to be picked up as the probe widened. That was his close associate P V Kulkarni, a retired chemistry teacher and National Testing Agency (NTA) subject expert, who was arrested from Pune.
The alleged role of the duo in the leak has not only brought Latur’s famed ‘Tuition Area’ under the glare of investigators and the media, it has also raised questions over whether aggressive practices in Maharashtra’s coaching hub — known for its ‘Latur Pattern’ of training — led to one of India’s biggest exam scandals in recent times.
‘Bouncers For Teachers’
Last week, this routine was interrupted when CBI and police turned up to investigate this year’s NEET-UG question paper leak. At the eye of the storm is Motegaonkar and RCC. Known to tens of thousands of students as just “M Sir”, it’s hard to miss his face staring down from posters on buses and autorickshaws across the state whenever exam season approaches.The tutors Motegaonkar hired — they included top MBBS graduates and former IITians — had bouncers for round-the-clock protection so as to insulate them from poaching attempts by rival coaching centres. Some of these IITian tutors were paid Rs 1.5 crore a year, depending on their “conversion rate”, says an RCC insider.
“The coaching centre monitored how many students were cracking IIT or NEET under a particular teacher. That became the teacher’s ‘market value’. It’s no wonder they had bouncers,” says a former faculty member.
‘Formidable Team’
Kulkarni, by contrast, was described by colleagues as a quiet individual. “He was very old-school in his ways, not wildly popular among students, but not unpopular either. He had a spotless record. He retired from here in 2023 after 28 years of service and our association ended,” says Sidheshwar Bellale, principal of Dayanand Science College, Latur.
It’s at this college that investigators believe Kulkarni and Motegaonkar’s paths first crossed, back in the 1990s. Kulkarni was a chemistry teacher and Motegaonkar a BSc student who tutored students in the same subject to support himself financially. His reputation as a tutor grew and it helped that he was a university topper and gold medallist in MSc chemistry from Swami Ramanand Teerth Marathwada University in Nanded. Motegaonkar later cleared SET, NET and JRF exams and completed a PhD.
“At some point, Kulkarni the chemistry teacher and Motegaonkar the chemistry tutor found themselves in the same local circles. They would later strike up a working relationship and stay in touch,” says a senior police officer. “They became a formidable team in the highly competitive ‘coaching class’ business. Kulkarni was the academic with deep knowledge of how colleges prepared question papers, while Motegaonkar developed sharp business instincts and a network of coaching centres in Maharashtra. It certainly was a good team-up.”
The team, investigators say, struck gold in 2019 when Kulkarni began working with the National Testing Authority (NTA) as a translator.
Ahead of this year’s NEETUG, says another senior police ofPune Mumbai ficial, “Kulkarni was given three sets of question papers, each with 45 questions, to translate into Marathi.”
“He allegedly shared 132 of the 135 questions with Motegaonkar. One of the three sets of question papers was selected by NTA and we suspect that is why a mock test by RCC, conducted 24 hours before the May 3 NEET exam, had 42 matching questions out of the 45, along with the answer keys.”
Kulkarni was arrested on May 15; Motegaonkar two days later. In one of his last social media posts, M Sir is seen urging students not to panic and treat the repeat NEET exam as a “second chance.” Motegaonkar’s brother, Shrikrishna, dismisses the allegations. “My brother is innocent. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”
Motegaonkar was among the loudest voices in the state who demanded action after NTA conducted NEET retests at specific centres in 2024, following allegations of irregularities. In a PIL he filed that year, he said those trying to “corrupt the education system” deserved “mrityudand.”
‘Latur Pattern’
Latur is often compared to Rajasthan’s Kota, but the model here, some say, is kinder to students. That’s largely due to the fact that it draws most of its students from districts of Maharashtra, thereby avoiding Kota’s feeling of “isolation”. The “Latur Pattern” began in the 1980s and was originally designed, through vigorous drills, to help students clear their board exams. Later, in the 2000s, it expanded to cover entrance exams.
It’s a model that’s had mixed success. Last year, of the 8,138 Maharashtra students who secured MBBS seats in the first round, 1,203 were from Latur district. In 2022, Latur had 70 students who scored 100% marks in SSC exams; Pune had five, Mumbai one.
As word spread about its ability to churn out high-scorers, business boomed in ‘Tuition Area’. Commercial space in the locality hit Rs 25,000 per sqft last year, comparable to some parts of south Delhi. The biggest player here is Motegaonkar’s RCC. Estimates suggest that of the nearly 50,000 students who land up every year in Latur’s coaching institutes, almost half go to centres in ‘Tuition Area’, where RCC got the lion’s share of hopefuls.
Motegaonkar had even split his students into batches, based on how much they could pay. Standard coaching fee was an annual Rs 80,000 for a student. Then there was a ‘platinum batch’ for wealthier families willing to pay as much as Rs 5 lakh a year. There was a ‘Doctor’s Batch’ for children of medical professionals and, finally, the ‘Arjuna Batch’, reserved for the “exceptionally talented.”
‘Not A Tuition Model’
But educators say there’s a key difference between Kota’s and Latur’s training methods. The ‘Latur Pattern’ was designed to ensure learning and teaching was only through colleges — unlike in Rajasthan’s hub, which relied solely on coaching institutes.
“Put simply, this is not a tuition model,” says professor Deelip Deshmukh, coordinator of the common entrance test (CET) cell at Rajarshi Shahu Mahavidyalaya, Latur. Steps were taken to prevent Latur from turning into Kota. Colleges decided that their teachers and professors would not tutor at coaching centres and even informal affiliations with coaching centre operators were actively discouraged.
So, some in ‘Tuition Area’ were surprised by how Motegaonkar and Kulkarni struck up a working relationship. “Kulkarni was considered a master of exam patterns,” says a retired Latur teacher. “He was near retirement when he was brought into the NEET ecosystem and Motegaonkar did not waste an opportunity to get close to him.”
Others say the allegations Kulkarni and Motegaonkar face threaten to destroy a precious education model that has helped thousands of students escape one of the most drought-prone regions of the country.
“I feel pain. Nearly 50 years of effort has been tainted by these allegations. I hope they are not true,” says 90-year-old professor Anirudha Jadhav, who is among the pioneers of the ‘Latur Pattern.’ Satish Pawar, director of a coaching centre, says the racket is the second “big quake” to hit Latur, referring to the 6.4 magnitude tremor that struck the region in 1993, killing 10,000 people. “It may seem like a rather strong comparison, but in all my 30 years here, I’ve not had more than 50 questions from mock tests match the actual NEET or JEE exams,” he says.
Others have asked for reforms. “Demand for coaching classes exists because syllabuses of competitive exams follow NCERT, while the state boards differ significantly from it. So, unless there is uniformity in curricula, evaluation and examination systems, this dependency on coaching classes, I fear, may continue,” says D D Kumbhar, vice-principal of Pune’s Fergusson College.
“One shouldn’t be surprised that police are grilling parents as well in this case,” adds a science teacher from Karnataka. “Students are not the ones paying lakhs of rupees for a question paper. In fact, I have had parents come up to me and ask, ‘What’s really wrong if the same set of questions is found in a mock test and the actual exam paper?’ They say it could be coincidence, too. So I’m not sure who needs an education now.”
