Maharashtra's Latur, epicentre of NEET leak, confronts unwelcome scrutiny

BEfore kotar, thither was Latur. The mid-sized Marathwada ithiel town, twice ravaged by earthquakes, rebuilt its equity as single of Maharashtra’s biggest coaching job centres with “The Latur pattern” that attracted thousands of students across the state. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Maharashtra state board had a merit list which was invariably stacked with students from Latur division.Educationists from the city like Dr Janardan Waghmare and Aniruddha Jadhav and institutions such as Dayanand Education Society, Rajarshi Shahu College and Dayanand College created a system of rigorous high school and +2 education that focused on training students for various engineering and medical entrance exams.“This Latur brand developed over almost 40 years, and it cannot be destroyed by any one person,” says Satish Pawar, director of Vidya Aradhana Coaching Classes in Latur, one of the 165 coaching institutes in the town.Also Read: CBI questions RCC director’s son, detains Latur doctor in NEET-UG paper leak probePawar is referring to this week’s arrest of Shivraj Motegaonkar, 47, the owner of Latur’s biggest coaching centre, Renukai Career Centre (RCC), in the NEET UG 2026 paper leak case. Motegaonkar’s RCC has branches in 9 districts of Maharashtra, and 30,000 students registered with it this year for NEET, CET and JEE coaching.Latur at centre of NEET paper leak rowDecades after it built a reputation for academic success Latur is in the national spotlight for the rot that has set into its powerful coaching ecosystem. Six of the 10 accused arrested so far in the case are from Maharashtra. Investigators believe the criminal network stretches from Pune, Nashik, Latur and Nanded in Maharashtra to Jaipur, Sikar and Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan, involving insiders connected to the examination system, coaching operators, middlemen, digital distribution chains and desperate parents willing to spend lakhs for guaranteed success in these entrance examinations. “This is not a geographic incident,” writes development economist Varna Sri Raman. “The labour market the aspirant prepares for is small. The labour market that prepares the aspirant is enormous...”.She adds that the coaching towns “concentrate buyers willing to pay, sellers with technical knowledge, and the digital infrastructure to clear trades quickly,” in a paper for policygrounds.press, an independent public policy and economic analysis platform.A key figure in CBI crosshairs is retired chemistry professor Prahlad Vithalrao Kulkarni who taught for several years at Latur’s Dayanand Science College. There, Kulkarni got acquainted with Motegaonkar, and began teaching at his coaching centre.After his retirement in June 2022, Kulkarni moved to Pune where he began running own coaching classes from his home. This year, NTA designated Kulkarni as a subject expert and paper-setter. He promptly leaked the questions to students at his coaching class, and 10 days before the NEET exam, also to Motegaonkar, his old Latur associate, according to CBI. When they arrested him on Sunday, investigators found the original NEET paper in Motegaonkar’s phone; it had been sent to him by Kulkarni.In addition, a week prior to the NEET exam on May 3, Kulkarni also allegedly gave the same question paper to Pune beautician Manisha Waghmare who has been arrested by CBI for soliciting student-clients for people like Kulkarni and her neighbour in Bibwewadi, Pune, Manisha Mandhare, an NTA-designated biology subject expert who also ran her own coaching classes in Pune, and who had full access to the biology questions in the paper. In fact it was she who had introduced Waghmare to Kulkarni. Manisha Mandhare and Kulkarni have been described by CBI as the “masterminds” behind the leak. She was arrested from Pune last week.Though this is the first time that Latur’s coaching classes have been allegedly involved in underhand practices, questions are being raised about the town’s success ratio in recent NEET exams. As per the 2024 data published by National Testing Agency (NTA), of 24,496 students who appeared for NEET 2024 from Latur, 1,245 scored above 600 marks. Among them, 376 crossed the critical 650-mark threshold generally needed for admission into government medical colleges.Twenty-five students scored above 700 marks and five crossed the rare 710-mark barrier. Neighbouring Nanded also recorded striking numbers.A total of 719 students scored above 600 marks, 281 crossed 650, 18 scored above 700 and four crossed 710, as per the NTA data. Together, Latur and Nanded contributed 26.73% of all Maharashtra students scoring above 600 in NEET 2024 despite accounting for only a fraction of the state’s total candidates. They also contributed 25.41% of students scoring above 650 marks and 20.97% of those crossing 700 marks.Maharashtra was the third strongest-performing state in India in NEET 2024. Out of 2,73,463 candidates appearing for the examination, 7,616 students scored above 600, 2,585 crossed 650, 205 students scored above 700 and 68 crossed 710 marks.According to Vidya Aradhana Classes owner Satish Pawar every year more than 30,000 students come to Latur as school and junior college students. Nearly 15,000 students from the town appear for NEET annually, while close to 5,000 sit for the JEE examination.Education expert and Kaushalya Academy director Vaishali Deshmukh says the city has built its economy around competitive examinations which involves two years of preparations for most. “The city has built an education industry worth more than ₹350 crore around competitive examinations such as NEET and JEE. Nearly 50,000 students come to Latur every year for medical and engineering entrance preparation. If one considers an average annual coaching fee of around ₹65,000 per student, the coaching business alone generates approximately ₹325 crore annually,” she said.Deshmukh said the economic impact extends far beyond classrooms.“Thousands of students migrating to the city every year have created a massive parallel economy involving hostels, paying guest accommodations, mess facilities, transportation, bookstores, libraries, stationery shops, test-series providers, canteens and rental housing. Entire neighbourhoods in Latur have evolved around student life, with local businesses depending heavily on the academic calendar,” she said.She added that while the ecosystem produced generations of successful doctors and engineers, it also intensified commercialisation and pressure on students and parents alike.Responding to attempts to link the entire “Latur Pattern” with the alleged paper leak, Dilip Deshmukh, director of Rajarshi Shahu College in Latur, strongly defended the town’s educational legacy. “For many in the region, the ‘Latur Pattern’ still represents a model of rural academic empowerment that helped thousands of middle-class and farming families produce doctors and engineers through disciplined and affordable education,” he said.He added that despite the controversy and negative attention surrounding the alleged paper leak case, thousands of students in Latur continued preparing honestly for the re-NEET examination scheduled next month.But investigators who are still widening the ambit of their probe say the leak functioned like a structured business network rather than isolated cheating. “The leak spread like an underground digital marketplace,” a CBI officer told HT, with Latur as an important pit-stop.After Kulkarni shared the question paper with Manisha Waghmare, she shared it with Dhananjay Lokhande, a conduit in Ahilyanagar who in turn shared it with his associate Shubham Khairnar at Nashik. It was Khairnar who on April 29 contacted Gurugram-based intermediary Yash Yadav to arrange for buyers.On the same day, Yadav contacted Mangilal Khatik in Jaipur who was worried about his son’s prospects in NEET and was willing to pay ₹10 lakh for 150 questions that would match with the original paper. Khairnar had promised Yadav that he would provide between 500-600 questions pertaining to physics, chemistry and biology that “ensure admissions in reputed medical colleges.”Once the payment was assured Khairnar transferred PDFs of the leaked papers through Telegram to Yadav who in turn forwarded them to Mangilal Khatik. In addition to providing these question papers to his son and two other family members who were appearing in this year’s NEET, Khatik also tried to recoup his investment by selling the same to other acquaintance. CBI has recovered evidence of this from Khatik’s phone which was confiscated upon his arrest.