Before Cotta, there was Latour. The mid-sized Marathwada city, which was twice devastated by earthquakes, has rebuilt its position as one of the largest training centers in Maharashtra through the ‘Latur Pattern’ which has attracted thousands of students across the state. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Maharashtra State Board had a merit list that was always full of students from the Latur department.
Educationists from the city like Dr. Janardan Waghmaar and Aniruddha Jadhav and institutions like Dayanand Educational Society, Rajarshi Shahu College and Dayanand College have created a rigorous system of +2 secondary education that focuses on training students for various engineering and medical entrance examinations.
“This Latur brand has developed over nearly 40 years, and no one can destroy it,” says Satish Pawar, director of Vidya Aradhana Coaching Classes at Latur, one of 165 coaching institutes in the city.
Read also: CBI interrogates RCC director’s son, holds Latur doctor in NEET-UG paper leak probe
Pawar points out the arrest this week of Shivraj Motegaonkar, 47, owner of Latur’s largest coaching centre, Renukai Career Center (RCC), in the NEET UG 2026 paper leak case. Motegaonkar’s RCC has branches in 9 districts of Maharashtra, and this year 30,000 students have registered for NEET, CET and JEE coaching.
Latour is in the middle of the NEET paper dropout class
After decades of building a reputation for academic success, Latour has fallen into the national spotlight as its robust training ecosystem rots. Six of the ten accused arrested so far in this case are from Maharashtra. Investigators believe the criminal network extends from Pune, Nashik, Latur and Nanded in Maharashtra to Jaipur, Sikar and Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan, and includes insiders linked to the examination system, coaching operators, middlemen, digital distribution chains and desperate parents willing to spend thousands of dollars to ensure success in these entrance exams. “This is not a geographical accident,” wrote economic development expert Varna Sri Raman. “The job market for which the aspirant prepares is small. The job market for which the aspirant prepares is enormous…”
Training cities “concentrate buyers willing to pay, sellers with the technical know-how, and digital infrastructure to clear deals quickly,” she adds, in a research paper for Policygrounds.press, an independent platform for public policy and economic analysis.
One of the key figures in the CBI’s crosshairs is retired chemistry professor Prahalad Vithalrao Kulkarni who taught for several years at Dayanand Science College in Latur. There, Kulkarni got to know Motigaonkar, and started teaching at his coaching centre.
After his retirement in June 2022, Kulkarni moved to Pune where he started running private coaching classes from his home. This year, NTA appointed Kulkarni as subject matter expert and paper drafter. He immediately leaked the questions to students in his coaching class, 10 days before the NEET exam, and also to Mottigaonkar, his old classmate of Latur, according to the CBI. When they arrested him on Sunday, investigators found the original NEET paper in Motigaonkar’s phone; Kulkarni had sent it to him.
Additionally, a week before the NEET exam on May 3, Kulkarni allegedly gave the same question paper to Pune-based beautician Manisha Waghmar who was arrested by the CBI for soliciting student agents to people like Kulkarni and her neighbor in Bibwewadi, Pune, Manisha Mandhari, an NTA-appointed 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 introduced Waghmare to Kulkarni. The CBI has described Manisha Mandhari and Kulkarni as the “masterminds” behind the leak. She was arrested from Pune last week.
Although this is the first time that coaching classes in Latur have been alleged to be involved in deceptive practices, questions have been raised about the city’s pass rate in the recent NEET exams. According to the 2024 data published by the National Testing Agency (NTA), out of 24,496 students who appeared in NEET 2024 from Latur, 1,245 scored more than 600 marks. Of them, 376 of them crossed the 650 critical mark generally required for admission in government medical colleges.
Twenty-five students scored above 700 and five of them crossed the rare barrier of 710 marks. The neighboring city of Nanded also recorded impressive numbers.
A total of 719 students scored above 600, 281 students exceeded 650, 18 students scored above 700 and four exceeded 710, according to NTA data. Latur and Nanded together contributed 26.73% of all Maharashtra students who scored over 600 in NEET 2024 even though they represent only a small portion of the total candidates in the state. They also contributed 25.41% of students who scored above 650 and 20.97% of students who scored above 700.
Maharashtra was the third strongest performing state in India in NEET 2024. Of the 2,73,463 candidates who appeared for the exam, 7,616 students scored more than 600, 2,585 crossed 650, 205 students scored more than 700, and 68 scored more than 710.
According to the owner of Vidya Aradhana Classes, Satish Pawar, more than 30,000 students annually come to Latur as junior school and college students. Nearly 15,000 students from the city appear for NEET exam annually, while nearly 5,000 students appear for JEE exam.
Education expert and Kaushalya Academy director Vaishali Deshmukh says the city has built its economy around competitive exams, most of which require two years of preparation. “The city has built an education industry worth more than $350 crore around competitive exams like NEET and JEE. Nearly 50,000 students come to Latur each year to prepare for entry into medicine and engineering. If we consider that the average annual training fee is approx $65,000 per student, the training alone generates approx $Rs 325 crore annually,” she said.
The economic impact extends beyond the classroom, Deshmukh said.
“Thousands of students migrating to the city every year have created a huge parallel economy that includes hostels, paying for guest accommodation, dining facilities, transport, libraries, bookshops, stationery shops, test series providers, canteens and rented accommodation. Entire neighborhoods in Latur have developed around student life, with local businesses relying heavily on the academic calendar,” she said.
While the ecosystem has produced generations of successful doctors and engineers, it has also intensified marketing and pressure on students and parents alike, she added.
Responding to attempts to link the entire ‘Latur pattern’ with the alleged leak of the paper, Dilip Deshmukh, principal of Rajarshi Shahu College in Latur, strongly defended the city’s educational legacy. “For many in the region, the ‘Latour Model’ remains a model of rural academic empowerment that has helped thousands of middle-class families and farmers produce doctors and engineers through disciplined and affordable education,” he said.
He added that despite the controversy and negative attention surrounding the alleged paper leakage issue, thousands of students in Latur continued to prepare faithfully for the NEET re-examination scheduled next month.
But investigators who are still expanding their investigation say the leak was an organized business network rather than an isolated fraud. “The leak has spread like an underground digital market,” a CBI officer told HT, taking Latur as an important stopping point.
After Kulkarni shared the question paper with Manisha Waghmaar, she shared it with Dhananjay Lokhande, a channeler in Ahilyanagar who in turn shared it with his partner Shubham Khairnar in Nashik. It was Khairnar who on April 29 contacted Gurugram-based broker Yash Yadav to arrange buyers.
On the same day, Yadav called Mangilal Khatik in Jaipur who called him N was concerned about his son’s chances of doing NEET and was willing to pay $10k for 150 questions matching the original paper. Khairnar had promised Yadav that he would provide 500 to 600 questions related to physics, chemistry and biology which would “guarantee admission in prestigious medical colleges”.
Once the payment was confirmed, Khairnar transferred the PDF files of the leaked papers via 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 appeared in this year’s NEET, Khatik also tried to recoup his investment by selling them to other acquaintances. The CBI recovered evidence of this from Khatik’s phone, which was confiscated upon his arrest.
