The story has been reported and written by Vasudev Jagarlamudi. He works at the intersection of marketing and technology, with a deep love for writing — from ad copy to occasional storytelling. Intrigued by how movements are built, he enjoys bringing communities together around ideas that inspire change. At The Better India, he writes on education, social change, and agriculture. 

Eight years ago, The Better India wrote about a Telangana police officer who was guiding UPSC aspirants through WhatsApp — for free.

Mahesh Muralidhar Bhagwat has not stopped.

Today, his mentorship network reaches thousands of civil services aspirants across the country. In UPSC Civil Services 2025, 331 of the 958 selected candidates had been mentored by his team — more than one in three successful candidates.

The numbers are even more striking in the Indian Forest Service. In 2025, 84 of the 148 selected candidates — more than half — credited Bhagwat’s mentorship. For three consecutive years, from 2023 to 2025, the All India Rank 1 in the Indian Forest Service came from his groups.

And in the UPSC Central Armed Police Forces examination in 2024, 66 of 459 selected candidates were mentored through the programme, with All India Ranks 2, 5, 13, 20 and 35 among them.

Bhagwat himself has since risen to the highest rank in the Telangana police, becoming Director General of Police in April 2026.

Yet the early-morning alarm has not changed.

Neither has the WhatsApp group.

The village boy who once doubted himself

To understand why Bhagwat spends hours mentoring civil services aspirants, often before and after a demanding police job, it helps to go back to Pathardi in Ahmednagar (now Ahilyanagar) district of Maharashtra.

He grew up there until Class 10 before moving to Pune for college.

For a young student from a rural background, the language of the UPSC examination seemed intimidating.

“I had an inferiority complex about English. My background was rural,” he recalls.

Then he saw something that changed his perception of what was possible.

A college senior wrote the UPSC examination in Marathi and cleared it. Bhagwat also read about Bhushan Gagrani, the former Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai, who secured All India Rank 3 while taking Marathi literature and history as his optionals and writing the examination entirely in his mother tongue.

“That is when I realised, we can do something. Opportunities are there.”

After graduating from Government Engineering College, Pune (COEP) in 1990, Bhagwat joined a government coaching centre in Mumbai. He later took up a well-paying CSR job at Tata Motors — not because he had abandoned the UPSC dream, but because he needed to finance it.

He studied wherever he could: on bus rides to villages he had adopted outside Pune and even on trucks carrying water to rural communities.

In 1994, before his UPSC prelims results had even been declared, he resigned.

“There was a lot of resistance. Such a lucrative job you are leaving. But it was a calculated risk,” he says.

He cleared the examination and joined the IPS in the 1995 batch. After spending his first two years in Manipur, he moved to Hyderabad in 1999.

But he never forgot what it felt like to prepare largely on his own — or how much the small acts of guidance from seniors had meant to him.

That experience would eventually shape one of the country's largest free mentorship networks for civil services aspirants.

It started with one WhatsApp group

The origins of the initiative can be traced to another aspirant who knew exactly what that isolation felt like.

Nitish Pathode, now a Deputy Commissioner of Customs in Ahmedabad and an IRS officer, had arrived in Delhi from Chandrapur, Maharashtra, to prepare for the UPSC examination.

At the time, hundreds of Maharashtra candidates stayed at Maharashtra Sadan. But there was no common platform to help them navigate the final stage of the examination.

“Questions about what to wear, how to handle the DAF, how to face the panel — everyone navigated it alone,” Pathode recalls.

In 2015, he created a WhatsApp group initially meant for friends preparing for the personality test.

Then he began adding mentors.

One of them was Mahesh Bhagwat.

“He was very helpful,” Pathode says.

The group, eventually named the Maharashtra civil services mentorship group, continued to grow.

Today, roughly 300 Maharashtra candidates reach the UPSC interview stage every year. Around 100 are selected —........

© The Better India