Mahesh Muralidhar Bhagwat, who serves as the Director of Police in Telangana, continues his free mentoring work for civil service aspirants. His network of mentors now covers thousands of candidates across the country.
As part of the UPSC Civil Services 2025 competition, his team assisted 331 out of 958 selected candidates—more than one-third of all successful participants. The statistics are particularly impressive regarding the Indian Forest Service: in 2025, 84 out of 148 selected candidates, more than half, noted the benefit of Bhagwat's mentorship. Furthermore, for three consecutive years, from 2023 to 2025, a graduate from his groups became the number one ranked candidate in the Indian Forest Service nationwide.
In the UPSC Central Armed Police Forces 2024 exam, the program supported 66 out of 459 selected candidates, including participants ranked #2, #5, #13, #20, and #35.
Bhagwat himself reached the highest rank in the Telangana police, becoming the Director of Police in April 2026, yet his morning routine and use of a WhatsApp group remain unchanged.
A Young Man from a Village Who Doubted Himself
To understand why Bhagwat spends hours mentoring, often before and after demanding police work, one must look at his past. He grew up in Patardi, Ahmednagar district (now Ahilyanagar) in Maharashtra state, until completing the 10th grade, after which he moved to Pune for studies.
For a young man from a rural area, the language of the UPSC exam seemed daunting. He recalls feeling an inferiority complex due to his rural background and English language difficulties. However, his perception changed when he saw the example of a senior student taking the UPSC in Marathi and successfully passing the exam.
Bhagwat also read about Bushan Gagari, a former Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai, who achieved the #3 rank nationwide by choosing Marathi as an optional subject and writing the exam entirely in his native language. This made him realize that opportunities existed.
After graduating from the College of Engineering Pune (COEP) in 1990, Bhagwat began working in a government school in Mumbai. Later, he secured a well-paid position in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at Tata Motors. He did this not because he gave up his dream of UPSC, but because he needed to fund his preparation.
He studied wherever he could: on buses traveling to villages he took charge of outside Pune, and even on trucks transporting water to rural communities. In 1994, before the preliminary results of the UPSC were announced, he resigned. He notes that this was a calculated risk, despite resistance due to giving up a high-paying job.
The risk paid off: he passed the exam and joined the IPS in the 1995 batch. After two years of service in Manipur, he moved to Hyderabad in 1999. Nevertheless, he never forgot what it was like to prepare mostly on his own, or how significant small acts of guidance from seniors were to him. This experience ultimately shaped one of the largest free mentoring networks for civil service aspirants in the country.
It All Started with One WhatsApp Group
The origin of this initiative is linked to another aspirant who deeply understood the feeling of isolation. Nitish Pathod, now Deputy Commissioner of Customs in Ahmedabad and an IRS officer, traveled to Delhi from Chandrapur, Maharashtra, to prepare for the UPSC exam. At that time, hundreds of candidates from Maharashtra lived in Maharashtra Sadan, but there was no common platform to help them through the final stage of the examination.
Pathod recalls: