Will Dainik Jagran prove to be Super-30’s nemesis?

It’s not often that a city is dismissive about one of its residents being feted as a hero in national media and his life being turned into a biopic starring one of Bollywood’s leading actors.

Since years, Patna has been reacting with such disillusionment to the national attention that Anand Kumar, of Super-30 fame, has been attracting for the success rate of his free residential coaching to IIT-JEE aspirants from socially- and economically-weak sections of society. While from the very beginning the student community in the city has been divided over such claims, last few years have seen a growing number of doubters.

Somehow that hasn’t been the case when it comes to the national scene. On one of the annual visits to  his hometown Patna, Amitava Kumar came across something that made its way to the pages of his book, A Matter of Rats-A Short Biography of Patna (Aleph, 2013). In one of his many failings as an interpreter of the city, a role thrust upon him as one of the more famous non-resident Biharis in the contemporary literary scene, Amitava joined the media chorus in heralding Anand Kumar as one of the heroic stories from Bihar’s capital.

While media houses continue to present him as a poster boy of social initiative, popular culture is ready to chronicle his life with a biopic, titled “Super 30”. Hrithik Roshan will be playing Anand Kumar.

Something, however, seems to have finally changed this week. Even the national media is now taking note of the allegations that the country’s most read newspaper Dainik Jagran has been making for the last 10 days in a series of front-page investigative reports in Patna editions of both its flagship paper as well as in its youth-oriented broadsheet, inext.

These reports have sought to unravel many aspects of Anand Kumar’s allegedly dubious operations in the garb of the Super-30 initiative. The allegations are many – ranging from duping students from different corners of the country with a high fee-charging parallel institution Ramanujan School of Mathematics to blatantly faking the number of successful students.

The reports have also gone into digging the sources of his income and property – all of which run into crores and quite incongruent to his claims of running a modest coaching institution for deprived sections. Questions were also raised about Anand Kumar’s alleged efforts to convert black money into white. For a man claiming to be nothing more than a mathematics teacher from a poor family, Anand Kumar has still not replied to questions that Dainik Jagran has raised in its expose series.

The trigger for the expose is an allegedly defamation attempt made against Abhayanand, former Director General of Police and one of the early collaborators with Anand Kumar for Super-30 initiative. It was on Indian Police Service (IPS) officer’s suggestion that Kumar started Super-30 programme in which the former cop himself taught Physics to students. Seen as a  programme catering to poor students, the initiative attracted national attention with its impressive success rate in IIT-JEE.

The duo, however, separated in 2008 in wake of Anand Kumar agreeing to receive cash prize at a media event organised by CNN-IBN. Abhayanand refused the prize and questioned the logic of accepting such prizes for an initiative that was non-commercial. He started his Rahmani-30 programme for coaching poor Muslim students for IIT entrance examination. After his retirement from IPS, the programme gained more momentum.

Social media posts against the ex-cop accused him of minting hundreds of crores of rupees and the police traced the post to Jitendra, a man working for Anand Kumar’s institute. In a dramatic turn of events at Kotwali police station in Patna on July 15, Anand Kumar argued with police in defence of Jitendra. This was reported in all the major dailies published from the city, including Dainik Jagran inext.  

However, it was from July 17 that the Dainik Jagran started piecing together many aspects of alleged fraud and deception that it found in Anand Kumar’s operations.

To begin with, the paper talked about documents seized by the police from Anand Kumar’s worker. Jagran alleged that the documents revealed possibilities of his black money operations and possible links to engineering college admission racket.

It was only on July 18 that the paper embarked on its independent inquiry into how the institution is run, the truth behind its claims and what its students (and even parents) have to say. It even published WhatsApp number to reach out to people who have anything specific to share. The same day, the paper published a report on how “Super 30’’ is merely a front for the parallel operation of Ramanujan School of Mathematics (RSM). According to the report, students applying for the  programme are asked to get enrolled into RSM after paying hefty fee to have any chance of making it to Super-30. Apparently, RSM is the real money minting machine for Kumar which makes him earn at least 1 crore annually.

Next day, July 19, the paper raised questions that are very basic to the expectations with which students come to Anand Kumar’s institute — how does one get into Super-30? The paper found that contrary to claims made by Kumar, the question is still a mystery especially when the institute mints crores from thousands of students enrolled there.

The next set of allegations  are possibly even more damning as it found that Super-30’s claims of success rate in IIT-JEE were grossly exaggerated and even fake in many cases. On July 20, Dainik Jagran published a report with a headline screaming: “Anand ka super fraud “ (Anand’s Super Fraud) in which it revealed that nine of the 25 students of Super-30’s 2015 batch were enrolled in another popular coaching chain FIIT-JEE. The paper even listed the registration numbers of students studying at the institute that charges a high fee to ask two questions: first, how can Super-30 exclusively claim them as its students and second, if they could pay hefty coaching fee at FIIT-JEE, how did they qualify as poor students at Anand Kumar’s institute?

Further investigating the fake success claims, the paper found even more startling details of allegedly false claims made about 2018 results. Contrary to claims made by Anand Kumar about 26 students of Super-30  batch cracking the exam this year , the paper found that only three of them did so. In its report (“Ek chhlava hai Super 30”, Super 30 is a deception, July 21), the paper also questioned the pedagogical methods of Anand Kumar, which didn’t encourage students to ask questions. Two days later (July 23), the paper had details on one of the alleged fraudulent methods through which the fake number of successful students is  publicised.

The alleged lack of hygienic living conditions in Super-30 hostel and how student organisations like Patna University Students Union (PUSU) have reacted to Jagran expose on alleged fraudulent activities attracted paper’s attention on July 22.

On July 21, the paper probed the jump in properties allegedly owned by Kumar’s family members and on July 25, the company floated allegedly for routing RSM’s transactions.

Interestingly, Anand Kumar hasn’t responded to any of the allegations, though Dainik Jagran asked him to reply to the published expose.

While the allegations and wide ranging  revelations haven’t surprised the city, Anand Kumar obviously, has a lot to answer for. Indeed Dainik Jagran has ensured that the alleged underbelly of a much-celebrated social initiative would now be talked about beyond private conversations in the state capital.

The question which would inevitably be asked is – in public perceptions, is Anand Kumar’s slide going to be as swift as that of Gautam Goswami?

Through the Hindi Lens is a fortnightly look into the world of Hindi news.