Meet Devender Gupta and Sudha Gupta: the public face of Mother’s Pride and Presidium, and the private docket that followed

For two decades the couple sold a story Delhi’s middle class wanted to buy. Sudha Gupta as the founder-chairperson of Mother’s Pride, the pre-school brand that promised fee concessions, “good returns” and a polished ladder into Presidium. Devender Gupta — also spelled Devendra in later captions — as the MCD executive engineer whose family address kept resurfacing at 11/77, West Punjabi Bagh. Together they were marketed as education entrepreneurs. The public record that has piled up since is colder than the brochures. It is a CBI disproportionate-assets prosecution, personal-bankruptcy declarations, civil recovery decrees, income-tax searches, Yes Bank insolvencies, a look-out circular later torn up by the High Court, and a school-brand that a tribunal itself described as still running through trusts, societies and franchisees while the company on the books had almost nothing left to resolve.

Call the headline what you like. Bunty and Babli was always a film about a couple who lived on other people’s credulity. What follows is not cinema. It is the paper.

The man the CBI put in the dock

Devender Gupta is not a rumour from a parents’ WhatsApp group. He is a named public servant in CBI RC No. 47(A)/99/CBI/ACB/ND, prosecuted under Section 13(2) read with 13(1)(d) and 13(1)(e) of the Prevention of Corruption Act. On 11 April 2008 the Special Judge framed charges against him for disproportionate assets of ₹9,48,19,816. Other persons in that case were charged under Section 109 of the IPC. The later trial docket travels as CC 38/2019. The sanction fight is not a footnote: Delhi High Court in Devender Gupta v. CBI (CRL.M.C. 5049/2014, 10 June 2022) had to reopen the competence of MCD sanction, riding on the earlier G.S. Matharoo v. CBI ruling of 25 January 2012 that for Group-A MCD officers the Corporation — not the Commissioner — was the authority.

That is the official spine. It is not a conviction. It is also not a clearing. As of the 6 September 2026 cut-off, no public judgment was located that acquits him of those charges, and no certified document was located that proves he was arrested, remanded or taken into CBI or ED custody. The distinction matters, and it will be repeated because the internet does not honour it.

The woman who built the brand and then offered fifteen lakh against a wall of claims

Sudha Gupta is the name the schools put on the hoardings. Documentary material supports her founder role in the Mother’s Pride and Presidium brands. That is not the same thing as her having incorporated, owned or controlled every company that later used the name. The director register for the 27 companies around Raj Rani Gupta (DIN 00190756) was built precisely to stop that slide.

What the insolvency court did to her personally is not branding. In IB-705/ND/2022, Bank of Baroda proceeded against her as personal guarantor of Our Company Infrastructure Developers Pvt. Ltd. After the repayment plan was rejected, the resolution process was closed on 8 January 2025. On 4 September 2025, NCLT New Delhi Court-II allowed the bankruptcy application. The same sitting also records a separate JC Flowers application, IA 1925/2025, stating that she had given another guarantee on 10 February 2018 for credit facilities of Mothers Pride Education Institution Pvt. Ltd. Two corporate debtors. One personal name.

The arithmetic of her offer is the part the brochures never printed. In the personal-guarantor process the claim side was recorded in the crores — the figure circulated in the case papers as ₹7,74,72,75,024.54 against a repayment-plan offer of ₹15 lakh. That is not a “₹774.73 crore scam” proved by a criminal court. It is admitted-claim arithmetic in an insolvency file colliding with a plan the tribunal would not accept. Anyone who adds that number to the CBI DA figure, the EOW complaint figure and the civil decrees and calls the sum “the scam” is doing propaganda, not reporting. The contrast still stands: a public education brand on one side, a rejected plan of fifteen lakh on the other.

On 12 February 2026 the Delhi High Court in W.P.(C) 6196/2024 set aside the look-out circular issued against her at Bank of Baroda’s request. Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav recorded the underlying loans: Bank of India, ₹35 crore, 23 August 2013, to the infrastructure company, with her as guarantor and director; then a consortium term loan of ₹49 crore on 3 September 2014, Bank of India plus Bank of Baroda, against a mortgage valued at about ₹85.16 crore. The Court held an LOC is not a permanent recovery tool. The circular went. The debt did not.

A reported non-bailable warrant from a Ghaziabad / Indirapuram matter in 2022 is just that — reporting of a warrant. No reliable public record located in this investigation confirms execution, remand, or an ED or CBI arrest of Sudha Gupta.

The maze was the product

If you wanted to follow the money you first had to follow the stationery.

Mother’s Pride is a brand. It has also been a proprietorship of Raj Rani Gupta. It has also been Mothers Pride Education Personna Pvt. Ltd. (CIN U80302DL2004PTC126750). It has also been Mothers Pride Education Institution Pvt. Ltd. (CIN U80903DL2012PTC238175). Presidium is a brand. It has also been Presidium Educational Institution Pvt. Ltd. (CIN U80302DL2005PTC138233). It has also been trusts: Presidium Educational and Charitable Trust, Presidium Eduvision Trust, and others. OCID sits in the same family-and-associate lending cluster. Later “Prudence” operators are not interchangeable with any of the above.

Raj Rani Gupta, DIN 00190756, is the historical spine of the 27-company map: 75 distinct DIN identities, 225 company–person relationships. In CS(Comm) 267/2020, Sandeep Kaur v. Raj Rani Gupta, the commercial court on 24 September 2025 treated the contracting “Mother’s Pride” as Raj Rani’s proprietorship after calling the bank records. The caption gives her as wife of Sumer Chand Gupta, resident of A-172, Outer Ring Road, Meera Bagh, Paschim Vihar. Devender Gupta, Sudha Gupta and Neerja Chawla had been on the original plaint at 11/77 West Punjabi Bagh and were later dropped from that decree array. Raj Rani’s attempt to freeze the suit behind the IBC was dismissed on 25 April 2025 and again on 2 August 2025.

That judgment also quotes Sarita Sayal’s email of 10 October 2018: she had resigned from Mother’s Pride/Presidium and told lenders to deal with the Punjabi Bagh team “led by Mr. Devendra Gupta husband of Mrs. Sudha Gupta.” The court did not convert that sentence into a finding that he beneficially owned every franchise. It did put his name, in writing, where the investors were being pointed.

The same day produced the companion decree in Indu Goswami. Teacher recovery decrees from Punjabi Bagh in 2025 are not, on the face of those records, final personal decrees against Devendra Gupta after he was deleted as a defendant. Anyone who reprints them as “he was ordered to pay the teachers” is misstating the caption.

The investors were not a rumour either

On 19 January 2019 the Indian Express reported that Delhi Police EOW had registered a case against owners, developers and branch heads of Mother’s Pride on the complaint of Satbir Singh and twelve others. The amount in that complaint: ₹4 crore 15 lakh. The allegation was textbook: invest for “good returns,” fee concessions, fee waivers; the returns did not arrive; refunds were refused. Sudha Gupta’s answer, printed in the same report, was franchisee-distance: “We have a lot of franchisees and we will look into it to see if any such thing happened in any of them. We will settle the matter at that level.”

Later High Court material in W.P.(CRL.) 1181/2021 records the State asserting more than 92 victims, not all settled, in the EOW matter identified as FIR 3/2019. Thirteen named complainants in 2019 and ninety-two in a later State assertion are not the same list and must not be added together.

Dwarka South FIR 223/2021, the school-investment cheating case that campaigners still wave, was quashed. Writing as if that FIR is alive is a lie by omission. Cheque-dishonour complaints and other investor suits exist as separate files. They are not one consolidated fraud conviction.

Yes Bank arrived with a statute, not a pamphlet

Three companies in the group went into CIRP on Yes Bank petitions.

Presidium Educational Institution Pvt. Ltd. was admitted on 29 November 2022 (IB-559/ND/2021). Mothers Pride Education Institution Pvt. Ltd. was admitted on 11 October 2022 (IB-21/ND/2022). Mothers Pride Education Personna Pvt. Ltd. was admitted on 4 January 2023 (IB-638/ND/2021). IRP Ganga Ram Agarwal gave way to AAA Insolvency / Ankit Goel. On 4 June 2025 NCLT replaced the Personna RP with Ashok Arora after recording serious lapses, delay and a process that could no longer be entrusted to the sitting professional.

Then the tribunal said, in language no prospectus would have commissioned, what the structure actually looked like. In January 2026 reporting on IA 652/ND/2024, NCLT directed about 33 schools using the Presidium name to render accounts of receipts and profits from the mark since the insolvency commencement date and deposit them into the CIRP account. The corporate debtor was the registered proprietor of the trademark. The schools were still using it. The RP’s case, accepted as a reason for the later recall, was that operations continued through trusts, societies and franchise arrangements while no revenue was routed through the company’s accounts, records were missing, assets were opaque, and liquidation would leave almost nothing — and would reward the people running the brand outside the formal company.

On 1 June 2026, in IA 6318/2025 and IA 6314/2025, the same bench of Manni Sankariah Shanmuga Sundaram and Atul Chaturvedi recalled the admission orders against Presidium Educational Institution and Mothers Pride Education Personna, terminated those CIRPs, lifted the moratorium and handed management back to the suspended boards. Mothers Pride Education Institution’s admission was not one of those two recalls. Company Appeals (AT) (Ins.) 1155–1157 of 2026 were indexed around 3 July 2026 as a stay. The complete post-July 2026 NCLAT text was not retrieved. Anyone who writes “the insolvency is over” or “the insolvency is finally terminated” without that appellate paper is guessing.

OCID, the infrastructure vehicle in Sudha’s guarantee, now has its own section-7 file: CP(IB) 680(PB)/2024, Bank of Baroda, filed 7 October 2024.

On 25 September 2025, in IA 1786/ND/2025, NCLT allowed the Institution RP to take control of the corporate debtor’s websites, with police assistance. Devendra Gupta appears in connected process papers as a respondent. That is custody of a URL, not a criminal conviction.

The family garage and the personal-guarantor table

In January 2015 the Economic Times put 22-year-old Paras Gupta on a Rolls-Royce Ghost Series II and called him the youngest owner of that model in India. He was described as a director of Mother’s Pride, the chain “first established by his mother Sudha Gupta.” Brother Prateek was written up with a Maserati and a Mercedes E63. The family list in that piece: Land Cruiser V8, Mercedes S 350, Range Rover Evoque, Prado. Later motor websites recycled the interview and floated a 2015 ex-showroom base of about ₹4.48 crore for a Ghost Series II. No registration extract, no invoice, no financier name has been produced in this investigation. The car is not a charge sheet. It is a 2015 lifestyle record of a man who, by 14 May 2024, sits in an NCLT caption as a personal guarantor of Personna, address 11/77 West Punjabi Bagh, alongside Devendra Gupta, Raj Rani Gupta, Prateek Gupta and Anil Kumar Banbah, RP Saurabh Chawla.

Devendra Gupta was declared bankrupt on 29 August 2025 on the Personna-guarantee track. The guarantee figure attached to that Personna line in the person file is ₹37.14 crore. Appeals went to NCLAT and a Supreme Court diary. Favourable outcomes elsewhere in the family file — quashing of FIR 223/2021, reversal of a tax-registration cancellation, the June 2026 recall of two corporate admissions — do not erase the bankruptcy order. They sit next to it.

G.S. Matharoo is the former civil servant whose name keeps arriving with the same banks. He is in the CBI sanction jurisprudence. He filed W.P.(C) 14838/2022 against a Bank of Baroda look-out circular; the recital includes an Education Collaboration Agreement dated 1 April 2013 with Presidium Education and Charitable Trust and Bank of India construction loans in August–September 2013. In January 2025 someone tried, through IA 181/ND/2025, to drag him into the Presidium CIRP and make him produce records. An ED search involving Matharoo is part of the earlier source-linked register. That is not a proved PMLA attachment against Devender or Sudha.

What the courts have already given them — and what they have not

The record is not a one-way street, and pretending it is would make this piece as sloppy as the brand literature.

FIR 223/2021 was quashed. Personal customs penalties were set aside. Multiple tax-registration cancellations were overturned. Sudha Gupta’s LOC was set aside on 12 February 2026. Two corporate CIRP admissions were recalled on 1 June 2026, then pulled into appellate stay territory. Devendra Gupta was deleted from some teacher-decree arrays. Those are not “technicalities.” They are operative orders.

What the record still does not contain is equally specific. No verified arrest of Devender Gupta, Sudha Gupta or Raj Rani Gupta. No target-specific ED raid-and-attachment package against those three. No matched GST raid order, SEBI adverse order, SFIO investigation order or RERA ruling against them. No judicial finding of hawala. No single defensible “total scam amount.” The CBI DA figure, the EOW complaint figures, the civil decrees, the corporate defaults and the personal-guarantee claims answer different legal questions and can describe overlapping money.

The Noida tragedy of 4 September 2025 — Class 6, Presidium Sector 31, FIR under Juvenile Justice Act Section 75 and BNS Section 357, DIOS report of CCTV blind spots — is a case against school management as reported. It is not a document that names Devender or Sudha as arrested accused. Using a child’s death as a smear against people not charged in that FIR is not investigation. It is scavenging.

The indictment that actually exists

Here is the version that survives contact with a lawyer.

A municipal engineer went to trial for disproportionate assets of ₹9.48 crore. His wife built a school brand that sold trust to parents and investment products to teachers and outsiders, then answered a 2019 EOW story by pointing at franchisees. The same cluster of addresses — 11/77 Punjabi Bagh, Meera Bagh — keeps appearing in personal-guarantor captions, commercial decrees and CIRP arrays. Yes Bank put three companies into insolvency. The tribunal that later recalled two of those admissions did so after being told the brand was still being used while the company was a shell. The personal-guarantor court rejected Sudha Gupta’s fifteen-lakh plan against a claim schedule in the hundreds of crores and declared her bankrupt. It declared him bankrupt too. A High Court took away her look-out circular and left the loans standing. A commercial court looked at the bank slips and said the “Mother’s Pride” that took a particular investor’s money was Raj Rani’s proprietorship, not the private limited company the family preferred to hide behind.

That is not a film. It is a filing system. The couple sold education. The dockets sold the rest.