CBSE's OSM Tender Row: Governance Failure or Scapegoat Hunt?

CBSE's OSM Tender Row: Governance Failure or Scapegoat Hunt?

TL;DR: CBSE outsourced its Class 12 answer-sheet evaluation to a company previously linked to the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster that killed over 20 students. A 17-year-old whistleblower documented at least 15 changes to the tender that appear to have been tailored for this firm. The government responded by transferring two bureaucrats. The opposition calls it a cover-up. The real question is whether India's public procurement system can protect 17.7 lakh students when a multi-crore contract is at stake.

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A teenager from Jharkhand received blurred scans of his own Class 12 answer sheets. Instead of filing a complaint and moving on, he spent weeks cross-referencing three successive versions of a government tender on the public procurement portal. His findings eventually landed him a seat before a Parliamentary standing committee. The teenager's name is Sarthak Sidhant. He is 17. The institution he took on is the Central Board of Secondary Education.

This is not just a story about a student versus a bureaucracy. It is a story about how India's largest school examination board handed its entire digital evaluation process to a company with a documented history of catastrophic failure, and how the procurement rules that should have prevented this were quietly rewritten.

What Happened: The OSM Rollout

For the 2026 Class 12 board examinations, CBSE introduced On-Screen Marking (OSM), a system where answer sheets are scanned and evaluated digitally on computer screens instead of by hand. Around 17.7 lakh students sat for these exams. A staggering 98.6 lakh answer books were scanned and uploaded to the digital platform.

The concept itself is not new. On-screen marking is standard practice in the UK, Australia, and several other countries. Done properly, it reduces human calculation errors, enables moderation, and creates a verifiable digital trail. CBSE's own pitch was that OSM would make evaluation "faster, more efficient, and more transparent."

What followed was the opposite. Students reported mismatched answer sheets, blurred scans, missing pages, and portal crashes. The overall pass percentage dropped to 85.2%, the lowest in seven years, falling 3.19 percentage points from last year. The number of students placed in the compartment category rose to 163,800 (9.26%) from 129,095 (7.63%) the previous year.

School Education Secretary Sanjay Kumar acknowledged that around 13,000 answer sheets had to be manually re-checked because they were illegible on screen, often because students used light ink. The Ministry of Education defended OSM as a global best practice, but the dry run told a different story. A pilot conducted in January 2026 across five Delhi schools with just 100 teachers flagged 36 technical, operational, and evaluation-related issues, including concerns about "blind or superficial checking" of scripts.

The board went ahead anyway.

The Company: From Telangana Tragedy to CBSE Contract

The contract for digital scanning and on-screen evaluation went to Hyderabad-based Coempt Edu Teck Pvt Ltd. On paper, this is a private edtech company. In practice, its corporate lineage tells a much darker story.

Before it was Coempt, the company was called Globarena Technologies Private Limited. In 2019, Globarena was the software vendor behind the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education's digitized exam system. That year, over 3.8 lakh students out of 9.7 lakh who sat for the Telangana intermediate exam failed due to missing marks, incorrect scores, and systemic software glitches. Around 3 lakh students applied for reverification. Multiple reports linked nearly 20 student suicides to the fallout.

A committee appointed by the Telangana government found that Globarena had never actually signed a formal agreement with the state education board for the Rs 4.35 crore project. The committee's verdict: "systemic failures, procedural collapse, and glaring negligence."

Less than six months later, Globarena changed its name to Coempt Edu Tech Private Limited. Same CEO. Same corporate lineage. Different label.

When asked about the name change by Newslaundry, Coempt CEO VSN Raju said: "We changed our name, all our clients know this, and I am still the CEO. We are not hiding." He also told The News Minute that the CBSE complaints pertained to "one or two cases."

Despite ongoing criminal proceedings linked to the 2019 controversy, the company was reportedly never blacklisted by any government body. This is a crucial detail, because CBSE's revised tender only disqualified vendors who are "currently blacklisted." A company that was investigated but never formally blacklisted sails through that filter. The question is whether the filter was designed with that loophole in mind.

The Tender: Three Rounds, 15 Discrepancies

This is where Sarthak Sidhant's research becomes critical. The 17-year-old from Jharkhand meticulously tracked changes across three successive versions of CBSE's OSM tender, published his findings on his website under the title "How CBSE rewrote rules to favour Coempt EduTeck," and eventually presented them before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education on June 2, 2026.

The procurement process unfolded in three stages, as documented by The Federal:

Round 1 (February 2025): The first tender was issued but then mysteriously vanished from the public Government e-Marketplace (GeM) records.

Round 2 (May 2025): A second tender attracted four major bidders, including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation, and CBSE scrapped the round entirely.

Round 3 (August 2025): A revised tender was issued. Coempt emerged as the winner. Sidhant identified at least 15 discrepancies between this version and its predecessors.

Here are the most significant changes, based on Sidhant's presentation and reporting by The South First and Business Standard:

Tender Requirement	Earlier Version	Revised Version	Who Benefits
Software maturity	CMMI Level 5	CMMI Level 3	Coempt (holds Level 3)
Blacklisting clause	"Blacklisted earlier"	"Currently blacklisted"	Coempt (ex-Globarena)
Data center	Must own DC and DR center	MeitY empanelment sufficient	Coempt (uses AWS)
Experience	5 lakh+ students per project	Cumulative answer books processed	Coempt
Poor performance	Disqualification for history of failed projects	Removed entirely	Coempt
Source code	Must own or hold enforceable rights	Removed	Coempt
Cooling-off period	2 years for recently retired CBSE staff	Reduced to 1 year	Unknown

The financial gap was equally striking. Coempt bid Rs 24.75 per answer booklet inclusive of taxes. TCS quoted Rs 65-66 per booklet before taxes. Coempt's three-year average annual turnover was Rs 50.86 crore, just 1.7% above the minimum threshold of Rs 50 crore.

CBSE officials have maintained that the board followed all government protocols "scrupulously" and that the contract was awarded to the lowest qualified bidder under a standard Quality-and-Cost-Based Selection (QCBS) framework. But QCBS is designed to balance quality and cost. When you systematically lower the quality bar across 15 parameters, the "quality" in QCBS becomes decorative.

The Hack: A 19-Year-Old Breaks In

If the tender allegations were not enough, a separate investigation exposed catastrophic cybersecurity failures in the platform itself.

Nisarga Adhikary, a 19-year-old Bengaluru-based ethical hacker, discovered that the OnMark portal used by Coempt for CBSE's evaluation contained a hardcoded "master password" embedded directly in publicly accessible frontend JavaScript files. The password could bypass OTP and authentication entirely. By changing examiner ID numbers in browser requests, researchers could allegedly access other accounts and evaluation records.

It got worse. Adhikary and his collaborators claimed they gained "full create, read, update and delete (CRUD) access and shell access to CBSE's prod servers". An Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage bucket linked to the system was accessible without authentication, potentially exposing scanned answer sheets and question papers from the 2026 examinations. Multiple institutions using the same bucket meant the exposure was not limited to CBSE alone.

Adhikary also claimed that personal student data was being processed through automation scripts that reportedly utilized Google's Gemini AI system as part of quality assurance workflows. If true, this raises additional questions about student data being fed into third-party AI models without consent or oversight.

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh called it "a data breach of monumental proportions", alleging that answer sheets of approximately 2 million students were exposed. CBSE responded by deploying cybersecurity experts from government agencies and IITs and thanking the ethical hackers for flagging the vulnerabilities.

Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan directed IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur to help strengthen CBSE's digital infrastructure. A fix dispatched after the house was already robbed.

The Government Response: Transfer, Not Suspend

On June 2, 2026, the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet transferred CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta. Singh was moved to the Agriculture Ministry as additional secretary. Gupta was replaced by Varun Bhardwaj, an Indian Forest Service officer.

The Centre also constituted a one-member inquiry committee headed by S. Radha Chauhan, chairperson of the Capacity Building Commission, to examine the OSM procurement process. The committee has been given one month to submit its report to the Department of Personnel and Training.

The word "transferred" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Singh and Gupta were not suspended. They were not charged. They were moved to other government positions with their pay and seniority intact. This is how Indian bureaucracy typically handles political pressure: shift the person, not the accountability.

The opposition immediately seized on this distinction. Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi called the action a cover-up: "And the real culprit, Dharmendra Pradhan: Safe. Officials removed. Minister spared. This isn't accountability; it's a cover-up."

AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal asked: "Is that a punishment or protection?"

Congress's Jairam Ramesh described the transfers as "an attempt to distract and fix accountability on bureaucrats rather than the political leadership." Shiv Sena (UBT)'s Aaditya Thackeray demanded suspension and investigation, calling the transfers "injustice."

The ruling party, for its part, has not publicly defended the procurement process beyond the procedural compliance argument.

The Deeper Problem: Procurement Rules That Protect No One

CBSE's defence rests on procedure. They say they followed the General Financial Rules (GFR) and used Quality-and-Cost-Based Selection (QCBS). Under India's GFR 2017 framework, QCBS assigns weights to technical quality and cost, typically 30% quality and 70% cost. The lowest qualified bidder wins.

The problem is structural. India's procurement system has long been criticized for its reliance on L1 (lowest bidder) norms. Industry experts and even the Central Vigilance Commission have flagged that L1 "may not be the most efficacious method of procurement, especially for projects that require high level of technical expertise." Infrastructure leaders have urged the government to genuinely implement QCBS instead of treating it as a rubber stamp for lowest-cost selection.

When Coempt bid Rs 24.75 per booklet against TCS's Rs 65-66, the outcome was almost predetermined. The 62% cost difference overwhelmed any quality evaluation. The rules were technically followed. The outcome was technically absurd.

This is not unique to CBSE. Across Indian public procurement, the tension between cost efficiency and quality assurance plays out in government hospitals buying the cheapest medical equipment, infrastructure projects going to the lowest-cost contractor, and now, education boards handing the futures of 17.7 lakh teenagers to the company willing to charge the least.

The Whistleblower's Nuance

What makes Sidhant's intervention noteworthy is his restraint. He is not opposed to OSM. Before the Parliamentary committee, he said: "I think OSM is a good change, but there should be wide rollouts first and good demo pilots."

He clarified that his research was a collaboration with ethical hacker Nisarg Adhikari and several journalists, and his focus was transparency, not abolition. This distinction matters. The conversation has drifted toward whether digital evaluation is inherently flawed. It is not. The UK's Ofqual, Australia's QCAA, and several European boards use on-screen marking successfully. The failure here was not in the concept, but in the execution: a rushed pilot, a questionable vendor, and a procurement process that appears to have been reverse-engineered to produce a specific outcome.

What Comes Next

The Radha Chauhan committee has a month. The Parliamentary standing committee under Congress MP Digvijaya Singh has heard Sidhant's testimony and is awaiting CBSE's formal response. The re-evaluation portal will remain operational until June 6, 2026, with reduced fees of Rs 100 for verification and Rs 100 for revaluation. The Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) is reportedly monitoring the portal for further cyber attacks.

The new CBSE leadership, Lokhande Prashant Sitaram as chairman and Varun Bhardwaj as secretary, inherits a crisis with no quick resolution. The 17.7 lakh students whose results hang in the balance need clarity on whether their evaluation was fair. The parents who saw their children's pass percentage crater to a seven-year low need to know whether the drop reflects genuine performance or systemic evaluation failure. And the broader education system needs to know whether OSM, as a concept, will survive the controversy its first large-scale implementation created.

But the central questions remain unanswered. Did CBSE officials deliberately alter tender specifications to favour a specific vendor? Was the decision to proceed despite 36 known issues from the dry run a bureaucratic gamble or wilful negligence? And does transferring two officials to equivalent posts constitute accountability in any meaningful sense?

The opposition wants the Education Minister's head. The government wants the inquiry to settle the matter quietly. The students want their answer sheets evaluated correctly.

Of these three demands, only one involves the actual children. And it is the one getting the least attention.

Sources

• Oneindia: What Is CBSE's New OSM System And Why Is It Facing Criticism - 17.7 lakh students, pass percentage, compartment data
• AMK Resource World: CBSE Class 12 Result 2026 - Pass percentage drop to 85.2%
• Scroll.in: CBSE chairman, secretary transferred - Transfer details and political reactions
• The South First: From blacklisting clauses to technical criteria - Detailed tender changes and bid amounts
• Business Standard: Student claims CBSE tender tweaks helped Coempt - Dry run findings, tender timeline
• Business Standard: Centre transfers CBSE chief, secretary - New appointments and inquiry committee
• The Week: Sarthak Sidhant appears before parliamentary panel - 15 discrepancies, Sidhant's testimony
• The Federal: CBSE OSM row student alleges tender rigged - Three-round tender timeline
• Newslaundry: Company behind CBSE evaluation platform - Globarena-Coempt name change, Telangana connection
• Deccan Chronicle: Telangana inter fiasco firm now linked to CBSE - Corporate lineage, 2019 scandal, CEO quote
• Careers360: CBSE admits vulnerabilities in OnMark portal - AWS bucket exposure, Jairam Ramesh quote
• Careers360: CBSE OSM portal under lens after hacker claims - Hardcoded passwords, technical vulnerabilities
• Medianama: CBSE hacked after officials denied security flaws - Full CRUD and shell access claim
• IAAN Express: CBSE OSM procurement probe - CBSE's procedural compliance defence
• The Statesman: Student whistleblower appears before parliamentary panel - Parliamentary panel details
• Sarthak Sidhant: How CBSE rewrote rules to favour Coempt EduTeck - Original student investigation
• Startup India: General Financial Rules brief - GFR procurement framework
• GFR 2017 Purchase Procedure - QCBS and procurement rules
• Cyril Amarchand: Reforms in public procurement - QCBS weightage framework
• AutoGuide India: QCBS-based procurement for government contracts - L1 vs QCBS debate