In the spring of 2026, the academic ambitions of nearly two million Indian high school students collided with a deeply compromised digital evaluation system. What began as scattered student grievances over unexpectedly deflated exam scores rapidly transformed into a national crisis. The fallout exposed systemic administrative negligence, structural procurement manipulation, and critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities at the highest levels of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).

The primary catalysts behind this exposure were not institutional watchdogs or professional forensic auditors, but a trio of tech-savvy teenagers. Operating from bedrooms in Ranchi and Delhi, these student whistleblowers dissected public procurement records, traced corporate histories, and identified severe security flaws within the software tasked with grading India's national exams. Their efforts triggered an unprecedented bureaucratic purge by the Prime Minister’s Office, a sweeping parliamentary inquiry, and a technical standoff with international cyber-threat actors.

Visual Graphic 1: The Network of Accountability (Systemic Relationship Map)

The Sparks in the Dark: Profiles of the Teen Whistleblowers

The grassroots exposure of the digital evaluation failure was driven by three distinct student investigations, each addressing a different aspect of the system's collapse.

Sarthak Siddhant: The Forensic Document Investigator

Seventeen-year-old Sarthak Siddhant, a resident of Ranchi, Jharkhand, was a tech enthusiast and student at JVM Shyamali, having previously completed most of his schooling at Delhi Public School, Bokaro. Well-regarded in localized scientific circles, Sarthak had previously developed "Nandini," an artificial intelligence application designed to monitor cattle health, and had qualified for the National Children's Science Congress. Outside his academic pursuits, Sarthak ran "Dari," an online civic platform that tracked infrastructure defects, municipal waste, and potholes across Ranchi and Bokaro.

Upon receiving his Class 12 board results in mid-May 2026, Sarthak was unconvinced by his assigned marks. He applied for a scanned copy of his answer sheet under the board’s official re-evaluation procedure. Finding the scanned images poorly rendered and structurally compromised, he began examining the broader systemic infrastructure of the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system. Collaborating with ethical hackers and local journalists, Sarthak scraped and systematically analysed all 576 procurement and tender documents hosted on the central public procurement portal. His findings culminated in an investigative blog post titled "How CBSE rewrote the rules to favour Coempt EduTeck," which detailed significant discrepancies in the board's vendor selection process.

Nisarga Adhikary: The Cybersecurity Researcher

Nineteen-year-old Nisarga Adhikary, a hobbyist cybersecurity researcher who also completed his Class 12 exams in 2026, approached the system from a technical perspective. Operating under anime avatars online to protect his privacy, Nisarga investigated the security architecture of the OnMark digital grading portal operated by CBSE’s chosen vendor.

In February 2026, Nisarga identified five critical vulnerabilities in the portal's frontend code, including a hardcoded master password that allowed users to bypass One-Time Password (OTP) verification and gain direct access to the examiner dashboard. This flaw theoretically enabled unauthorized users to view student scripts, access personal identifiable information (PII), and manipulate scores.

Vedant Shrivastava: The Human Face of the Glitch

Vedant Shrivastava, a Class 12 student based in New Delhi, experienced the system's operational failures firsthand. After receiving unexpectedly low marks in Physics, Vedant applied for a photocopy of his evaluated answer script. When the file arrived, he discovered that the answer booklet associated with his roll number was written in handwriting completely different from his own.

Unable to find a functional administrative channel to report the error, Vedant and his older brother, Siddhant, created a dedicated account on X (formerly Twitter) on May 23, 2026, to publish evidence of the mix-up. The post quickly garnered over 2.5 million views, making Vedant the focus of national media attention.

Before CBSE acknowledged the scanning error, Vedant faced intense online harassment. A prominent national television news anchor publicly labeled him a "Pakistani agent" trying to discredit the national examination apparatus, a claim that was later retracted with an apology after CBSE officially admitted to the scanning mismatch.

The Telangana Precedent: A Legacy of Corporate Malfeasance

The private vendor at the centre of the CBSE controversy was Coempt EduTeck Private Limited, a Hyderabad-based firm headed by Chief Executive Officer V.S.N. Raju. Forensic corporate registries reveal that Coempt EduTeck was a direct rebranding of Globarena Technologies Private Limited. Under its previous name, the company had been involved in multiple highly controversial state examination failures.

In April 2019, the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBIE) declared its Class 11 and 12 results using software developed by Globarena Technologies. Of the 9.7 lakh students who appeared, more than 3.28 lakh were declared to have failed. The resulting public crisis was severe; at least 19 to 21 students died by suicide within a single week.

A subsequent three-member state-appointed expert inquiry committee—comprising G.T. Venkateswar Rao (Managing Director, Telangana State Technology Services), A. Vassan (IIT Hyderabad), and Nishanth Dongari (IIT Hyderabad)—concluded that Globarena's software suffered from critical design errors, processing omissions, and a failure to complete essential operational modules within the contract’s timeline.

Furthermore, political figures, including then-Telangana Congress Committee working president (and current Chief Minister) A. Revanth Reddy, alleged that Globarena enjoyed close ties with influential political administrators and had previously defrauded JNTU Kakinada in an automated examination contract valued at Rs 268 crore.

In 2023, identical software failures occurred in Telangana's intermediate exams, with another 19 student suicides reported in a single week. Despite this history, V.S.N. Raju maintained that the rebranding of Globarena to Coempt was a standard "branding exercise" under company law and that the firm had been cleared of deliberate wrongdoing by judicial authorities.

By late 2025, this background was publicly accessible, yet it did not trigger disqualification during CBSE’s vendor vetting process.

The Procurement Audit: How the Rules Were Altered

Sarthak Siddhant’s investigation focused heavily on how Coempt EduTeck secured the multi-crore CBSE evaluation contract over established competitors like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). His analysis of the bidding process on the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) and Central Public Procurement Portal revealed three distinct phases of tendering between February and August 2025:

• Round 1 (February 2025): The initial tender was issued but failed to attract viable bids, subsequently being removed from the GeM portal without a public archive.

• Round 2 (May 2025): A second tender attracted four major bidders, including TCS and Coempt. All four bidders failed the technical evaluation phase under the board’s original quality criteria, forcing CBSE to scrap the round.

• Round 3 (August 2025): CBSE issued a third, revised RFP on August 28, 2025. In this round, Coempt EduTeck emerged as the lowest bidder (L1) under a Quality-and-Cost-Based Selection (QCBS) framework, undercutting TCS’s bid by nearly 60%.

A comparison of the successive tender documents reveals significant changes to key criteria, which eased the path for Coempt's selection:

Comparative Tender Specifications Matrix

Chronology of the CBSE OSM Collapse (2025–2026)

Ignored Warnings and Promotional Rebranding

The failure of the OSM system was preceded by multiple unheeded technical and administrative warnings. Following the December 2025 contract award, CBSE conducted a brief dry run across five schools in Delhi in January 2026. The resulting internal report identified 36 distinct operational challenges. These included concerns that evaluators would engage in "blind or superficial checking" due to software latency, a lack of clear auditing mechanisms, and technical vulnerabilities that could lead to data mismatches.

Despite these clear warnings, CBSE chose not to delay the nationwide implementation. Instead, the board launched a promotional campaign, sending "social media toolkits" to school principals. These kits encouraged educators to create and post short video reels praising the On-Screen Marking system on platforms like Instagram to counter growing student skepticism.

Concurrently, Nisarga Adhikary’s February 2026 vulnerability disclosure regarding the hardcoded master password remained unaddressed by both CERT-In and CBSE for over three months. This lapse left the personal information and exam papers of nearly two million minors exposed during the grading cycle.

The Post-Result Collapse and the Shastri Bhawan Incident

When the Class 12 results were announced in mid-May 2026, the real-world impact of these systemic failures became apparent. The national pass percentage fell to a seven-year low of 85.20%, driven in part by significant grading anomalies. Students who had cleared highly competitive national engineering exams, such as the JEE Main, discovered they had failed their board papers.

Upon requesting their scanned scripts, many found that handwritten equations, chemical structures, and biology diagrams had completely disappeared during the low-resolution 200 DPI scanning process. Others received answer sheets with entire sections missing or containing other candidates' work.

The political fallout was immediate. Student organisations, including the National Students' Union of India (NSUI), staged protests outside CBSE's New Delhi headquarters and filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Delhi High Court demanding an independent judicial inquiry. An online student-led movement, the "Cockroach Janta Party"—named after comments made by Supreme Court Justice Surya Kant regarding systemic administrative pests—called for the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, scheduling a protest at Jantar Mantar for June 6, 2026.

On June 1, 2026, amid the growing public controversy, a fire broke out on the second floor of Shastri Bhawan, which houses the Ministry of Education. While the blaze was quickly controlled, opposition leaders, including Jairam Ramesh, labeled the incident "very fishy," alleging it was a convenient destruction of procurement and tender files ahead of potential judicial scrutiny.

June 2, 2026: The Deposition, The Purge, and the Cyber Siege

June 2, 2026, served as the turning point of the entire controversy, marked by dramatic events in parliament, a rapid administrative restructure, and a significant cyberattack.

The Parliamentary Deposition

Sarthak Siddhant appeared before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth, and Sports in New Delhi, chaired by Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh. The 17-year-old student presented a detailed seven-page analysis of the procurement records, demonstrating to the committee how the board had modified its Request for Proposal (RFP) conditions to accommodate Coempt EduTeck.

The meeting was attended by CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh and School Education Secretary Sanjay Kumar. When questioned by MPs regarding the tender discrepancies, Rahul Singh was unable to provide direct answers, stating he could only recall details from "memory".

The Executive Purge

Following the parliamentary hearing, and amid reports that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had intervened, the government initiated a major administrative restructure:

• CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh (IAS, 1996 Bihar Cadre): Shunted out of the Ministry of Education and transferred to the Department of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare as an Additional Secretary.

• CBSE Secretary Himanshu Gupta: Prematurely repatriated to his parent cadre in the Ministry of Home Affairs on administrative grounds. He was placed under an "extended cooling-off" condition, making him ineligible for any central deputation until December 12, 2030.

• New Leadership: Senior bureaucrat Prashant Lokhande Sitaram was appointed as the new CBSE Chairman, while Varun Bhardwaj, previously Director of Higher Education, was named the new Secretary.

• The S. Radha Chauhan Committee: The Cabinet Secretariat constituted a one-member inquiry committee headed by retired IAS officer S. Radha Chauhan to investigate the procurement of services for the OSM system. Chauhan, a highly experienced 1988-batch Uttar Pradesh cadre officer, had previously served as Joint Secretary in the Department of School Education and Literacy under the HRD Ministry (2011–2015), CEO of the National e-Governance Division (NeGD), and Secretary of the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT). Her committee was given a strict 30-day mandate to submit its findings.

The Cyber Siege

At 8:00 AM on June 2, CBSE officially opened its digital marks verification and re-evaluation portal. To defuse student anger, the board had reduced the verification fee to Rs 100 per answer book and Rs 25 per question.

However, within minutes of going live, the portal was hit by a coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The servers recorded over 1.5 million automated hits in a span of just two minutes, accompanied by more than 100,000 unauthorized file access attempts using directory traversal tools.

Security analysts noted that the attackers attempted to exploit the system's vulnerabilities during the board's leadership transition. CBSE was forced to deploy emergency cybersecurity teams from the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) to stabilize the portal and preserve data integrity.

Visual Graphic 2: Chronological Flow of Events (2019–2026)

Policy Implications and Unresolved Questions

The CBSE On-Screen Marking controversy highlights several critical challenges in the digitization of public sector systems:

The Pitfalls of Administrative Digitisation

The CBSE leadership rushed the nationwide rollout of the digital grading system, treating digitization as an automatic guarantee of uniformity and efficiency. By ignoring the board’s own policy of running localized regional pilots, the executive leadership overlooked critical real-world operational challenges. Low-resolution scans and poor interface design made it difficult for teachers to grade accurately, demonstrating that digitisation without rigorous operational vetting can compromise the integrity of public processes.

Evolving Public Procurement Frameworks

The controversy surrounding the selection of Coempt EduTeck illustrates the limitations of standard public procurement evaluation systems. While CBSE officials maintained that they followed the General Financial Rules (GFR) and selected the lowest qualified bidder (L1) under a QCBS framework, the investigation showed how easily bidding criteria can be modified to accommodate specific bidders. By altering historical blacklisting clauses to focus only on current status, the board overlooked a controversial corporate history that was directly relevant to the risk profile of the project. This highlights the need for public procurement frameworks to prioritize qualitative track records, technical competence, and past performance over cost-minimization.

Security Disclosures and System Resilience

The three-month delay in addressing Nisarga Adhikary’s vulnerability report reveals a significant gap in the public sector's ability to handle security disclosures. When state institutions ignore warnings from cybersecurity researchers, they leave critical infrastructure vulnerable to exploitation. The subsequent DDoS attack and file-traversal attempts on June 2 demonstrate how quickly unresolved security flaws can be exploited, especially during administrative transitions.

Unresolved Questions and Future Outlook

As the S. Radha Chauhan committee conducts its inquiry, several key questions remain for the Ministry of Education and CBSE’s new leadership:

1. Administrative Accountability: Will the inquiry panel examine the role of retired CBSE officials who may have influenced the relaxation of the RFP conditions across the three tender rounds?

2. Institutional Over-Censorship: Why did security and intelligence agencies fail to act on detailed vulnerability reports submitted in February, and why was the student whistleblower initial report met with online harassment and political accusations?

3. Systemic Recovery: Will CBSE permanently suspend the use of the Coempt platform, and how will the board rebuild trust with the millions of students whose academic results were compromised?

The intervention of the Prime Minister’s Office and the subsequent changes in CBSE's leadership show a recognition of the severity of the crisis. However, restoring the integrity of India's national examination system will require more than just changing top officials. It demands a fundamental shift in how public institutions approach technology, ensuring that security, operational readiness, and vendor history are prioritized over administrative convenience.