By Aj Prabal
On 2 June 2026, hours after 17-year-old Sarthak Sidhant, a schoolboy from Ranchi, made a presentation to the parliamentary standing committee on education, the government transferred the chairman and secretary of the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education), both IAS officers. It also announced a departmental inquiry committee to look into the hurried introduction of a digital evaluation system that led to this fiasco.
Since the CBSE Class 12 results were announced on 13 May, lakhs of harried students have reported totalling errors, unmarked questions, mismatched answer sheets, blurred scans and missing supplementary sheets. Lakhs have applied for verification. In a tweet on 26 May, the CBSE acknowledged receiving 4.04 lakh ‘applications for scanned copies of answer books’. The same tweet claimed to have received ‘11.31 lakh requests for answer books’. The distinction was not clear to this reporter.
For students waiting for re-evaluation, this is no longer a technical glitch. The results are now suspect and at risk are college admissions that are often provisional pending proof that candidates have secured the necessary cut-off marks in their board exams.
Transferring a few worthies and demanding that the education minister resign does not solve the students’ problems nor secure their future. Even now, after its hurriedly introduced on-screen marking (OSM) web domain has been conclusively proven to be hackable, the CBSE’s response is to accept re-evaluation requests — for a fee! It has even managed to come up with a graded fee structure for this re-evaluation. And, believe it or not, will conduct the re-evaluation on the same compromised web domain. If the CBSE has alternative plans, there have been no public announcements to that effect.
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Sarthak Sidhant and 19-year-old Nisarga Adhikary from Siliguri have thoroughly exposed the OSM platform used to evaluate the CBSE Class 12 board papers of 18 lakh students. Sarthak went a step further and exposed how the CBSE tweaked conditions to favour Hyderabad-based Coempt Eduteck over Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
Also Read: Why is CBSE silent on vendor behind ‘On-Screen Marking’ system?
Quick aside: TCS with 600,000 employees, an annual revenue of $29 billion (Rs 2.40 lakh crore) and 57 years of experience lost out to a company with 51 employees and an average annual turnover of Rs 50 crore.
Sure, size doesn’t bestow credibility but ‘CBSE did not just pick a bad software vendor by accident. They lowered financial baselines. They dropped software security certifications. They cut the corrupt practices cooling-off period by half. They removed the physical server isolation requirement. They erased the word ‘blacklisting’ from their penalty matrix via a last-minute corrigendum, before bidding; and they bypassed their own mandatory CERT-In production audits,’ Sarthak points out in a blog post.
Why did TCS lose the contract? CBSE floated the tender thrice in 2025 — in February, May and August — each time diluting some of the conditions, lowering the bar and making it easier for Coempt Eduteck to bid. On paper, TCS with its vast network, expertise and collaborators abroad, did look qualified to roll out India’s first online evaluation platform. But it became clear that the CBSE was doing everything possible to keep it out. It even decided that the vendor needn’t have its own ‘data centre and disaster recovery centre’, that it would do if the vendor relied on a ‘MeitY-empanelled data and disaster recovery centre’.
There were other tweaks in the OSM tender that Sarthak Sidhant prised open and laid bare. ‘They gambled with our data security, our marks, our mental health; the institution failed us,’ Sarthak writes in his blog.
Nisarga, who had discovered how vulnerable the platform was back in February, three months before the Class 12 board examination began (on 17 May), was equally scathing.
Source: National Herald
Note: Shafaqna do not endorse the views expressed in the article
