Industry2026-06-03·8 min read

CBSE OSM Reckoning: Cabinet Orders Probe as Chairman and Secretary Are Transferred

On June 2, 2026, the Cabinet Secretariat constituted a one-member inquiry committee to probe CBSE's OSM procurement — the same day both the board's chairman and secretary were transferred.

The Most Consequential Day in CBSE's Recent History

On June 2, 2026, the Cabinet Secretariat issued an Office Memorandum that would have been unimaginable six months ago. The Government of India formally constituted a one-member inquiry committee — headed by S. Radha Chauhan, Chairperson of the Capacity Building Commission — to investigate the procurement of On-Screen Marking (OSM) services by the Central Board of Secondary Education. On that same day, CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta were simultaneously transferred, replaced by Lokhande Prashant Sitaram and Varun Bhardwaj respectively.

The synchronised removal of both the chairman and the secretary, together with a Cabinet-level inquiry, marked the highest-level government accountability action taken against an educational body in recent years. It confirmed what educators, parents, and student groups had been arguing since May: the CBSE OSM controversy was not a minor technical hiccup but a systemic governance failure.

How It Came to This

CBSE's decision to implement On-Screen Marking at full national scale in 2026 — covering approximately 9.87 million Class 12 answer books and an estimated 400 million scanned pages — was the most ambitious digitisation exercise in Indian board examination history. The intent was sound: eliminate totalling errors, speed up results, and remove physical answer sheet handling from the post-result verification chain.

The execution was not.

The contract for OSM services was awarded to Hyderabad-based Coempt Edu Teck (formerly Globarena Technologies) just 66 days before CBSE announced a nationwide rollout. The company had previously operated examination systems in Telangana that failed in 2019 and 2023. Teachers who participated in mandatory mock evaluation sessions in February 2026 reported portal access failures, slow system performance, inadequate internet connectivity, and data errors on the OASIS portal. These warnings went unheeded.

When the Class 12 results were announced on May 13, 2026, the national pass percentage had fallen to 85.20 percent — the lowest in seven years. Students across the country reported blurred scans, missing pages, wrong answer sheets, and marks that bore no relationship to their performance. Over 68,000 answer books required rescanning. More than 13,500 scripts were pulled for manual rechecking. A 19-year-old cybersecurity researcher publicly documented critical vulnerabilities in the OSM portal, prompting CBSE to deploy expert teams from IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur.

A Public Interest Litigation was filed in the Allahabad High Court. Parliamentary members wrote to the Education Minister. And eventually, the Cabinet Secretariat acted.

What the Probe Committee Will Examine

The inquiry, which must report to the Department of Personnel and Training within one month, has a specific mandate: to examine matters relating to the procurement of OSM services by CBSE. This makes the Coempt Edu Teck contract its central subject.

Key questions the committee is expected to address include:

Whether the procurement process followed standard Government of India tendering norms

Why a vendor with a documented track record of system failures in other state examinations was selected

Whether the 66-day window between contract award and nationwide deployment was adequate

What due diligence was conducted on the vendor's technical capacity and infrastructure readiness

Whether the Board's leadership was informed of the February 2026 mock evaluation failures and what corrective action, if any, was recommended

The committee's conclusions will not be limited to accountability. They are expected to feed into revised procurement standards for digital examination services across all centrally-regulated boards.

Why This Matters Beyond CBSE

The CBSE OSM crisis and the subsequent probe carry implications that extend well beyond the board itself.

For state examination bodies, the inquiry will produce a procurement framework that many are likely to adopt — or be advised to adopt — before they commission their own OSM implementations. Several state boards are at various stages of planning or piloting digital evaluation. The Radha Chauhan committee's findings will, in effect, define minimum standards for vendor selection, mandatory pilot timelines, cybersecurity audit requirements, and contingency planning.

For universities, the crisis has underscored the difference between a vendor with a product and a vendor with a proven, scalable implementation track record. Institutions evaluating OSM platforms need to ask sharply different questions than they did twelve months ago: What is the vendor's largest deployment to date? What is their contractual SLA for uptime during peak evaluation periods? Have they been independently security-audited? What manual fallback exists if scanning quality fails?

For procurement governance, the creation of the probe committee signals that the government now treats digital examination infrastructure as a domain of public accountability, not just academic administration. A failure in OSM is not merely an IT problem — it affects millions of students' admissions, careers, and mental health. The institutional response to that failure must be proportionate.

The Path Forward for CBSE 2027

Both CBSE and the broader digital evaluation community are now focused on what CBSE should do differently when OSM returns for the Class 12 cycle in 2027.

The consensus among examination technology experts points to four non-negotiable requirements:

Staged rollout over multiple years. No national board should move from zero to full-scale deployment in a single cycle. A pilot covering 5-10 percent of scripts in year one, expanded to 30-40 percent in year two, allows the system to absorb real-world failure modes before they affect every student.

Mandatory pre-launch external audit. An independent technical review — conducted 90 days before deployment, not 66 days after contract award — should verify scanner performance at required throughput, portal stability under concurrent load, and cybersecurity hygiene.

Evaluator training with verified certification. Mock sessions with synthetic answer sheets in controlled environments should generate completion certificates that become a condition for evaluator access to the live portal.

Transparent vendor qualification criteria. The minimum deployment scale that qualifies a vendor to bid for a national board contract should be publicly stated and verifiable, not determined after contract award.

The probe committee's report is due within a month. Its findings will determine whether CBSE's 2027 OSM implementation is built on a defensible foundation — or whether the board is condemned to repeat a crisis that has already cost it the careers of its two most senior officers.