When a Student Walked Into Parliament: CBSE OSM Faces Reckoning

The Hearing That Shifted the Frame

On the morning of June 2, 2026, a 17-year-old student named Sarthak Sidhant walked into Parliament House Annexe in New Delhi and presented his findings to India's Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports. His subject: the procurement process behind CBSE's On-Screen Marking system, the vendor that won the contract, and what he described as a pattern of tender modifications that systematically advantaged a single bidder.

The committee, chaired by Congress MP Digvijaya Singh, had summoned School Education Secretary Sanjay Kumar and CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh to the same session. Within hours, a Class 12 student who had personally been affected by the evaluation he was critiquing had become one of the more unusual witnesses in the committee's recent history — presenting independently compiled quantitative analysis to a national oversight body responsible for education policy.

The OSM Controversy: A Short Recap

CBSE implemented On-Screen Marking for Class 12 board examinations in the 2026 cycle. Answer sheets were scanned and uploaded to a digital portal; evaluators assessed handwritten responses on-screen rather than on physical scripts. The policy goal was legitimate: reduce evaluator subjectivity, improve marking consistency, create a digital audit trail.

When results were announced on May 13, student complaints emerged rapidly. Blurred scans had rendered handwriting unreadable. Pages were missing from some digital answer book uploads. Some answer blocks appeared to have been left unevaluated. Totalling errors were documented. Pass percentage for Class 12 fell to 85.20 percent — the lowest since 2019.

The volume of complaints was significant. CBSE received over 1.67 lakh revaluation applications covering 3.8 lakh individual answer sheets. The board reduced re-evaluation fees from ₹500–₹1,500 to ₹100 and extended the portal deadline to June 7. Revaluation results were released in phases beginning June 21, with 87 percent of applications processed by that date.

At the centre of both the technical failure and the procurement controversy was one vendor: Coempt EduTeck Private Limited.

What Sarthak Sidhant Told the Committee

Sarthak Sidhant had spent weeks reviewing the procurement documentation for the Coempt EduTeck contract. He compared multiple iterations of CBSE's Request for Proposal, tracking how requirements changed across revisions.

His central finding: CBSE had progressively removed clauses related to blacklisting and performance penalties from successive RFP drafts. He alleged this pattern favoured the eventual winning bidder despite what he described as its prior problematic track record.

He told the committee directly: "CBSE rewrote rules to favour Coempt EduTeck."

Following the presentation, committee members questioned CBSE officials present about who bore responsibility for the procurement decisions and for the evaluation failures students had experienced. Committee Chairman Digvijaya Singh stated that the committee "will do whatever that can be done in the interest of the students." CBSE was asked to submit written answers to the committee's questions within one month.

Why a 17-Year-Old at a Parliamentary Committee Matters

Parliamentary committee hearings routinely receive testimony from government officials, academics, and policy experts. A student presenting independently documented procurement analysis and being formally heard is a departure from this pattern.

It represents something significant in how India's education governance landscape is shifting.

Civil society capability. Sarthak Sidhant's analysis — comparing RFP revisions, identifying specific clause removals, articulating a procurement pattern — required skills not typically associated with a Class 12 student preparing for board examinations. His ability to produce and present this analysis signals that information asymmetry between institutions and affected students is narrowing.

The frame shift from technical to structural. Media coverage of the CBSE OSM controversy had primarily framed the failure as technical: blurred scans, software problems, portal downtime. The June 2 hearing shifted the frame to procurement governance. Who selected Coempt EduTeck? On what criteria? What contractual safeguards existed for non-performance? Were penalty clauses deliberately removed? This is a materially different line of inquiry from "the scans were blurry."

Ministerial sequencing. The hearing occurred against a backdrop of ministerial pressure. Within days of the June 2 committee session, CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta were transferred, and the Ministry of Education constituted a formal inquiry committee. Whether the parliamentary hearing directly catalysed these decisions is not publicly confirmed, but the sequencing is notable.

The Cybersecurity Dimension

The procurement failure at Coempt EduTeck was not the only governance gap that surfaced in the lead-up to the 2026 results. In February 2026 — three months before the Class 12 examination — 19-year-old ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary identified serious security vulnerabilities in the OSM portal and reported them to the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In).

Most of those vulnerabilities remained unaddressed on examination day.

The combination of procurement irregularities in vendor selection, unresolved security flaws in the platform, and scale of deployment without a prior pilot cycle created a system that was brittle from multiple directions simultaneously.

The inquiry committee constituted by the Ministry of Education is expected to examine the vendor selection process, the technical specifications in the RFP, whether Coempt EduTeck met agreed performance benchmarks, and what happened to the CERT-In vulnerability report between February and May.

Lessons for Examination Bodies Across India

The June 2 parliamentary hearing and the CBSE OSM controversy provide examination bodies and affiliating universities with a set of due diligence principles that should be built into any digital evaluation procurement.

Procurement Documentation is a Liability Record

If an OSM platform fails in production, the first question regulators and courts will ask is whether the RFP specified performance standards, what those standards were, and what contractual remedies existed. CBSE's apparent removal of blacklisting clauses across RFP revisions created the vulnerability Sarthak Sidhant's analysis exposed. Institutions tendering for evaluation platforms should maintain version-controlled procurement documentation, explicitly retain blacklisting and termination-for-cause clauses, and document any mid-process changes to specifications with formal justification.

Independent Security Validation Before Go-Live

The CERT-In vulnerability report submitted by Nisarga Adhikary in February was not actioned before the May examination. A pre-deployment security audit by an agency independent of the vendor — with a signed remediation certificate before the platform handles live data — is a non-negotiable control for any digital evaluation system holding student answer scripts.

Pilot Before Full Deployment

CBSE moved to full-scale OSM across Class 12 in a single cycle. Problems with scanning at volume, evaluator unfamiliarity with on-screen annotation tools, and scan quality variation were foreseeable in a smaller-scale pilot. Institutions planning digital evaluation transitions should structure at least one partial pilot cycle — perhaps one department or one paper — with physical verification available as a fallback, before committing to full deployment at institutional scale.

The Student is Now an Auditor

The post-2026 landscape makes clear that students who experience evaluation errors will document, publicise, and pursue complaints through courts, committees, and media. Robust re-evaluation portals, transparent mark-update workflows, and timely grievance resolution are not optional for institutions that wish to avoid analogous controversies. They are also not merely about avoiding criticism — they are the minimum standard for fair treatment of students in a digital evaluation environment.

What the Committee Report May Contain

The Parliamentary Standing Committee is expected to submit its report to the Department of Personnel and Training within one month of the June 2 hearing. Based on the questions raised and the evidence presented, the report is likely to address:

If adopted, these recommendations would constitute the most structured regulatory framework India has had for digital examination governance.

The Broader Accountability Signal

Sarthak Sidhant's presentation at Parliament is not the central story — it is a symptom. It became possible because information about procurement documents is publicly accessible, analysis tools are widely available, and the committee was willing to receive a non-expert witness with a well-documented claim.

What it demonstrates is that the governance of digital evaluation systems cannot be treated as a purely technical or administrative matter. When a system managing marks for 1.5 crore students deploys at scale, any failure becomes a public governance event. The question of who selected the vendor, on what terms, with what accountability for non-performance, is as much a policy question as a technical one.

The inquiry committee's findings, when published, will be the first forensic account of a major OSM rollout failure in Indian educational history. They will matter not only for CBSE, but for every state board, affiliating university, and autonomous institution that is currently planning or implementing digital evaluation. The governance lessons of 2026 are being written now.

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