Vetted But Not Verified: How a Blacklisted Exam Firm Got India's Biggest Contract

A Contract That Should Have Raised Flags

In December 2025, CBSE awarded Coempt Eduteck Pvt Ltd — a Hyderabad-based firm — the contract to scan and digitally process approximately 9.9 million Class XII answer books. The contract was signed on December 5, just 74 days before board examinations began on February 17, 2026. By May, after results were declared and the scale of the evaluation failures became clear — blurred scans, missing pages, mismatched answer sheets, a national pass rate that fell to 85.20%, the lowest in seven years — the question being asked in Parliament, high courts, and newsrooms was the same: how did this company get this contract?

The answer involves a pattern that every university in India running competitive procurement for examination technology needs to understand.

A Track Record in Plain Sight

Coempt Eduteck's prior corporate identity was Globarena Technologies. The rebranding did not erase its history. In 2019, Globarena was connected to a catastrophic examination failure in Telangana: the state's Intermediate board results were botched so severely that student suicides followed. In 2023, the company was again associated with examination failures in the same state.

By 2025, the company had rebranded as Coempt Eduteck. The past, however, was discoverable — not hidden, not sealed, not expunged. Court records existed. State procurement blacklists existed. News archives existed.

At least one institution looked.

What Kannur University Did Right

When Coempt Eduteck submitted its bid to Kannur University (Kerala) for an examination technology contract, the university's procurement committee examined the company's legal disclosures. They found that the declaration submitted was "not in conformity" with official court records — specifically, that a pending criminal case had been suppressed. The committee concluded this amounted to "suppression of material facts" affecting "the integrity of the procurement process" and disqualified the company before it ever made a technical presentation.

This is standard due diligence. CBSE did not do it.

CBSE's evaluation gave Coempt 91 points and Tata Consultancy Services 89 points in the technical assessment — a two-point margin that handed a 9.9 million answer book contract to a firm a Kerala university had already identified as non-disclosing.

The Tender Manipulation Question

Beyond background checks, the procurement record raises additional concerns. Earlier versions of the CBSE tender reportedly required Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Level 5 certification from the vendor — a recognised standard for software development and delivery maturity. By the time the final tender was published, the requirement had reportedly been downgraded to Level 3. Similarly, clauses that would have disqualified companies with a history of project abandonment or financial weakness were allegedly removed from later versions.

A student, Sarthak Sidhant, appeared before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education and alleged that the tender criteria had been tailored to favour a specific outcome. The central government constituted a one-member inquiry committee headed by S. Radha Chauhan, Chairperson of the Capacity Building Commission, to investigate the procurement. The committee was directed to submit findings to the Department of Personnel and Training within one month of its June 2 constitution.

CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta were transferred to other departments. The inquiry continues.

What a Proper Due Diligence Framework Looks Like

Universities evaluating examination technology vendors — whether for on-screen marking, answer sheet scanning, result management, or end-to-end examination automation — need a structured due diligence process that goes beyond reading the proposal document.

Criminal and Legal Disclosure Verification

Require vendors to submit a self-declaration of all pending and resolved legal proceedings, FIRs, and blacklisting orders. Cross-verify against:

Any discrepancy between the declaration and verifiable records is grounds for disqualification, as Kannur University demonstrated.

Track Record Assessment

Require references from contracts of comparable scale — in terms of number of answer books handled, number of concurrent evaluators, and turnaround time requirements. Check references directly. Ask specifically about system failures, data loss incidents, and evaluation controversies.

Technical Capability Certification

Set CMMI Level 5 as the minimum standard for data-handling software, not Level 3. Require ISO/IEC 27001 certification for information security management. Require independent security audits, not self-certification. For contracts involving student data, require compliance documentation under the DPDP Act 2023.

Financial Stability

A company given a government examination contract must be able to sustain operations under scrutiny. Request audited financials for the past three years. Check for ongoing insolvency proceedings or significantly leveraged balance sheets.

Lead Time Realism

The CBSE contract awarded in December for February examinations was structurally unrealistic. Industry practice for large-scale examination technology deployments requires six to twelve months of integration, staff training, and pilot testing. Any vendor promising readiness in under ninety days for a first-time deployment at scale deserves scrutiny.

The Lesson for Universities

CBSE's 2026 OSM crisis was not a technology failure in isolation. It was the downstream consequence of procurement decisions made without adequate vendor vetting. The technology may have been imperfect, but an established, certified, well-audited vendor with a clean track record would have come with test results, pilot data, and contractual accountability mechanisms that a rebranded entity with suppressed disclosures could not provide.

Universities planning to adopt digital evaluation for their examination cycles are making the right strategic move. The CBSE experience does not discredit digital evaluation — it shows precisely why vendor selection is the highest-stakes decision in the entire adoption process.

Kannur University got it right with limited resources and no public drama. The standard it applied — verify declarations, cross-reference public records, disqualify on suppression — is achievable by any institution that treats procurement as the governance function it is.

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