CBSE On-Screen Marking Row Erupts: Two Top Officials Transferred, Probe Ordered as Students Expose Cracks in Class 12 Evaluation
CBSE On-Screen Marking Row Erupts: Two Top Officials Transferred, Probe Ordered as Students Expose Cracks in Class 12 Evaluation
New Delhi, June 4 — A storm over the Central Board of Secondary Education's digital answer-sheet evaluation system has escalated into one of the biggest education controversies of the year, with the Centre transferring two of the Board's most senior officers and ordering a high-level inquiry into how the marking contract was awarded.
The trigger is CBSE's On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, used to digitally evaluate Class 12 board exam answer sheets for the 2026 examinations. Over the past two weeks, a combination of mismatched answer sheets, alleged portal security flaws, and questions over the tendering process has drawn in students, opposition leaders and a parliamentary panel.
On June 2, the government transferred CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta. The same day, the Cabinet Secretariat constituted a one-member committee headed by S. Radha Chauhan to examine the procurement of OSM services, with the Capacity Building Commission providing secretarial support. The committee has been asked to submit its report within a month. The transfers are being widely read as the most significant administrative action since the row began.
At the centre of the dispute is Coempt Edu Teck, a Hyderabad-based firm that built and hosted the infrastructure for CBSE's OSM system. CBSE has said it floated the Request for Proposal for digital evaluation of 2026 board answer books on the Central Public Procurement Portal on August 28, 2025, and that the contract was awarded to Coempt Edu Teck after following due process under the General Financial Rules. Board officials maintain the contract went to the lowest qualified bidder under a quality-cum-cost based selection framework.
The political charge came from Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, who alleged that Coempt Edu Teck had earlier operated under the name Globarena and accused authorities of ignoring the firm's record. He claimed the firm had been linked to similar problems in Telangana board examinations in 2019 and 2023, and went on to allege that OSM-related errors were connected to the deaths by suicide of 23 young people in that state. Gandhi has demanded an independent judicial probe and a Special Investigation Team. CBSE has firmly rejected the allegations, calling them "erroneous, misleading and not based on facts," and saying it followed financial rules scrupulously. The firm has also denied wrongdoing. These remain allegations that the ongoing inquiry has yet to test.
What turned a set of individual complaints into a national issue was the work of three students.
Vedant Srivastava, 17, brought the problem into public view. On May 23, after receiving unexpectedly low Physics marks and applying for photocopies of his answer sheets, he found that the Physics script uploaded by CBSE was not his own and posted about it on social media. His family later said they faced online abuse after going public.
Nisarga Adhikary, a 19-year-old student and cybersecurity researcher, exposed the technical side. He reported gaining access to the OSM platform on February 25 and said he immediately flagged it to CERT-In, the country's computer emergency response agency.
Sarthak Sidhant, a 17-year-old from Ranchi, built the case on the tender process. After his own re-evaluation left him unconvinced, he combed through voluminous CBSE tender documents and published a blog claiming at least 15 discrepancies, alleging that clauses on poor performance, blacklisting, financial qualification limits, CMMI levels and project eligibility were altered across successive tenders in ways that appeared to favour a single vendor. He has since appeared before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, presenting his findings, and has met Rahul Gandhi in Delhi.
CBSE and the service provider have denied any wrongdoing, but the Board has acknowledged certain issues with the marking system and says it has begun corrective measures. It has also said its newly launched Class 12 re-evaluation and verification portal — opened on June 1 — faced a wave of cyberattacks, including an attempted denial-of-service attack that generated 1.5 million hits within two minutes, even as students reported difficulty accessing it.
With the Radha Chauhan committee now examining the procurement process and the parliamentary panel awaiting CBSE's response, the report expected within a month is set to become the next decisive moment in a controversy that has put both the integrity of digital evaluation and the Board's procurement practices under the scanner.
[ CBSE On-Screen Marking Controversy, CBSE OSM Probe, CBSE Chairman Transfer, Class 12 Evaluation System, CBSE Procurement Inquiry, Coempt Edu Teck ]
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