member of National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) during a protest against the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) over discrepancies and technical glitches in the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, at Indira Bhawan, in New Delhi, Thursday, May 28, 2026. | (PTI Photo)
Tech troubles in CBSE
As the CBSE evaluation errors controversy was unfolding, Sarthak Sidhant, a 17-year-old Class 12 student from Jharkhand, published an investigative blog ‘How CBSE rewrote rules to favour Coempt EduTeck’, which probed the dilution of the tender for an allegedly favourable vendor for OSM evaluation. There is also another, 19-year-old, Nisarga Adhikary, an ethical hacker who claims to have hacked into the OSM portal, and was able to read, write and edit answer sheets.Nisarg and Sarthak are investigating two different aspects of the CBSE system. Nisarg’s focus is on how the digital infrastructure is built, managed and run. He notes that when he hacked into the OSM portal, he was able to read, write and edit documents (answer sheets). Sarthak’s probe was focused on the dilution of the tender to suit a particular vendor. He mentions about 15 points to show how this process was tweaked to favour Coempt.Ethical Hacker Nisarga Adhikary who exposed CBSE says there are data sovereignty issues with how COEMPT Eduteck, CBSE’s tech vendor, handled sensitive student exam data. “COEMPT should have ideally stored data in their own servers, but they took the ‘cheap easy route,’ of storing answer sheets in Amazon Web Services public buckets without any security checks”, he says. Published - June 01, 2026 03:25 pm IST
