3 teens vs CBSE: How the Class 12 paper-checking system OSM blew up, and the board corrected, defended, countered

ANationwide disputation o'er the telephone exchange room of Secondary Education's first-time habituate of On-Screen Marking (OSM) system for Class 12 has been driven not by political parties or street demonstrations, but by three teenagers online — a student who was handed someone else's answer sheet; another 17-year-old who dissected the OSM contract; and a 19-year-old who said he breached the web portal altogether.These three, and many others like them on X and Instagram, have forced the CBSE to concede errors on some technical fronts, defend its system overall, and flatly reject corruption claims. The company running the OSM platform, Hyderabad-based Coempt EduTeck, has denied any wrongdoing too.The Congress-led Opposition, however, has seized on the row to question PM Narendra Modi’s BJP-led NDA regime, with Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi and others standing stressing that these students belong to Gen-Z, the new generation at heart of major political changes in the Indian subcontinent.Sunday’s attack and defenceOn Sunday, May 31, both ends of the row saw new developments.Rahul Gandhi met Vedant Shrivastava, the student who’d got the wrong answer sheet. They spoke about familiar insults being thrown at them, such as “anti-national” and “deep state agents” or being called Pakistani. They laughed at also being called “Soros agents”, a reference to Hungarian-American investor and philanthropistGeorge Soroswhom the Hindutva right-wing accuses of funding “left-wing agenda” among other things. Earlier, he had shared a blog by 17-year-old Sarthak Sidhant, who investigated CBSE’s alleged “manipulation of its own selection process” in the OSM tender process. “Sarthak’s work shows that India’s Gen Z is brilliant and fearless. And sooner or later, they will find out the full truth,” Gandhi wrote.The third teen at the nub of the controversy is Nisarga Adhikary, 19, who apparently got a response from the CBSE — the board did not name him expressly — after he claimed to have found that the OSM web portal, where teachers marked scanned answer sheets, could be breached.The board posted on X on Sunday afternoon: “The identified vulnerabilities have been contained, and other exploitable weaknesses are being ruled out. We are grateful to all alert citizens and ethical hackers pointing out such weaknesses, and have gotten in touch with some of them directly.” He posted a meme saying the CBSE has “admitted” there were loopholes; and then he deleted that post.What set it offThe OSM, introduced at scale for Class 12 this year, replaced the system of posting of physical answer books to examiners, with a more tech-focused system of scanned copies being evaluated on a screen.The CBSE has maintained the system improves transparency and cuts totalling errors.But after results were declared in mid-May, the Class 12 pass percentage fell to a seven-year low, students who applied for re-evaluation began reporting blurred scans, missing pages, unevaluated answers and, in some cases, answer sheets that were not theirs.The CBSE issued a statement defending the OSM as "fair, transparent and equitable". It reiterated that re-evaluation could be sought. Of the 98.6 lakh answer books evaluated, CBSE's own figures showed 68,018 needed rescanning for poor image quality and 13,583 were checked manually after scans failed.Face of mismatched answer sheetThe first major human face of the OSM row emerged in Vedant Shrivastava, a Delhi-based student. After getting unexpectedly low Physics marks, he applied for photocopies of his answer sheets and found that the one CBSE shared with him did not match his handwriting.His May 23 post on X crossed 2.5 million views, and its screenshots went viral also on Instagram, the platform more popular among the younger internet users.The CBSE responded directly on X, saying his concern had been examined and the correct answer book sent to his email, with his result to be updated.Before that resolution, Vedant was trolled. A national TV anchor's "Pakistani" jibe went viral, for instance, though he later apologised. His brother Siddhant said the family had set up a new X handle only because they saw no clear way to report the problem.Sleuth who scanned tendersSarthak Sidhant, a 17-year-old from Jharkhand, was dissatisfied with his own results, and spent days probing CBSE’s systems. An online sleuth who runs a blog, he compared CBSE's tender documents on the public procurement portal.His blog, titled ‘How CBSE rewrote rules to favour Coempt EduTeck’, alleged the eligibility and technical bar was lowered across three tender rounds until the eventual winner could qualify.Also read | Gen-Z blog explodes: How 17-yr-old Sarthak's investigation of CBSE OSM tenders became centrepiece of a mega rowIn interviews from Ranchi, Sidhant said he had compared the old and new tender documents and counted “at least 15 discrepancies”.The most pointed one, according to him, was that the condition barring firms “blacklisted earlier” was changed to “blacklisted currently”. He argued that this change also let the vendor Coempt EduTeck, which was earlier known as Globarena Technologies, qualify as it had allegedly faced blacklisting by some universities in Telangana at one time.The CBSE and the company rejected the suggestion that the rules were bent for any firm. As HT also reported on the changes, officials said the board followed procurement protocols and awarded the contract to the lowest qualified bidder under a quality-cum-cost framework. They said modifications in the Request for Proposal (RFP) norms across tendering rounds should "not be seen as a rushed exercise, but as a process of correcting shortcomings from earlier rounds”.Sidhant’s blog was magnified by politicians across the Opposition spectrum. Rahul Gandhi shared it and called India's Gen Z “brilliant and fearless”; Congress comms head Jairam Ramesh posted sought education minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation and a CBI probe; AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal urged followers to read it.Hacker who scared and informedIn between, also came an investigation by Nisarga Adhikary, who described himself as a hobbyist cybersecurity researcher and had also cleared Class 12 this year.He said he had found a master password sitting in the portal's frontend code that allowed the OTP step to be skipped. That meant the OSM paper-checking portal dashboard could be opened directly, and he could alter marks. He told HT he had flagged the flaws to the government in February, too, but that gaps remained.CBSE's response here shifted quickly. On May 26, the board rubbished the claim, saying the website address (URL) he cited was only a testing site with sample data. He said the operational evaluation portal had a different address that was not compromised, and that no breach had come to light. In its clarification, the board made a typo in the URL it posted and had to reissue it.Five days later, as Vedant and Sidhant’s virality multiplied too, the board said the identified vulnerabilities had been "contained”. It said a cybersecurity team from the government and the IITs had been deployed to fortify the system.The company's defenceCoempt EduTeck and its CEO, VSN Raju, have called it "absolutely a wrong allegation" that the whole system was flawed, saying complaints amounted to “only one or two cases”.On Vedant's answer sheet mix-up case, he blamed a scanning error, not the technology.He also denied any tender condition was changed, and said the scanners were standard and the resolution “perfect”.On the hacking, he echoed CBSE that the accessed server was for internal testing only.As for the firm's past — it was earlier Globarena Technologies, tied to the 2019 Telangana board exam fiasco — Raju said the rebranding was no secret and that courts had cleared the company in the Telangana case.The politics, and the wider momentThe CBSE row landed at a fraught time for the government exam machinery.Education Minister Pradhan was already under fire over a paper leak in the May 3 NEET-UG medical entrance exam. Then came the CBSE marking row, and on May 30 there were some delays in the CUET admissions test too.Pradhan has taken “full responsibility”, and promised no further issues in the exam systems.On the NEET, the largest such test in India and arguably the world, the government has told the Supreme Court that PM Modi is “personally supervising” the retest scheduled for June 21.The CBSE has said no payment has yet been released to Coempt, and that penalties would be reviewed after re-evaluation and supplementary exams. Its re-evaluation portal is set to open on June 1; that too was delayed from May 29."To ensure a transparent and glitch-free process for verification and re-evaluation of answer books of students who intend to submit their applications on the Post-Result Activities portal, it has been decided that the designated portal will now be operational from 1st June 2026. This is to ensure the highest standards and protocols of evaluation," the CBSE said about that.