The company that built the Hyderabad-based Central Board of School Education’s On-Screen Marking (OSM) system on Thursday defended its implementation of the project facing public criticism and widespread scrutiny.
The company has defended the scanning process for answer sheets, denied allegations of data security lapses and substandard hardware, attributed the answer sheet mix-ups to manual errors rather than software glitches, and cited court rulings in the 2019 Telangana case to assert that it had been cleared of allegations of past wrongdoing.
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In its first statement on the controversy, the company also denied allegations that the tender conditions were changed in its favour.
In a parallel communications effort, Quimbit sent separate letters dated June 12, titled “Assurance Memorandum on Continuity, Compliance and Quality of Service,” to more than 35 of its clients, including universities and school boards, seeking to reassure them that the recent controversy over OSM would not impact its ability to provide “safe, accurate, and uninterrupted” inspection services.
Coempt’s clarification came after several errors surfaced during the rapid implementation of CBSE’s OSM system for checking answer scripts and post-result process.
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In response to allegations that some students were shown answer sheets belonging to other candidates, Coempt said it had traced one such incident to the physical scanning stage rather than a software failure. “We have identified the location and the person who conducted the survey. We have verified 100% that technologically there is nothing wrong with this case,” the company said, adding that initial results indicate “manual oversight.”
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Earlier, a senior Education Ministry official said on May 29 that around 20 cases had been detected in which scanned pages belonging to different candidates were mixed up. The issue came to attention after Class XII students, including Vedant Shrivastava, found mismatched content in the answer sheets provided during re-evaluation. CBSE later contacted the student and provided them with the correct scripts.
The company said complaints regarding blurry images and visible handwriting are being reviewed with rating authorities. She also said that despite “isolated bottlenecks”, nearly 95% of students who applied for the scanned copies got them. According to CBSE data, 4,04,319 students requested scanned copies of their answer sheets. According to Coempt’s claim, about 384,103 applicants received access, leaving about 20,216 students still waiting for their transcripts.
Neither CBSE nor Coempt responded to HT’s queries on the reasons for the delay in providing access to the remaining applicants or when the pending applications will be cleared.
The council used Coempt’s OnMark platform to digitally assess nearly 10 million Class 12 answer scripts before announcing the results on 13 May. Of the nearly 9.8 million answer sheets scanned, more than 68,000 had image quality issues, and more than 13,000 had to be manually graded because they were digitally illegible.
HT reported on June 6 that the CBSE had stopped using Coempt’s OnMark platform for the reassessment process amid concerns over the security of exams and student data and shifting operations to infrastructure under the board’s direct control. HT also reported that Coempt had provided cybersecurity certificates that had expired and were linked to another client.
The re-evaluation process is now being done through the new OSM portal developed with the help of experts from IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur. An IIT official had earlier told HT that the platform runs on the same code base used by Coempt but is entirely hosted on servers controlled by CBSE.
In its latest response, Coempt rejected claims that tender terms had been changed to accommodate inferior hardware, saying the scanners the company uses are industry-standard models and are regularly updated. It also addressed the claims of a 19-year-old ethical hacker who said he gained access to parts of the platform, asserting that the hack only involved a “publicly available testing server used for internal purposes” and that no student data or operating systems were compromised.
The company also revisited the controversy surrounding Telangana Intermediate’s 2019 inspection, saying the courts had fully examined the matter and upheld the findings clearing it of any wrongdoing. Referring to the case, she said the Supreme Court observed that only 1,183 out of 380,000 failed candidates were found to have passed the review and rejected the petitions seeking comprehensive re-evaluation and criminal action against the technology provider.
In the letter dated June 12 and signed by CEO VSN Raju, Coempt told clients it had “nothing to hide” about its history and asserted that neither the company nor any of its predecessor entities had been blacklisted by any board, university or government body. She called on institutions to examine court orders and official documents.
This controversy has also led to renewed interest in CBSE’s OSM procurement process. As HT reported on May 29, CBSE’s first tender did not attract any bids and none of the four bidders in the second round technically qualified. Several conditions were subsequently relaxed in the third tender, including requirements for automated automated scanning and minimum scanning resolution, which was reduced from 300 dpi to 200 dpi. Coempt was eventually awarded the contract after beating Tata Consultancy Services by two scores in the technical evaluation and submitting a financial bid nearly 60% lower than that of the Mumbai-headquartered company.
“The company strongly denied allegations that the tender conditions were changed to accommodate substandard devices,” Quimpet said.
In a public statement and a June 12 letter to clients, including the Odisha Board of Higher Secondary Education, the company said the recent claims regarding answer sheet accessibility, image quality and cybersecurity are based on “incomplete or inaccurate information” and do not reflect the quality of its operations.
It said it has remained fully compliant with regulatory requirements and is currently serving over 35 universities and institutions, processing nearly Rs 2 crore answer booklets annually through digitisation, screen marking, AI-assisted assessment and question paper management.
