The Central Board of Secondary Education floated three successive bids for the screen marking system before finding a qualified vendor. It received no bids in the first round, failed to find a technically qualified bidder in the second round, and relaxed several key requirements in the third round, which was released in August 2025, at which point there were only six months left before the system was rolled out nationally for Class 12 board exams, according to documents reviewed by HT and officials familiar with the matter.
A senior board official confirmed the sequence. “We wanted to roll out the OSM system in 2026. However, after failing to secure a bidder in the first two rounds of the tender process, we identified several deficiencies and operational issues in our initial request for proposal (RFP) documents.
These gaps were addressed in the third RFP, where some conditions were amended to make the process more practical and ensure successful participation. This should not be seen as a hasty exercise, but rather as a process of correcting shortcomings in previous rounds to achieve better results.
TCS and Coempt were approved in the third tender
Teachers who participated in a two-day pilot conducted in January — the only field exercise before rollout — separately warned CBSE that the system needs at least one or two years of additional preparation before nationwide implementation, HT reported earlier this week.
CBSE officials did not respond to requests for comment on why the board was insisting on the OSM approach for the 2026 examination.
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The above-mentioned official added that the first tender was canceled as per the general financial rules of the Government of India.
The internal committee minutes dated November 19, 2025, seen by HT, show that both TCS and Coempt passed the technical round in the third tender, with Coempt emerging as the winning bidder after financial evaluation as the lowest financial bidder under the quality and cost-based selection framework.
But before that, many of the technical requirements had been significantly relaxed between the failed bids and the August RFP that ultimately produced a winner – some of which had to do with scan quality and associated penalties, which has now become one of the main complaints.
The minimum scanning resolution has been lowered from “300 dpi and above” to “at least 200 dpi with clearly readable content.” TCS, during pre-bid consultations in May, had urged CBSE to lower the DPI threshold, arguing that 150 DPI would provide a “sufficiently clear view” while reducing file size and retrieval time.
CBSE did not take any action on the proposal in May but adopted a relaxed standard in August.
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“The scan quality of 200 dpi is sufficient to ensure clear and legible copies,” a CBSE official said. The February and May tenders also stipulated that the survey be conducted “without cutting the backbone” using “high-speed robotic or robotic surveying infrastructure.” The August tender removed explicit automated scanner requirements and only broadly required that the service provider provide the “scanners” as part of the IT infrastructure.
How the bidder pool has been expanded
Separately, the mandatory certification of the integration of the Capability Maturity Model – an internationally recognized measure of software process maturity – was lowered from Level 5, the highest level, to Level 3, expanding the pool of qualified bidders in the final RFP.
A second CBSE official rejected the suggestion that the requirements should be relaxed in favor of any particular company. “We followed government guidelines and standards in selecting the company through a tender. It was not blacklisted by any government agency and no one raised any concern about it. It was selected after due process.” Coempt CEO Edu Teck did not respond to numerous calls and text messages seeking comment.
Speed and quality
While scanning quality requirements were relaxed, the August tender at the same time imposed much harsher penalties for operational delays.
The February tender was the most stringent regarding prescription errors per copy $20,000 for each incorrectly or partially scanned copy and $50,000 for unscanned books, with delays attracting 6% per day to a maximum of 30%. This May tender has significantly reduced – $4000 for each mismatched copy, $8000 for partial scanning, $15,000 for non-scanned books, with a delay of 1% per day up to a maximum of 10%. The August tender shifted the structure of penalties away from per-copy errors towards operational deadlines: failure to clear the previous day’s answer books by the next attracted $50,000 per working day; Delay in live broadcast is attracted $10 lakh per week.
No payment has been issued to Coempt yet. “The issue regarding penalties will be reviewed after completion of the re-evaluation process and supplementary examinations. Any action will be taken strictly as per the rules if violations are proven,” a CBSE official said.
The scale of what the system was required to process created tension between speed and concrete quality. If approximately 550,000 physics answer books were scanned in one day, the system would need to process about 380 copies every minute continuously for 24 hours.
For English, with approximately 1.7 million answer books, the rate was closer to 1,200 copies per minute. To be sure, the process was decentralized and the survey was conducted simultaneously in several centers across the country.
Of the 9,866,622 answer books assessed this year, 68,018 had to be re-scanned due to poor image quality and 13,583 were manually scanned after repeated scanning failed to produce legible copies. As reported by HT, the CBSE board recommended pilot projects across regional offices before rolling it out nationwide – a suggestion on which the board did not take any action.
“We received around 760 scanned physics answer books for OSM assessment, but nearly 100 were rejected as they were unclear, partially scanned or had missing pages,” a physics assessor from Delhi told HT.
