The Class XII student, whose blog sparked a week of unrest at CBSE, used the reminder of the deadline set by the board to set on Sunday, demanding an extension of the re-evaluation window as he was “busy this week with your exam”.
Sarthak Siddhant, a student and blogger from Ranchi, Jharkhand, was replying to X on a CBSE post telling Class 12 candidates that June 7 is the last day to apply to check and re-evaluate their answer sheets. The portal will be open until 11:59 p.m., June 7, a deadline that the board has already pushed once, starting June 6, amid complaints of a glitch in the portal.
“Can you please extend the deadline please as I was busy this week exposing you,” Sathak Sidhant posted in response to the CBSE post.
This hit capped off a great few days.
On June 2, Siddhant submitted a seven-page set of findings to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, headed by Congress MP Digvijaya Singh. Hours later, the government transferred CBSE chief Rahul Singh and secretary Himanshu Gupta, appointed Prashant Lokhande as the new chief, and formed a single-member committee to probe the procurement that Siddhant had questioned.
Opposition leader and Congress member Rahul Gandhi met him and his family on the same day and wrote: “Sarthak, stand firm on your principles.”
Siddhant said that after a friend told him about technical lapses in CBSE’s on-screen marking portal, he turned to the tender documents behind OSM, a new system launched this year. This came at a time when students complained of errors and wrong answer sheets were being scanned for verification through the OSM portal.
In his blog titled “How CBSE Rewrote the Rules for Coempt EduTeck”, he claimed that there were at least 15 discrepancies between successive tenders awarded to the OSM. CBSE and the company have denied any wrongdoing. HT reported that the OSM contract went to Coempt on December 5, 74 days before tests began on February 17.
Sarthak Sidhant said his research was conducted with ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary, 19, who reported a vulnerability in the OSM portal. Another teenager, Vedant Shrivastava, made a post about getting an answer sheet wrong, an error that CBSE corrected once his X post went viral.
Based on Sidhant’s allegations, CBSE rejected this tailor-made bid for Coempt, saying it followed common financial rules and chose the lowest bidder. Now the probe is running.
As for the re-evaluation, the board opened the post-results portal on June 2, after a delay from the original May 29.
It also said that it re-scanned 68,018 answer books, pulled 13,583 books for manual re-scanning, moved the answer sheet data to its own servers, and that the portal faced a cyberattack from “malicious actors”.
Sidhant said he is not against digital labels like OSM.
“I think OSM is a good change,” he said, but added that there would need to be broader pilot tests before a full launch.
