Seventeen years old, from Jharkhand, and too young to vote for the people he was addressing. On Tuesday, June 2, 2026, Sarthak Sidhant walked into the Parliament House Annexe in New Delhi and handed a parliamentary committee a seven-page document.
The paper listed alleged irregularities in how the Central Board of Secondary Education chose vendors for its On-Screen Marking system, the software used to mark Class 12 answer scripts. Sidhant had sat the Class 12 exams himself this year. The Hindu reported that he also put a series of questions to the board.
The room
The Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports, chaired by Congress MP Digvijaya Singh, was meeting on how on-screen marking had worked in the exams and what problems students faced. CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh and School Education Secretary Sanjay Kumar were present, along with officials of the Education Ministry.
Sidhant pointed to what he called anomalies in the tendering process that let the firm Coempt take part in the bidding. The Times of India reported that CBSE answered that it had changed the terms to make the bidding more competitive. The board also gave the panel a report on the difficulties of rolling out the system. Officials promised MPs the portal problems were fixed and that students had until Saturday, June 6, to apply for re-evaluation of their answer sheets.
Fallout
Rahul Singh was transferred hours after the meeting.
The committee also heard from CERT-In, the government agency that handles cyber threats. A note it submitted said it had verified vulnerabilities in CBSE-related systems that users had flagged between the end of February and May, and told the board to fix them three times between February and May 25. It informed Amazon Web Services, which hosts parts of CBSE’s digital infrastructure, on May 31. According to the Times of India, its emergency assessment of one portal found the platform unfit to run in a live production environment. CBSE said some of the vulnerabilities had been fixed.
“The committee has always been looking at the issues of students and their problems. This is exactly what the committee has done,” Digvijaya Singh told reporters.
Sidhant afterwards met Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition, who has used the CBSE episode to sharpen his attack on the government. “Stick to your principles, Sarthak,” Gandhi wrote on X.
Days earlier, on May 30, Sidhant had taken part in a webinar hosted by The Hindu titled “Tech troubles in CBSE marks.”
Sources
- Sarthak Sidhant flags CBSE OSM tender irregularities before Parliamentary panel – The Hindu
- CBSE debacle: Student tells Parliamentary panel about 'tendering flaws' | India News – The Times of India
