What is the story about?
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is facing flak over its newly introduced On-Screen Marking (OSM) system. After the Class 12 Board exam results were declared, various discrepancies came to light in the evaluation of answer scripts and the re-evaluation process.
The company behind the CBSE’s digital evaluation platform has come under scrutiny following the revelation of its controversial past. The Opposition has also questioned the board for awarding the contract to the Hyderabad-based firm.
We take a look.
Coempt Edu Teck is the Hyderabad-based company awarded CBSE’s digital evaluation contract.
The educational technology and digital examination firm was previously known as Globarena Technologies. The company also came under fire in 2019, when discrepancies emerged in the Telangana Intermediate Board’s Intermediate (Plus 2) examination results.
At the time, Globarena was recruited by the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education to build a software to digitise exam-related administrative work.
Over 3.8 lakh students out of the 9.7 lakh who appeared for the Telangana intermediate exam failed. More than 20 students died by suicide after the results were released.
At the time, the Supreme Court rejected a plea seeking reevaluation, compensation for students and criminal charges against the company. It noted that of the 3.8 lakh students who had failed, only 1,183 were declared as passed, reflecting an evaluation error of only 0.16 per cent.
Less than six months after the controversy, Globarena Technologies renamed itself as Coempt Edu Tech Private Limited, Newslaundy reported, citing company documents.
Speaking to The News Minute (TNM), VSN Raju, CEO of Coempt Edu Teck, claimed the name change was unrelated to the results controversy in Telangana.
“We changed our name, all our clients know this, and I am still the CEO. We are not hiding. Otherwise, why will my name still be there?”
“We have over 25 years of experience in providing end-to-end examination solutions to certificate awarding bodies. We are the most preferred partner to automate critical examination processes like pre-examination, question paper management, AI-based online examination, answer-book digitisation (uncut), digital evaluation and post-examination,” the company’s website claims.
CBSE floated a tender to handle its digital evaluation system in November 2025, as per documents accessed by TNM.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Coempt were reportedly the only two companies that met the technical criteria.
Documents accessed by CNN-News18 reveal that CBSE struck down the ‘blacklisting clause’ from its tender for digital scanning and evaluation of answer booklets a month after its introduction.
The original 132-page tender document issued by CBSE last August included a provision enabling a committee to consider blacklisting, forfeiture of Performance Bank Guarantee (PBG) and termination of contract in cases of serious lapses.
However, a corrigendum issued in September 2025 removed the blacklisting clause before the contract was awarded. Under the final six-page contract, the vendor could face steep financial penalties and even termination, but not blacklisting.
In its response, CBSE told CNN-News18 that it incorporated the blacklisting clause in the initial contract, but TCS objected to the provision. The board said even if the clause was not a part of the corrigendum, it reserves its power to blacklist the vendor.
Notably, the tender process itself has come under scrutiny. As per a
Hindustan Times (HT) report, CBSE floated three tenders before finalising Coempt for the OSM system in December 2025.
As the first two rounds failed to produce eligible bidders, CBSE eased several conditions when the third tender was rolled out in August 2025.
One of the major reported changes in this tender was the reduction in the minimum scanning resolution. The requirement was slashed from “300 DPI and above” to “minimum 200 DPI with clearly readable content”, reported HT.
The August tender also allegedly removed an explicit demand for robotic scanner infrastructure. Penalties were also relaxed compared to the previous two tenders.
Now, failure to scan the one-day-old answer books by the following day would attract a penalty of Rs 50,000 per working day, while delay in going live would incur a fine of Rs 10 lakh per week.
Officials told News18 that Coempt and TCS both qualified in the final round. However, Coempt was awarded the contract due to its lower bid.
These revelations have raised questions about whether requirements were relaxed to favour the Hyderabad-based firm.
A senior CBSE official has, however, denied these claims, calling them "wrong" and emphasising that the company was selected after due process,
HT reported.
These developments were first flagged by a Class 12 student named Sarthak Sidhant, who examined CBSE’s publicly available tender records relating to the OSM project. He focused on reforms introduced to eligibility criteria and technical requirements across different versions of the tender documents.
CBSE is facing backlash after scores of students took to social media, alleging answer-sheet mix-ups, blurred answer scripts, repeated portal crashes and other glitches in the OSM system.
As several young students complained on X and Instagram, Opposition leaders picked up the issue, targeting the central government over the alleged failures.
A Class 12 student, Vedant, had earlier gone viral on social media after claiming that the Physics answer sheet uploaded by CBSE on the portal during the revaluation process did not belong to him. Since then, similar claims have been made by other students and their families, who have also flagged different handwriting, payment gateway failures and incorrect fee displays, among other issues.
CBSE has admitted detecting around 20 cases of answer-sheet mix-ups. Moreover, more than 13,000 answer sheets had to eventually be evaluated manually due to scanning quality issues, government sources told PTI last week.
They said more than 98 lakh answer sheets, amounting to nearly 40 crore pages, were scanned under the OSM system."Out of these 98 lakh answer sheets, around 68,000 were found to have quality issues during scanning and were rescanned. Eventually, a little over 13,000 copies still did not attain the required legible quality even after rescanning," the sources added.
Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who has come under the Opposition's fire, recently acknowledged discrepancies in the digital evaluation system, assuring students that corrective measures will be implemented.
With inputs from agencies
The company behind the CBSE’s digital evaluation platform has come under scrutiny following the revelation of its controversial past. The Opposition has also questioned the board for awarding the contract to the Hyderabad-based firm.
We take a look.
What is Coempt Edu Teck?
Coempt Edu Teck is the Hyderabad-based company awarded CBSE’s digital evaluation contract.
The educational technology and digital examination firm was previously known as Globarena Technologies. The company also came under fire in 2019, when discrepancies emerged in the Telangana Intermediate Board’s Intermediate (Plus 2) examination results.
At the time, Globarena was recruited by the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education to build a software to digitise exam-related administrative work.
Over 3.8 lakh students out of the 9.7 lakh who appeared for the Telangana intermediate exam failed. More than 20 students died by suicide after the results were released.
At the time, the Supreme Court rejected a plea seeking reevaluation, compensation for students and criminal charges against the company. It noted that of the 3.8 lakh students who had failed, only 1,183 were declared as passed, reflecting an evaluation error of only 0.16 per cent.
Less than six months after the controversy, Globarena Technologies renamed itself as Coempt Edu Tech Private Limited, Newslaundy reported, citing company documents.
Speaking to The News Minute (TNM), VSN Raju, CEO of Coempt Edu Teck, claimed the name change was unrelated to the results controversy in Telangana.
“We changed our name, all our clients know this, and I am still the CEO. We are not hiding. Otherwise, why will my name still be there?”
“We have over 25 years of experience in providing end-to-end examination solutions to certificate awarding bodies. We are the most preferred partner to automate critical examination processes like pre-examination, question paper management, AI-based online examination, answer-book digitisation (uncut), digital evaluation and post-examination,” the company’s website claims.
Why Coempt Edu Teck is under scanner
CBSE floated a tender to handle its digital evaluation system in November 2025, as per documents accessed by TNM.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Coempt were reportedly the only two companies that met the technical criteria.
Documents accessed by CNN-News18 reveal that CBSE struck down the ‘blacklisting clause’ from its tender for digital scanning and evaluation of answer booklets a month after its introduction.
The original 132-page tender document issued by CBSE last August included a provision enabling a committee to consider blacklisting, forfeiture of Performance Bank Guarantee (PBG) and termination of contract in cases of serious lapses.
However, a corrigendum issued in September 2025 removed the blacklisting clause before the contract was awarded. Under the final six-page contract, the vendor could face steep financial penalties and even termination, but not blacklisting.
In its response, CBSE told CNN-News18 that it incorporated the blacklisting clause in the initial contract, but TCS objected to the provision. The board said even if the clause was not a part of the corrigendum, it reserves its power to blacklist the vendor.
Notably, the tender process itself has come under scrutiny. As per a
As the first two rounds failed to produce eligible bidders, CBSE eased several conditions when the third tender was rolled out in August 2025.
One of the major reported changes in this tender was the reduction in the minimum scanning resolution. The requirement was slashed from “300 DPI and above” to “minimum 200 DPI with clearly readable content”, reported HT.
The August tender also allegedly removed an explicit demand for robotic scanner infrastructure. Penalties were also relaxed compared to the previous two tenders.
Now, failure to scan the one-day-old answer books by the following day would attract a penalty of Rs 50,000 per working day, while delay in going live would incur a fine of Rs 10 lakh per week.
Officials told News18 that Coempt and TCS both qualified in the final round. However, Coempt was awarded the contract due to its lower bid.
These revelations have raised questions about whether requirements were relaxed to favour the Hyderabad-based firm.
A senior CBSE official has, however, denied these claims, calling them "wrong" and emphasising that the company was selected after due process,
These developments were first flagged by a Class 12 student named Sarthak Sidhant, who examined CBSE’s publicly available tender records relating to the OSM project. He focused on reforms introduced to eligibility criteria and technical requirements across different versions of the tender documents.
What’s the CBSE evaluation row?
CBSE is facing backlash after scores of students took to social media, alleging answer-sheet mix-ups, blurred answer scripts, repeated portal crashes and other glitches in the OSM system.
As several young students complained on X and Instagram, Opposition leaders picked up the issue, targeting the central government over the alleged failures.
CBSE’s May 2025 tender required answer sheets to be scanned with automatic robotic scanners, spines preserved, at a minimum of 300 DPI.
The tender re-issued in August quietly removed all of it. “Scanners” became generic. Resolution dropped to 200 DPI.
Now we know what that… https://t.co/XXdorOi3oq
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) May 31, 2026
A Class 12 student, Vedant, had earlier gone viral on social media after claiming that the Physics answer sheet uploaded by CBSE on the portal during the revaluation process did not belong to him. Since then, similar claims have been made by other students and their families, who have also flagged different handwriting, payment gateway failures and incorrect fee displays, among other issues.
CBSE has admitted detecting around 20 cases of answer-sheet mix-ups. Moreover, more than 13,000 answer sheets had to eventually be evaluated manually due to scanning quality issues, government sources told PTI last week.
We have been closely monitoring the vulnerabilities in the OnMark portal of our service provider that are being flagged in the public domain. An expert team of cybersecurity professionals has been deployed over the last few days from across various arms of the government as well…
— CBSE HQ (@cbseindia29) May 31, 2026
They said more than 98 lakh answer sheets, amounting to nearly 40 crore pages, were scanned under the OSM system."Out of these 98 lakh answer sheets, around 68,000 were found to have quality issues during scanning and were rescanned. Eventually, a little over 13,000 copies still did not attain the required legible quality even after rescanning," the sources added.
Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who has come under the Opposition's fire, recently acknowledged discrepancies in the digital evaluation system, assuring students that corrective measures will be implemented.
With inputs from agencies
