Amid the controversy over CBSE’s On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, 17-year-old student Sarthak Siddhant has become the subject of national discussion. This Class 12 student was called to present his views before the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports. Usually, senior officers and experts present before such committees but this time the presentation of a student attracted everyone’s attention.
Sarthak Siddhant had raised several questions after studying the evaluation process of CBSE and the tender documents to it. His claims and analysis sparked widespread debate on social media, following which the parliamentary committee took the matter seriously and gave him an opportunity to present his views.
Sarthak is a class 12 student of 2025-26 batch. He says that when he got the scanned copy of his answer sheet, it was blurry and incomplete. After this experience he decided to understand the on-screen marking process of CBSE. During the investigation, he started studying publicly available tender documents and gathered a lot of information.
Sarthak claims that he reviewed 576 CBSE tenders available in the public domain. He then made his findings public through a blog. In the blog, he alleged that some conditions of the tender to on-screen marking were changed to benefit a private company. He also mentioned about 15 alleged anomalies in the tender process, which brought the matter further into the limelight.
Following Sarthak’s claims, the Standing Committee of Parliament invited him to give a presentation. The committee headed by Congress MP Digvijay Singh, along with listening to him, also took information from senior officials of CBSE and Education Ministry. Now the committee will review the available documents and the responses of the officials. This entire incident has sparked a new debate regarding the transparency and accountability of the examination evaluation system.
