NEW DELHI — Vedant Srivastava posted the evidence himself: scanned answer sheets, returned for re-evaluation, that did not match the pages he had written. “I studied for an entire year. I sacrificed sleep, peace of mind, outings, everything for these exams,” he wrote, and thirteen thousand shares later the Central Board of Secondary Education was manually rechecking his paper and discovering he was right.
The republic’s exam auditors, it turns out, are three teenagers.
Srivastava supplied the proof. Sarthak Sidhant, an 18-year-old in Ranchi, supplied the paper trail, publishing an investigation arguing the board had “deliberately played with students’ futures by rewriting its own rulebook” as its new digital marking system buckled. And Nisarga Adhikary, a 19-year-old in Bengaluru, supplied the warning nobody read: in February he reported five critical flaws in OnMark, the online grading portal, to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team, including one that risked compromise of a master password and full takeover of examiners’ accounts. He received an acknowledgment and nothing else. He went public in May, and the board conceded the holes were real only after that, Bloomberg reported. Bloomberg profiled all three this week as the unlikely authors of a political showdown.
The system they audited was processing the futures of 1.7 million students. The board moved this year’s school-leaving exams to On-Screen Marking, scanning answer books for teachers to grade digitally, and the rollout produced blurry scans, server outages and re-evaluation copies students say were not theirs, Al Jazeera reported. The vendor history is the detail that turns error into indictment: the contract went to Coempt Edu Teck after the board cut major technical requirements last August, six months before the exams, and Coempt previously operated as Globarena Technologies, the firm whose digitisation of a 2019 Telangana exam ended with 40 percent of students failed and at least 20 dead by suicide. India’s school system hired the company at the centre of its worst grading disaster, under a reduced specification, on a deadline.
The state’s response has escalated in proportion to its embarrassment. The government transferred the CBSE chairman and secretary on Tuesday, moves Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal dismissed as deflection while they demanded the education minister’s resignation. The NEET medical entrance retest already sits under the watch of the Intelligence Bureau and the CBI, and this week Bloomberg reported the government is turning to the military to help secure examinations. The arc is worth stating plainly: a teenager’s free security audit was ignored in February, and by June the army was being asked to do what reading his email might have done.
Around the three of them, the politics has organised itself. The Cockroach Janta Party’s seven-day ultimatum for Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation expires on Saturday, the largest youth movement of the Modi era marching on grievances these teenagers documented screenshot by screenshot. The same ministry spent the week licensing Bristol, York and UNSW to open Indian campuses, importing institutional trust at the exact moment three teenagers were itemising why the domestic kind is bleeding out.
What the episode exposes is structural, and the experts have said so in plain terms. Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society noted that India offers no real incentives for vulnerability reporting of the kind bounty programmes provide elsewhere, which is how a working exploit chain sits in a government inbox for three months. Professor Apoorvanand put the political half more bluntly: “The government has been indifferent towards people,” and students have “lost trust in institutions.” The board’s own behaviour completed the argument: it acknowledged Adhikary’s findings only after they were public, fixed them only after they were news, and has not said whether every hole is closed.
There is one more turn in Adhikary’s story. Weeks after his disclosure, IIT Kanpur’s cybersecurity innovation hub hired him as a threat intelligence engineer, Indian outlets reported. The state’s research establishment now employs the teenager its emergency response team ignored, which is either the system correcting itself or the system absorbing its critics, depending on the week you ask.
What remains unanswered is everything above the teenagers’ pay grade, which is to say everything that was actually decided by adults: who cut the technical requirements from the OnMark tender, who cleared a vendor with Globarena’s history, whether the unresolved flaws Adhikary listed are closed, and whether anyone senior to two transferred officials will answer for any of it. The minister has until Saturday on the street’s clock. The questions will keep longer than that.
Srivastava’s post is still up, with its year of sacrificed sleep and its pages that were not his pages. The state transferred two officials, drafted the army, and hired the teenager. The scans are still blurry.
