Industry2026-10-23·7 min read

Congress Accuses Ministry of Shielding CBSE's OSM Vendor: What the Rs 38 Crore COEMPT Row Means for Universities

Jairam Ramesh's October 21 accusation that CBSE never penalised its OSM vendor exposes procurement gaps universities must not repeat when adopting digital evaluation.

The Accusation: Five Months, Zero Penalties

On October 21, 2026, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh posted on social media that CBSE had still not penalised its on-screen marking (OSM) vendor — five months after the board publicly announced it would do so. According to Ramesh, CBSE stated on June 1, 2026, that it would take action against the vendor COEMPT. As of the third week of October, no sanction order has been issued.

Ramesh's charge has a paper trail. An RTI response filed with CBSE's finance section returned the answer "No such information is available with the Finance Section" when asked about penalties levied on the vendor. For an organisation that had overseen a digital marking rollout covering roughly 46 lakh Class 12 students, a blank RTI response on financial penalties is a governance signal that universities should study closely.

The Contract: What Rs 38.46 Crore Actually Bought

Ramesh placed the total value of the COEMPT work order at Rs 38.46 crore. The first two tenders combined had been valued at Rs 28 crore; the final work order pushed the total to over Rs 38 crore. He also alleged that the actual market rate for the volume of answer sheets scanned — calculated on a per-sheet basis — should have come to roughly Rs 25.39 crore, approximately 66 per cent of the final work order value.

Whether or not the specific allegations are proven, the procurement timeline contains a documented fact that every university exam committee should note: an August 2025 tender included strong penalty clauses, including a Rs 1 lakh fine for every 15-minute delay in resolving technical issues. A corrigendum issued in September 2025 removed references to blacklisting vendors. COEMPT was awarded the contract on December 5, 2025. The OSM system went live for the Class 12 board exams in the first quarter of 2026 and experienced widely reported glitches.

Ramesh argued that the officials who approved the contract are the same officials responsible for penalising COEMPT — a structural conflict of interest. Congress also called the contract rates inflated and accused the current Education Ministry of protecting vendors inherited from its predecessor.

The Education Ministry and CBSE had not responded publicly to these claims in the coverage reviewed here. The allegations are Ramesh's and remain disputed.

Why This Matters Beyond CBSE

CBSE's OSM rollout was the largest single deployment of on-screen marking in Indian school education. Its difficulties — portal outages, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, re-evaluation disputes involving more than one lakh students — became a national story. But the vendor accountability gap may outlast the exam season as the more durable institutional lesson.

Universities across India are now evaluating or mid-deployment on digital evaluation platforms. The scale is different: an affiliating university processing two lakh answer books faces different procurement dynamics than a national board. But the procurement risks are identical.

Penalty clauses can be diluted post-tender. If a corrigendum removes blacklisting provisions before the vendor is selected, the contract is structurally weaker than it appeared during the RFP phase. Legal and technical teams reviewing any digital evaluation tender should compare the original notice with the final work order before signing.

Conflict of interest in oversight. When the team that selects a vendor is also responsible for penalising that vendor's failures, enforcement becomes politically costly. Universities should consider separating the procurement committee from the performance monitoring committee.

RTI-invisible contracts are a red flag. CBSE's "no information" RTI response suggests either poor internal record-keeping or deliberate opacity. Any institution adopting exam technology at scale should ensure contract terms, SLAs, and penalty ledgers are stored in a retrievable format.

The Structural Problem: Who Holds Exam Technology Vendors Accountable?

India does not yet have a mandatory accreditation standard for exam technology vendors. The Nilekani task force's interim recommendations focused on question paper security and biometric authentication; vendor performance standards for OSM and answer-sheet management platforms were not in the public summaries reviewed here.

This regulatory vacuum places the accountability burden entirely on individual institutions. A university that selects a digital evaluation vendor today has no sector-wide benchmark to fall back on. The CBSE experience suggests what that looks like in practice: a vendor that encountered repeated failures, removed from the tender process safeguards that would have allowed blacklisting, and collected a contract value reportedly 50 per cent above market rate.

Ramesh's broader political charge — that the government is protecting the vendor — may or may not be borne out. But the structural argument is worth separating from the political one. Any institution in which the contracting authority and the enforcement authority are the same body will face this problem regardless of political intent.

What Universities Should Require Before Signing

Based on the CBSE experience, university examination committees adopting digital evaluation should verify the following before finalising any OSM vendor contract:

Clause	Minimum Standard
Uptime SLA	99.9% during active evaluation windows
Penalty per outage	Defined, not discretionary
Blacklisting provisions	Present in final work order, not removed by corrigendum
Data custody	Specifies where answer book images are stored and for how long
Audit rights	University can inspect logs independently
Escrow of source code	Required for mission-critical deployments

The CBSE row also highlights the importance of having an independent technical committee — drawn from faculty, IT governance, and legal — that reviews vendor performance and can recommend penalties without deference to the department that awarded the contract.

The Reputational Cost of Getting It Wrong

CBSE's chairman and secretary were transferred after the OSM failures. The Parliamentary Committee received student testimony. Courts were petitioned. Three months into the new admission season, the OSM controversy still generates weekly coverage.

Universities typically cannot absorb that kind of institutional damage. Unlike national boards that operate under Ministry oversight, affiliated universities answer to parent universities, accreditation bodies, and student courts simultaneously. A failed digital evaluation rollout at an affiliated college, linked to a vendor that had prior incidents at CBSE, would be difficult to defend before a NAAC peer team or in an RTI response.

The COEMPT case is not a reason to avoid digital evaluation. It is a reason to procure it correctly.

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