Why SGBAU Floated Two OSM Tenders in One Year: What Universities Get Wrong About Procurement

The Tender That Had to Be Re-Issued

On April 30, 2026, Sant Gadge Baba Amravati University (SGBAU) in Maharashtra published a notice on the state government's e-tendering portal, mahatenders.gov.in. The scope was clear: "Digitization of Descriptive Answer Scripts and On-Screen Marking (OSM) System." The earnest money deposit was fixed at ₹5,00,000. Bids were to be submitted by May 21 and opened on May 22.

By September 2, 2026, SGBAU had issued the same tender again — Tender No. 11/2026 — with a revised fee of ₹24,780, the same ₹5 lakh EMD, and a new submission deadline of September 30. The opening was October 1.

A university that re-tenders for an identical scope within five months is telling you something important. Either the first process attracted no viable bidder, or the bids received failed to meet technical requirements, or the evaluation committee found the options unsatisfactory and walked away. In any case, the outcome was the same: another procurement cycle, another set of months lost, and a digital evaluation system that still wasn't live when the October 2026 semester began.

SGBAU's experience is not unique. In 2026, at least 29 universities and examination bodies across India floated OSM tenders. A significant portion of those processes either resulted in re-tenders, extended negotiation periods, or contract awards that were subsequently challenged. Understanding why procurement fails at this stage — and what institutions can do differently — is essential for every examination controller planning a digital evaluation rollout.

Why OSM Tenders Fail More Often Than Expected

Digital evaluation procurement differs from standard IT purchases in one important way: the evaluation and rollout timeline is not forgiving. Answer books arrive in bulk. Evaluators have fixed windows. Results feed into admissions and academic calendars. A vendor who delivers at 70 percent of their promised capability causes visible, institution-wide damage in a way that a delayed ERP rollout does not.

This creates a dilemma for university purchase committees. On one hand, the government procurement framework strongly incentivises awarding contracts to the lowest technically qualified bidder — the L1 model. On the other hand, OSM is a system where marginal cost-cutting on scanning equipment, server infrastructure, or training resources creates disproportionate operational risk.

The CBSE-Coempt episode in early 2026 demonstrated this at national scale. CBSE awarded its Class 12 OSM contract through a process in which Coempt Edu Teck undercut Tata Consultancy Services on price. The result was blurred scans, partial evaluations, server crashes during the re-evaluation portal launch, and — eventually — the removal of CBSE's chairman and secretary.

For affiliating universities with 200 to 500 colleges to manage, the risk is comparable. A scanning failure on day one of a 300,000-answer-book intake means the entire academic calendar for those colleges slips.

The Four Procurement Gaps That Cause Re-Tendering

Examination controllers who have been through multiple failed OSM procurement cycles consistently identify the same set of failures.

Qualification criteria that are too generic. Requiring a vendor to have "experience in educational software" or "IT project experience of five years" captures everyone from exam platform specialists to generic system integrators. A vendor who built a school attendance app technically qualifies. Meaningful OSM procurement requires sector-specific criteria: minimum number of answer books digitised in prior cycles, demonstrable scanning station throughput at declared DPI, and references from institutions with comparable annual examination volume.

No pilot requirement in the RFP. Universities that include a mandatory pilot phase — processing a representative sample of actual answer books through the vendor's complete pipeline before contract execution — surface operational gaps before a crisis occurs. SGBAU's April RFP apparently did not produce an adequate pool of vendors willing to commit to a pilot with meaningful performance benchmarks. The September re-tender may have revised those terms.

Price as the deciding factor. Many government procurement frameworks require that price receive high weighting in the final evaluation matrix. For commodity purchasing, this is sound policy. For complex evaluation infrastructure, it systematically selects vendors who will cut corners on scanning quality, server redundancy, and evaluator training. The institutions that have had the most successful digital evaluation rollouts — VTU, Alagappa University, and several state boards — negotiated on a quality-weighted matrix, even when this required additional internal justification.

Ambiguous data security requirements. An OSM RFP that does not specify data residency, encryption standards, access control requirements, and breach notification timelines will attract bids that assume the institution accepts whatever the vendor's default security posture is. Post-CBSE, no examination controller can accept that assumption.

What SGBAU's September Tender Reveals About the Evolving Market

The revised SGBAU tender, published in September 2026, is more than a procurement admin correction. It signals that the institution understood something had gone wrong with the first attempt and chose to re-enter the market rather than award a contract to an inadequate vendor.

This is, in fact, the correct institutional response. A university that awards a contract to the only bidder who showed up, regardless of that bidder's capability, will discover the capability gap during live operations. A university that re-tenders, possibly with revised qualification criteria, has a better chance of finding a vendor who can genuinely deliver.

The practical cost is significant: at minimum four to six months of additional delay. For SGBAU, this means the OSM system they intended to use for mid-2026 examinations will not be operational until at least early 2027, assuming the October 1 bids produced a viable result.

For institutions that have not yet started their procurement journey, the SGBAU timeline is a useful benchmark. Universities that want digital evaluation live for their November-December 2026 semester examinations needed to have issued their RFP no later than August. Universities targeting their next major examination cycle — typically February-March 2027 — should have a final vendor in place by December 2026 at the latest, which means an RFP issued now.

The Weighted Evaluation Framework That Changes Outcomes

Examination controllers preparing to issue an OSM RFP should build their evaluation matrix around four dimensions, with suggested weightings calibrated for the Indian government procurement context.

Technical capability (40 percent): Demonstrated experience with answer script digitization at scale, scanner throughput documentation, evaluator portal performance benchmarks, and infrastructure redundancy specifications.

Security and compliance (20 percent): Data residency assurance, encryption standards, vulnerability assessment methodology, and breach notification commitments.

Organisational capacity (20 percent): Financial stability, team size and qualification, and the specific project team assigned to this contract.

Price (20 percent): Total cost of ownership across the contract term, including per-answer-book pricing, training costs, and support costs.

A price weighting of 20 percent rather than 40 or 50 percent does not guarantee a better vendor, but it prevents the procurement process from systematically filtering out qualified vendors who invest properly in their systems and support infrastructure.

India's 29 OSM tenders in 2026 represent a procurement market that is still learning what it is buying. Universities that take the time now to build rigorous RFPs will not have to re-tender five months later.

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