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The Central Board of Secondary Education floated three successive tenders for its on-screen marking system before finding a qualified vendor. It received no bids in the first round, failed to find a technically eligible bidder in the second, and relaxed several key requirements in the third, which was issued in August 2025, at which point a mere six months remained before the system was deployed at national scale for Class 12 board examinations, according to documents reviewed by HT and officials familiar with the matter.

New Delhi: National Students' Union of India (NSUI) members stage a protest over the CBSE's OSM (On-Screen Marking) system, in New Delhi, Thursday, May 28, 2026. (PTI Photo)(PTI05_28_2026_000368A) (PTI)A senior board official confirmed the sequence. “We wanted to roll out the OSM system in 2026. However, after failing to secure a bidder in the first two rounds of the tender process, we identified several shortcomings and operational issues in the initial Request for Proposal (RFP) documents.

These gaps were addressed in the third RFP, where certain conditions were modified to make the process more practical and ensure successful participation. This should not be seen as a rushed exercise, but as a process of correcting shortcomings from earlier rounds to achieve better results.”

Teachers who participated in a two-day dry run conducted in January — the only field exercise before the rollout — had separately warned CBSE that the system needed at least a year or two of further preparation before nationwide implementation, HT reported earlier this week.

CBSE officials did not respond to requests for a comment on why the board insisted on the OSM approach for the 2026 examination.

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The official cited above added that the first tender was scrapped as per the General Financial Rules of the Government of India.

Internal committee minutes dated November 19, 2025, seen by HT, show that both TCS and Coempt cleared the technical round in the third tender, with Coempt emerging as the successful bidder after financial evaluation as the lowest financial bidder under the quality-cum-cost based selection framework.

Before that, however, several technical requirements were substantially diluted between the failed tenders and the August RFP that eventually produced a winner — some of which pertained to scan quality and related penalties, which is now one of the chief complaints.

The minimum scanning resolution was reduced from “300 DPI and above” to “minimum 200 DPI with clearly readable content.” TCS had, during pre-bid consultations in May, urged CBSE to lower the DPI threshold, arguing that 150 DPI would provide “adequately clear visibility” while reducing file size and retrieval time.

CBSE did not act on the suggestion in May but adopted a relaxed standard in August.

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“Scanning quality of 200 DPI is sufficient to ensure clear and legible copies,” a CBSE official said. The February and May tenders had also mandated scanning “without cutting the spine” using “automated or robotic high-speed scanning infrastructure.” The August tender removed the explicit robotic scanner requirement and broadly required only that the service provider supply “scanners” as part of the IT infrastructure.

Separately, the mandatory Capability Maturity Model Integration certification — an internationally recognised measure of software process maturity — was lowered from Level 5, the highest tier, to Level 3, widening the pool of eligible bidders in the final RFP.

A second CBSE official rejected the suggestion that requirements were relaxed to favour any particular company. “We followed government guidelines and norms in selecting the company through a tender. It was not blacklisted by any government agency and nobody had raised any concern regarding it. It was selected after due process.” The chief executive of Coempt Edu Teck did not respond to multiple calls and text messages seeking comment.

While scanning-quality requirements were relaxed, the August tender simultaneously imposed significantly harsher penalties for operational delays.

The February tender had been the strictest on per-copy errors, prescribing ₹20,000 per wrongly or partially scanned copy and ₹50,000 for unscanned books, with delays attracting 6% per day capped at 30%. The May tender substantially reduced these — ₹4,000 per mismatched copy, ₹8,000 for partial scans, ₹15,000 for unscanned books, with delays at 1% per day capped at 10%. The August tender shifted the penalty architecture away from per-copy errors toward operational deadlines: failure to scan the previous day’s answer books by the following day attracted ₹50,000 per working day; delays in going live attracted ₹10 lakh per week.

No payment has been released to Coempt so far. “The matter related to penalties will be reviewed after completion of the re-evaluation process and supplementary examinations. Any action will be taken strictly as per rules if violations are established,” a CBSE official said.

The scale of what the system was required to process makes the tension between speed and quality concrete. If roughly 550,000 Physics answer books were scanned within a day, the system would have needed to process around 380 copies every minute continuously for 24 hours.

For English, with nearly 1.7 million answer books, the rate would have been close to 1,200 copies per minute. To be sure, the process was decentralised and the scanning took place at several centres across the country in tandem.

Of the 9,866,622 answer books evaluated this year, 68,018 had to be rescanned due to poor image quality and 13,583 were checked manually after repeated scanning failed to produce legible copies. As reported by HT, CBSE’s own governing body had recommended pilot projects across regional offices before the nationwide rollout — a suggestion the board did not act on.

“We received around 760 scanned Physics answer books for OSM evaluation, but nearly 100 had to be rejected because they were blurred, partially scanned or had missing pages,” a Physics evaluator from Delhi told HT.