Procurement records reveal the scoring and pricing factors that helped Coempt secure CBSE’s digital evaluation contract over TCS amid growing political scrutiny.
File Photo: IANS
A Hyderabad-based edtech firm with fewer than 60 employees has found itself at the centre of one of the sharpest controversies in Indian public education in years. Coempt Eduteck Private Limited, which beat Tata Consultancy Services to win a contract worth roughly Rs 384 crore for digitally evaluating nearly one crore Class XII answer books, is now facing questions about its past, its procurement advantage, and the integrity of the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system it was hired to power.
The row has drawn in the Leader of the Opposition, a senior Congress leader calling for a ministerial resignation, a student blogger who combed through hundreds of tender documents, and a cybersecurity researcher who alleged portal vulnerabilities.
Advertisement
Here is what is known so far.
Advertisement
Coempt Edu Teck Private Limited was incorporated on 11 April 2000 in Hyderabad, Telangana, and was formerly known as Globarena Iteknowledge Private Limited and Globarena Technologies Private Limited. Its board includes Managing Director M. Anantha Chary, described as an entrepreneur with experience in IT, healthcare and BFSI; Director and CEO VSN Raju, an IT professional who has been the company’s public face through the current controversy; Chairman Prof Sowmyanarayanan Sadagopan, a founder director of IIIT Bangalore and former faculty at IIT Kanpur and IIM Bangalore; Dr R Jayaraman, Member Secretary of CED, Tamil Nadu; and AV Narayana, a retired IPS officer from the CID, Andhra Pradesh. The company currently employs 51 professionals.
It operates in the edtech and software solutions space, registered under the Registrar of Companies, Hyderabad.
In April 2019, over 3.8 lakh students out of the 9.7 lakh who took the Telangana intermediate exam failed, and over 20 students died by suicide. The company hired by the Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education to build software to digitise exam-related administrative work was Globarena Technologies Private Limited. Less than six months after those results, Globarena Technologies changed its name to Coempt Edu Tech Private Limited, company documents reveal. When questioned, the company’s CEO, VSN Raju, denied any connection between the name change and the controversy, saying the High Court and Supreme Court had cleared the firm in response to a PIL filed in the case.
Procurement records reviewed by The Times of India show that Coempt scored 91 out of 100 in the technical evaluation against TCS’s 89 – a difference of just two points. The critical gap appeared in a single sub-category: past experience in scanning and distributing subjective answer scripts for digital evaluation. Coempt received full marks there; TCS scored zero. In the financial bids, the divergence was far larger. Coempt quoted roughly Rs 24.8 to Rs 25.7 per answer booklet, while TCS quoted between Rs 53 and Rs 65. The evaluated bid value worked out to approximately Rs 384.6 crore for Coempt against nearly Rs 951.3 crore for TCS, a gap of around Rs 566 crore. Under the QCBS model, technical scores carried 70% weightage and financial bids 30%.
CBSE did not arrive at Coempt in a straight line. The tender was first issued in February 2025, followed by a second round in May after the initial process failed to produce a qualified vendor. A third tender was issued in August 2025, following which Coempt emerged as the successful bidder. Student blogger Sarthak Sidhant, a Class XII student who went through hundreds of tender documents, alleged that conditions had been diluted across the three rounds. Earlier tenders reportedly required CMMI Level 5 certification, while later versions accepted Level 3, which Sidhant claims matched Coempt’s capabilities.
One of the most pointed allegations concerns a specific clause. In the earlier RFP, there was a clause about bidders being “blacklisted earlier,” which was changed in the new RFP to “blacklisted currently.” Congress leader Jairam Ramesh took this further, alleging that a corrigendum issued by CBSE in September 2025 removed the board’s own power to blacklist vendors – stripping accountability before the contract was even awarded. CBSE has rejected these allegations, maintaining it followed General Financial Rules protocols throughout.
The procurement controversy is layered over a parallel operational failure. A student, Vedant Shrivastava, applied for a photocopy of his Physics answer sheet after receiving unexpectedly low marks and found that the sheet emailed to him belonged to someone else entirely. CBSE admitted to an error and sent him the correct sheet. Separately, cybersecurity researcher Nisarga Adhikary alleged in a blog that vulnerabilities in the OnMark portal could have allowed unauthorised access and alteration of marks. CBSE later clarified that the portal examined was only a test environment and not the live system. The board subsequently confirmed it had deployed a team of cybersecurity professionals to address vulnerabilities.
The row has become a full-spectrum political contest. Rahul Gandhi called it a “deliberate conspiracy,” demanded a judicial inquiry and an SIT, and cited Sarthak Sidhant’s blog in parliament-facing posts. Jairam Ramesh called for Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation. The BJP, in turn, pointed out that Coempt had received contracts from institutions in Telangana and Karnataka – both Congress-governed states – undercutting the opposition’s framing. CBSE has maintained throughout that the process was compliant and that the firm that met technical requirements and secured the highest combined QCBS score was selected as per the rules.
The board is currently conducting a re-evaluation of Class XII answer sheets, with reports suggesting around nine lakh scanned copies were shared online with students as part of the review process. The row shows no signs of quieting down.
Advertisement
