The Central Board of Secondary Education issued its on-screen marking contract to Hyderabad-based Coempt Edu Teck on December 5, 2025 — just 66 days before the board announced the full-fledged rollout of OSM on February 9 — with the firm having emerged as the lowest financial bidder in a quality-and-cost based tender process, officials said on Friday.
The timeline, confirmed to HT, places the contract award at the centre of mounting questions about the pace of the rollout.
As HT reported on Friday, CBSE failed to secure a qualified vendor in two earlier tender rounds before several technical conditions were tweaked in an August 2025 RFP.
Under the Quality and Cost Based Selection framework — which assigned 70% weightage to technical parameters and 30% to financial bids — Coempt quoted approximately ₹25.75 per copy inclusive of taxes. Tata Consultancy Services, the only other bidder to meet the technical specifications, quoted around ₹65 per copy after taxes for certain categories. “TCS’ rates were significantly higher at around ₹65 per copy after taxes for certain categories,” an official said, asking not to be named.
Officials said both companies held Capability Maturity Model Integration Level 5 certification — the highest tier — at the time of the award.
{{/usCountry}}Officials said both companies held Capability Maturity Model Integration Level 5 certification — the highest tier — at the time of the award.
{{/usCountry}}Officials acknowledged that approximately 20 cases of answer-sheet mix-ups had surfaced, but suggested such errors were possible in manual systems as well given the scale of the process — nearly 9.8 million answer books. “For a child whose answer sheet was mixed up, no explanation is enough. But if speed alone determined mistakes, more of such issues could have happened,” an official said, adding that the board was examining how the mismatches occurred and ways to make the system “absolutely glitch-free.”
On penalties for the reported mismatches and glitches, officials said contractual provisions would apply after completion of the verification process. According to officials, wrongly scanned or mismatched answer books attract a ₹4,000 penalty per copy, partially scanned copies ₹8,000 and completely unscanned copies ₹15,000.
Officials also defended the selection of Coempt amid allegations by opposition leaders, including Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, over the company’s previous work in Telangana. An official said litigation related to the company’s post-examination management work in the state had been examined by courts and “nothing unusual” had been found.
Officials said scanned copies of answer scripts would be made available to students through DigiLocker from next year.