Scanned copies of CBSE answer scripts will be made available to students through DigiLocker from next year, officials said on Friday, while defending the board's rollout of on-screen marking (OSM) and its decision to award the contract to Telangana-based Coempt Edu Teck.
Officials also defended the selection of Coempt amid allegations raised by opposition leaders, including Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, regarding the company's previous work in Telangana, HT earlier reported.
Legal challenges relating to the company's post-examination management work in the state had been examined by courts and that "nothing unusual" had been found, the report quoted an official as saying.
The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) awarded its OSM contract to Coempt on December 5, 2025 - just 66 days before announcing the full-scale rollout of the system on February 9 - after the company emerged as the lowest financial bidder in a quality-and-cost based tender process, officials said.
The timeline, confirmed to HT, has drawn attention amid growing scrutiny over the speed with which the new evaluation system was implemented.
How CBSE picked Coempt for OSM work
{{/usCountry}}The timeline, confirmed to HT, has drawn attention amid growing scrutiny over the speed with which the new evaluation system was implemented.
How CBSE picked Coempt for OSM work
{{/usCountry}}As reported by HT on Friday, CBSE was unable to secure a qualified vendor in two earlier rounds of tendering before modifying several technical requirements in an August 2025 request for proposal (RFP).
Under the Quality and Cost Based Selection (QCBS) framework, which assigned 70% weightage to technical parameters and 30% to financial bids, Coempt quoted approximately ₹25.75 per answer script, inclusive of taxes. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the only other bidder to qualify technically, submitted a bid of 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, requesting anonymity.
Officials said both companies possessed Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Level 5 certification - the highest maturity level - when the contract was awarded.
Officials also acknowledged that around 20 cases of answer-sheet mismatches had been reported but argued that such errors could occur even under manual evaluation systems, particularly given the scale of the exercise involving 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.
The official added that the board was investigating the causes of the mismatches and exploring measures to make the system "absolutely glitch-free."
On the question of penalties for reported mismatches and technical glitches, officials said contractual provisions would be invoked once the verification process was completed.
According to officials, penalties under the contract include ₹4,000 for every wrongly scanned or mismatched answer book, ₹8,000 for partially scanned copies and ₹15,000 for completely unscanned answer books.