Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi has publicly backed three teenage whistleblowers who exposed alleged irregularities in the Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE) On-Screen Marking (OSM) system.
The meeting came hours after 17-year-old Sarthak Sidhant deposed before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, sharing his probe; hours after which the Narendra Modi government changed the CBSE chairman and ordered an inquiry into the OSM procurement.
Sidhant says he caught 'at least 15 discrepancies' in successive CBSE tenders, and that rules were rewritten to favour the firm running OSM, Coempt EduTeck; the CBSE and the firm have denied the allegations.
Rahul Gandhi used the coinage '#TenderInvestigator' in another a play on the teenager's trawl through tender documents on the Central Public Procurement portal.
This gesture follows Gandhi's May 31 meeting with Vedant Shrivastava, the Class 12 student who found that the Physics answer sheet CBSE uploaded under his roll number was not his.
The students have become the public faces of a wider revolt against this year's run of examination failures, which also includes the cancelled NEET-UG 2026 medical entrance test, now headed for a June 21 re-test after a paper leak.
