OSM In The Dock: CBSE Chief And Education Secretary To Face Parliament Panel

On Tuesday, June 2, the Chairman of the Central Board of Secondary Education and the Union School Education Secretary will walk into the Parliament House Annexe to answer questions in a room they had probably been hoping to avoid all summer.

Both have been summoned by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports, in a notice issued by the Rajya Sabha Secretariat last week. The agenda, in the committee's own bureaucratic phrasing, is "use of On-Screen Marking (OSM) in Grade 12 Exams and issues faced by students consequent." The same notice lists the application of the new three-language formula in Classes 9 and 10 as a second item — politically charged given Tamil Nadu's opposition to it, and a guarantee that Tuesday's questioning will not stay confined to a single domain.

The framing matters

What is striking about the notice is the wording. It is not just the use of OSM that the panel intends to examine. It is the consequent issues faced by students — language that places the lived experience of Class 12 examinees, not the administrative comfort of the board, at the centre of the inquiry. For much of the past month, the board's own framing has been that the technical issues were limited, that the affected URL was a "testing portal," and that the production system had not been compromised. The committee, in its very phrasing, is refusing to accept that framing as the starting point.

The day before

The OSM hearing has a noticeable bedfellow on the calendar. On Monday, June 1, the same committee met — under Digvijaya Singh's chair, in the same Annexe — to discuss the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak, the functioning of the National Testing Agency, and the larger question of whether India's high-stakes entrance examinations should move from pen-and-paper to computer-based testing. The NTA had earlier admitted to members that it currently carries a staff shortage of around 25 per cent. Thirteen people have been arrested by the CBI in the NEET-UG 2026 paper-leak case. The cancelled examination has been rescheduled for June 21.

In other words, the same forum is now formally examining both halves of the country's school-leaving and medical-entrance architecture — back-to-back, under the same chair.

What the CBSE chief will be asked to explain

The case against the OSM system has, over the past four weeks, been built almost entirely in public.

A 17-year-old named Vedant Shrivastava produced photocopies showing that the Physics answer sheet bearing his roll number contained somebody else's handwriting. CBSE eventually acknowledged the mix-up and conceded that some twenty similar mismatches had taken place. A 19-year-old ethical hacker named Nisarga Adhikary demonstrated, in a public thread on X, that the OnMark portal's access controls were broken, that a literal "master password" — 123456 — was sitting inside its publicly accessible front-end code, and that the AWS storage bucket holding scanned answer sheets could be enumerated by anyone on the internet. Another 17-year-old, Sarthak Sidhant, read through hundreds of pages of CBSE's tender documents and showed how successive corrigenda had quietly rewritten the procurement rules — removing the source-code-ownership clause, removing physical server isolation, and erasing the word "blacklisting" from the penalty matrix just before bids closed.

The vendor that won the contract, Coempt EduTeck, was until recently known as Globarena Technologies — the same firm whose 2019 Intermediate-results disaster in Telangana was followed by the deaths by suicide of at least twenty-three students. Coempt was never blacklisted. It changed its name. All of this is now matter of public record. The committee will not lack for material.

The Digvijaya factor

Digvijaya Singh is also, plainly, the chair under whom this hearing is most likely to draw blood. The Congress veteran has been the most consistent parliamentary voice against the NTA's handling of NEET since 2024, and the committee under his chairmanship has produced increasingly pointed reports on the National Education Policy's implementation. His own governing instinct, as he put it in an interview late last year, is one line long: "I am a Gandhian who believes in decentralisation."

What this moment means

There is a clear pattern to how the OSM and NEET stories have moved this summer. The first noise came from students. The second wave came from a teenage hacker and a teenage tender researcher. The third came when the Supreme Court, hearing the NEET petitions, observed that it was "sad" the NTA had not learnt its earlier lessons. The fourth came when Coempt EduTeck's past as Globarena entered public knowledge. Now, in the fifth wave, Parliament is calling the executive to answer.

Whether anything changes after Tuesday will depend, as so often in Indian institutional politics, on what the committee chooses to put in writing. But the simple fact of the summons is itself a development worth marking. It is the moment at which the OSM row stops being a social-media controversy, a procurement scandal, and a court matter — and becomes, formally and on the record, a parliamentary one.