New Delhi: The Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) contract with Hyderabad-based Coempt Eduteck Private Limited, for its On-Screen Marking (OSM) system saw an estimated jump of approximately Rs 10 crore between the first two tenders and the final order for the same volume of work, reported Hindustan Times. The opacity surrounding the contract figures adds to a growing controversy regarding the changes made in the final RFP’s eligibility criteria to unfairly favour a particular vendor. Increase in final contract valueThe first two Request for Proposal (RFP) documents, issued in February 2025 and May 2025, valued the contract at about Rs 28 crore for roughly 2.38 crore answer scripts. The work order ultimately issued to Coempt Eduteck on December 5, 2025, on the other hand, placed the contract value at Rs 38.46 crore – a Rs 10 rore increase for the same work. According to the HT report, of the 2.38 crore answer scripts projected in the tender, only about 98.6 lakh Grade XII answer books were finally scanned. At the quoted rate of Rs 25.74 per booklet, the vendor is eligible to receive roughly Rs 25.39 crore – 66% of the total work order value – even though the actual workload was less than half of what was originally envisioned. Opacity surrounding the payment hikeThe work order, issued to Coempt just 74 days before the Grade XII board examinations began, stated Rs 38.46 crore as the final value for the digital evaluation of answer books of both Grade X and Grade XII CBSE examinations, reported HT. Grade X copies were not digitally evaluated by the company, but the contract value stated in the work order was not adjusted to account for this. On May 17, CBSE issued a statement claiming 98,66,222 Grade XII board answer sheets had been scanned, with 68,018 sheets in the process of being rescanned due to poor quality of the scans. Additionally, 13,583 sheets were graded manually when the quality issue could not be resolved. A government official, speaking to HT on condition of anonymity, said the order was filed on the basis of 1.5 crore answer scripts, which should have meant a payment of Rs 17.64 crore – less than half of the Rs 38.46 crore final order value. The official said, “There will always be differences on either side, increase or decrease between estimated and actuals…The actual payment to Coempt will be made on the basis of actual copies scanned and uploaded on OSM portal for evaluation.” Also read: AI Can Breach CBSE Marking Portal, Find Experts; Students Continue to Suffer on Re-Evaluation SiteTherefore, evidence suggests that Coempt Eduteck is eligible for a much lower payment than what was mentioned in the final work order. Other discrepanciesSarthak Sidhant, a 17-year-old student who first flagged the discrepancies, while talking to The Wire on Thursday (June 4), said that the service provider would never have qualified in the first place, had conditions prescribed in the earlier tender/request for proposal documents not been altered. After the first tender attracted no bids and none of the four bidders qualified during the second round, eligibility criteria were relaxed before the third tender was floated in August 2025. The changes included dropping the requirement for high-quality automated robotic scanning, changing the image resolution standards from 300 DPI to 200 DPI. Sidhant said that the rules might have been tweaked to prioritise volume rather than quality of the uploaded documents. He also claimed that a clause empowering CBSE to disqualify a vendor if they made ‘other mistakes’ such as data breach and technical issues was removed from the final document, essentially withdrawing its powers to ‘blacklist’ vendors who default. Moreover, the final document mandated a total of 25 lakh cumulative answer sheets a preliminary criteria, which allowed a firm like Coempt Eduteck, with fragmented experience on a lower scale, to clear the tender process. Crucially, the requirement for at least a 100 trained professionals was reduced to just 15 in the final RFP document. Coempt’s evaluation process has been riddled with technical irregularities, blurry scans of answer sheets, mismatched results and a glitchy portal, leaving thousands of students struggling with re-evaluation and verification requests. Following recommendations by an expert panel comprising professionals from the Institutes of Technology (IITs) Madras and Kanpur, CBSE’s OSM data has been shifted from Coempt’s infrastructure to a government-managed Amazon Web Services platform. A committee has also been appointed by the Union government to examine the procurement of vendor process. CBSE is yet to make any payments to Coempt Eduteck and will do so after the completion of all exam-related formalities, including re-evaluation of answer sheets.