New Delhi: Amid allegations that the CBSE went out of its way to favour a private firm bidding to run its on-screen marking (OSM) system that was revealed to contain vulnerabilities after class 12 students took their finals, the Union government on Tuesday (June 2) ordered an inquiry into the board’s procurement practices.With students and parents also reporting various issues with the OSM system, the government on Tuesday transferred the board’s chairman and its secretary out of the Union education ministry as well.The cabinet secretariat constituted a one-member committee comprising S. Radha Chauhan, a retired IAS officer heading the Capacity Building Commission that works to strengthen the government’s human resource foundations, to inquire into the CBSE’s procurement process for its OSM system.Chauhan is to submit a report to the Department of Personnel and Training in one month, the cabinet secretariat said in an office memorandum.Separately, the cabinet’s appointments committee approved the transfer of the CBSE’s chairman – its top-most official – Rahul Singh as additional secretary in the agriculture and farmers’ welfare department. He is replaced by Lokhande Sitaram, additional secretary in the home department.It also approved the school education and literacy department’s proposal to ‘prematurely repatriate’ CBSE secretary Himanshu Gupta to his parent cadre in the home affairs ministry on administrative grounds “with the condition of extended cooling-off”. He will be eligible for another central deputation after December 2030, it added.Earlier on Tuesday Sarthak Sidhanth, a 17-year-old who had taken the CBSE exams last month, presented his findings over the board’s procurement process before the parliamentary standing committee on education, women, children, youth and sports led by Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh. CBSE director Singh was reportedly present at the meeting.Sidhant had alleged that the CBSE ‘systematically rewrote its rulebook’ to favour the Hyderabad-based Coempt Edu Teck firm, including by altering a clause to allow bids from companies that were not “currently blacklisted” at the time of the tendering process as opposed to those had once been flagged. The Wire has not independently verified these claims.Another youngster, 19-year-old ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary, reported discovering numerous vulnerabilities in the CBSE’s OSM system, while students complained that the answer booklets marked under their name belonged to other people, that their papers were blurry or graded incorrectly, and that the board’s verification portal was glitchy.Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan said he accepts responsibility for problems with the CBSE’s OSM system. With anger over last month’s NEET-UG paper leak also simmering, many have called for Pradhan to step down, including inventor-activist Sonam Wangchuk and the increasingly prominent Cockroach Janta Party satirical outfit.