5 Key Takeaways
- A Class 12 student, Sarthak Sidhant, scraped 16.6 million public procurement records from India's CPP Portal to create a searchable database, dramatically improving accessibility of government spending data.
- The initiative followed Sidhant's earlier audit of CBSE's digital evaluation system, which revealed tender irregularities and led to his appearance before a Parliamentary Committee.
- The database transforms fragmented, hard-to-search official records into a single downloadable resource, enabling journalists, researchers, and citizens to analyze contracts and detect potential favoritism or corruption.
- Sidhant's effort underscores the power of citizen-driven transparency, democratizing oversight by making raw data available for independent analysis without requiring institutional backing.
- The project represents a shift in civic engagement, showing how digitally literate youth can use open data and programming skills to hold government accountable, inspiring further investigations and improvements to official portals.
From Answer Sheets to 16.6 Million Contracts: How a Class 12 Student Opened India's Public Procurement Vault
On a humid June afternoon in 2026, a short message appeared on X that would make government watchdogs take notice. "Transparency needs to be accessible. From today, it is." The post came not from a seasoned activist or a well-funded non-profit, but from a Class 12 student named Sarthak Sidhant. With that tweet, he quietly released a searchable database of approximately 1.66 crore — or 16.6 million — government procurement records scraped from India's official Central Public Procurement Portal.
For a country that spends tens of lakhs of crores of rupees every year through public contracts, the launch was a digital earthquake wrapped in the calm voice of a teenager. The portal, built over just two weeks, pulls back the curtain on everything from office stationery purchases to multi-crore infrastructure tenders. It is arguably the largest citizen-driven transparency initiative focused on public spending in India's recent history.
A Simple Idea with Monumental Effort
At its core, the idea is straightforward. The Government of India already operates the Central Public Procurement Portal, commonly known as the CPP Portal. Any ministry, department, or public sector unit that wants to buy goods, services, or works worth more than a certain threshold is supposed to publish the tender notice, the bid documents, the awarded contract, and details of the winning bidder on that platform. In theory, this is open data. In practice, the portal can be clunky, difficult to search, and not exactly inviting for a citizen who just wants to know how their tax money is being spent.
Sarthak Sidhant's new database changes that equation entirely. Over a span of roughly two weeks in June 2026, he used automated tools to pull together around 1.66 crore individual records from the CPP Portal. He then structured the information into a format that anyone — a journalist chasing a story, a researcher studying government spending patterns, or a curious citizen keeping an eye on local contracts — can explore and download. The database effectively transforms fragmented and hard-to-navigate official records into a single, easily searchable public resource.
Announcing the initiative on social media, Sidhant framed the effort as the start of something bigger. He described the launch as "the beginning" and explicitly encouraged users to download the full database, examine the records independently, and conduct their own analysis. The underlying message was unmistakable: vigilance over public money should not be outsourced only to auditors and government agencies. An informed public is the strongest accountability mechanism there is.
Who Is Sarthak Sidhant?
For many people who first read the news, the name already rang a bell. Sarthak Sidhant had captured national headlines earlier in 2026 for reasons that had nothing to do with procurement databases. He was the teenager who had audited the Central Board of Secondary Education's digital evaluation system and found enough discrepancies to get called before a Parliamentary Standing Committee.
His journey into the world of public accountability began, improbably, with his own Class 12 answer sheets. Like any student anxious about board exam results, Sidhant applied to obtain scanned copies of his evaluated papers under the CBSE's access mechanism. When the copies arrived, he started noticing things that did not add up. Marks awarded on certain questions seemed inconsistent. That personal frustration might have ended with a re-evaluation request in many households. Sidhant, however, decided to go deeper.
He began examining the On-Screen Marking system — the digital process through which teachers evaluate scanned answer booklets — and the procurement documents related to the technology that powers it. By carefully studying multiple versions of CBSE tender documents available in the public domain, he identified what he claimed were significant changes in eligibility criteria for bidders, performance guarantee clauses, and certification requirements across different stages of the bidding process. These alterations, he argued, raised serious concerns about the integrity and transparency of how one of India's largest examination boards awards technology contracts.
The findings were explosive enough to reach Parliament. Sidhant was invited to appear before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, where he presented his observations in detail. For a student still completing his schooling, the sight of him calmly explaining procurement anomalies to lawmakers became a symbol of how young Indians are using publicly available data to ask uncomfortable questions. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi also met him publicly, further amplifying the narrative of a Gen Z whistleblower who refused to stay silent.
"The sight of him calmly explaining procurement anomalies to lawmakers became a symbol of how young Indians are using publicly available data to ask uncomfortable questions."
From Education Tender to Nationwide Procurement Database
The CBSE investigation was, in many ways, a proof of concept. It demonstrated that citizenship-driven scrutiny of government contracts could spot issues that formal oversight mechanisms either missed or were slow to address. But Sidhant quickly realised that the problem he had stumbled upon was not confined to education. If irregularities could hide inside a single board's tender process, what about the millions of other contracts spread across every wing of the government?
That question led him to the Central Public Procurement Portal, a repository that holds procurement records spanning numerous ministries, state governments, public sector undertakings, and autonomous bodies. The CPP Portal is a mandatory publication platform under the General Financial Rules, and its intended purpose is to ensure transparency in public spending. Yet, because the portal's search interface is not built for large-scale analysis, very few people outside of government procurement professionals ever use it for systematic scrutiny.
Sidhant's approach was both technically ambitious and philosophically simple. Over those two weeks in June, he wrote scripts to systematically scrape and archive publicly listed tender notices, corrigenda, award details, and bidder information from the CPP Portal. The result — roughly 16.6 million records — is not a leak. It does not contain classified or restricted information. It is an aggregation of data that was already mandated to be public. The innovation lies entirely in making that data genuinely accessible.
With a single download, a reporter in a small town can now look up every contract awarded by a local government department in the last few years. A data scientist can map patterns of who wins government business and at what cost. A civil society organisation can cross-reference procurement records with electoral bonds or company registries to detect potential conflicts of interest. The possibilities sit squarely at the intersection of open data and active citizenship.
How the Database Works — and Why It Matters
To appreciate why this release is significant, it helps to understand a few fundamentals about government procurement in India. Public procurement refers to the process through which authorities purchase goods, services, or construction works. It can range from buying medicines for a district hospital to awarding a contract for a new metro line. Because of the scale — India's total public procurement runs into several lakh crore rupees annually — even tiny inefficiencies or favouritism in awarding contracts translate into enormous fiscal losses.
The government's own rules require that tenders above a certain value be published publicly so that eligible bidders can compete and so that there is a record of who won and at what price. The CPP Portal was supposed to be that one-stop record. However, critics have long argued that mere publication is not enough. If the data sits in a silo, difficult to query in bulk and impossible to cross-link with other datasets, its transparency value is largely symbolic.
Sidhant's portal tackles this gap head-on. By scraping and indexing the records, it allows users to bypass the cumbersome official interface and conduct fast, cross-cutting searches. One could, for instance, quickly pull up all contracts awarded to a single company across multiple ministries, or identify tenders where the final awarded value deviated significantly from the estimated cost. The database turns static web pages into a living accountability tool.
Crucially, Sidhant has placed the entire dataset up for download. He has not just built a website that people can visit; he has effectively handed over the raw material for others to build upon. In his own words, describing the initiative as "the beginning" signals that he expects journalists, researchers, and civic hackers to take this foundation and create deeper investigations, interactive dashboards, and perhaps even mobile applications that make government spending understandable to the common person.
A Parliament Appearance and a Growing Profile
The launch of the procurement database did not happen in isolation. It arrived just weeks after Sidhant's deposition before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, an experience virtually unheard of for a school student. That appearance was not a ceremonial meet-and-greet; it was a substantive session in which Sidhant presented his analysis of the CBSE's On-Screen Marking tender and answered questions from MPs about where the system might have gone wrong.
The parliamentary summons validated a broader point that digital rights and transparency activists have been making for years: India's youth are not content to be passive recipients of government services. Armed with digital tools, the Right to Information, and a willingness to sift through dense official documents, a single motivated individual can hold systems to account in ways that were previously the exclusive domain of audit institutions.
When Rahul Gandhi met Sidhant after the CBSE revelations, the optics went beyond political messaging. It placed the idea of "citizen auditors" firmly into mainstream public discourse. Sidhant, for his part, has consistently avoided being pigeonholed into any political narrative. His focus remains on the data, the methods of extracting it, and the potential for more people to join the effort.
The Ecosystem of Open Government Data
Sarthak Sidhant's work sits within a broader global movement towards open government data. Countries like the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Ukraine have invested heavily in procurement portals that are not just repositories of PDF documents but fully machine-readable, API-accessible datasets. India's own Open Government Data platform has made strides in health, agriculture, and census information, but procurement data has lagged in usability despite its massive public interest.
The CPP Portal contains a goldmine of information on who gets government business. Tenders reveal which companies are winning contracts, at what prices, and under what conditions. They also carry corrigenda that can show how terms were changed after initial publication — a practice that, while sometimes legitimate, can also be a red flag for tailoring requirements to favour a particular bidder. Sidhant's CBSE investigation had shown exactly this: eligibility criteria and performance requirements that seemed to shift between tender versions in ways that potentially narrowed the competitive field.
With 1.66 crore records now sitting in a downloadable format, the barrier to entry for such analysis has dropped dramatically. A university student working on a term paper about public procurement inefficiencies can access the same raw information as a senior auditor. A regional newspaper with a two-person investigative team can mine local contract data without needing specialised software. This democratisation of analytical capability is the beating heart of the initiative.
The Tool Behind the Transparency
While Sidhant has not publicly detailed every technical step, the underlying process involves what is commonly called web scraping — the automated extraction of data from websites. Web scraping requires writing scripts that can systematically visit thousands or millions of web pages, identify structured information such as tender IDs, dates, values, and names, and store that information in a database. Done responsibly, scraping publicly available information is legal and widely used in journalism and research.
The sheer scale of the CPP Portal, with records spanning years and thousands of procuring entities, makes manual collection impossible. Automating the process demands solid programming skills, an understanding of how to respect server loads without disrupting the source website, and patience to clean and de-duplicate messy government data. Sidhant, who is yet to enter college, appears to have acquired these skills largely through self-learning.
His tweet announcing the portal included a direct link where users could access the full dataset. The move to offer bulk downloads, rather than just a search interface, shows a mature understanding of open data principles. It signals trust in users to interpret the data correctly and a desire to spur derivative works that may go far beyond what one person can build.
Reactions and the Road Ahead
The immediate public reaction has been a mix of admiration and curiosity. Journalists who cover government accountability have praised the effort for lowering the cost of investigative research. Transparency advocacy groups see it as a model for how students and young professionals can contribute to democratic accountability without needing institutional backing. Some procurement experts have raised routine cautions about context — raw tender data without familiarity with procurement rules can lead to misinterpretation — but nobody denies the power of having the data openly accessible in the first place.
The government has not yet issued an official reaction to the database. The CPP Portal itself remains operational, and nothing in Sidhant's project violates its terms of use because the information was already in the public domain. In a sense, the teenager has done what the state itself could have done years ago: making public procurement data truly usable.
What comes next depends on how the data gets used. Sidhant has called on citizens, journalists, and researchers to explore the records and draw their own conclusions. If even a tiny fraction of the database is scrutinised, it could generate stories that change the way contracts are awarded. It could also inspire authorities to improve the official portal's functionality so that independent scraping is no longer necessary.
For Sidhant personally, the database marks a deliberate expansion from a single-issue campaign to a nationwide transparency infrastructure. He remains a student, but his work now holds up a mirror to the state's own pledges of openness. The promise of "maximum governance, minimum government" hinges on data that citizens can actually see and use. By turning 16.6 million procurement records into a resource anyone can search, Sarthak Sidhant has shifted the frontier of what civic engagement looks like in digital India.
His story — from requesting his own answer sheets to briefing lawmakers and handing a nation its own spending data in a searchable box — is a reminder that accountability does not always arrive in the form of a formal commission or a regulatory order. Sometimes, it arrives as a download link posted by a teenager who believes that transparency needs to be accessible. And from the end of June 2026, thanks to one persistent Class 12 student, it is.
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