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The Exam That Failed the Nation
How 18‑Year‑Olds Exposed the Modi Government’s Education Sham

On the last Sunday of May, the Prime Minister’s Mann ki Baat filled the airwaves with tips to beat the summer heat – desi drinks, cool recipes, and the like. He spoke about nothing of exams. Nothing about the paper leaks, the blurred answer sheets, the ruined futures. And we should not be angry about that omission. Rather, we should be reassured: after 13 uninterrupted years of the same government, the examination system has remained so stubbornly dishonest and opaque that discussing it or ignoring it cannot make a difference anymore. The man had 13 years. In that time, papers leaked repeatedly, students took to the streets only to be beaten back by lathis, and still the system never mended. So exchanging summer‑drink advice for an honest conversation on exams changes nothing. The rot is complete.

The Children Who Became the Opposition

When a government loses the young, it loses its moral compass. This time, it is not the Opposition that is exposing the hollowness of the Modi dispensation – it is 18‑ and 19‑year‑olds with laptops, curiosity, and an ethical spine. Vidansh Srivastava, Sarthak Sidhant, and Nisharg Adhikari – three names that should be framed in every school – dragged the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) into the light. Vidansh was handed an answer sheet that wasn’t his own; he tweeted the evidence, and CBSE quietly corrected its mistake. Sarthak, from Ranchi, dug through the tenders and unearthed a pattern of rigged clauses that made a specific company the inevitable winner. Nisharg, a 19‑year‑old ethical hacker who never shows his face, cracked the CBSE’s digital vaults and proved that any student’s answer sheet was accessible to anyone with minimal skill. Siddharth Raylan and Anil Teerth Parmar, too, asked uncomfortable questions. This is an unprecedented moment in Indian democracy: for the first time, Class 12 students are risking their careers and peace of mind to expose a sitting government.

Think of the previous prime ministers – Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Chandra Shekhar, VP Singh, Deve Gowda, IK Gujral, PV Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh. In none of their tenures did teenagers systematically strip the falsehoods off a government’s education policies. Narendra Modi is the first PM under whom 18‑year‑olds have become the de facto accountability mechanism. The response was predictably vicious: these children were called “anti‑national”, linked to Pakistan, and the tired bogeyman of George Soros was wheeled out. Yet the students responded with dignity, brushing off the smears with the maturity that the government sorely lacks.

Rahul Gandhi’s decision to invite these whistleblowers for a conversation was an act of rebellion in today’s India, where even journalists hesitate to be seen with opposition leaders. The children went to him, and he listened. The Prime Minister, on the other hand, chose to ignore them entirely – a deafening silence that speaks louder than any summer‑drink anecdote. If there was even a shred of shame, the Education Minister and the CBSE Chairperson would have been sacked instantly. But shame is a luxury this government never afforded its citizens.

The Tender Trail: How CBSE Rigged a Corporate Heist

Sarthak Sidhant’s forensic audit of CBSE tenders reads like a thriller. What he found was not an accident but a carefully scripted sequence that steered a multi‑crore contract towards a single entity – Co‑Amt (Quent Edutech). The tender documents, which he accessed and compared, tell a story of methodical weakening of safeguards. The table below, based on his blog and corroborated by independent reports, lays bare the manipulation.

Criterion	Original Tender (Aug 2025)	Revised Tender (Sep 2025)	Consequence
Turnover requirement	Rs 50 crore (FY 2021‑23)	Rs 30 crore (FY 2022‑24)	Co‑Amt, which earlier failed by 14%, now qualified with a razor‑thin margin of 1.7%
Technical experts	At least 100	Only 15	Quality control for over 1.7 lakh answer sheets was drastically diluted
Scanner type	Automatic book / robotic scanner mandatory	“Sufficient scanner”	Allowed any scanner, resulting in blurred, stapled, and folded‑paper images
Blacklist clause	Present	Removed	Co‑Amt cannot be blacklisted; only a fine can be imposed

Sarthak’s questions are damning: why was the turnover limit inflated to exclude competitors? Why did the board accept a firm that just barely scraped through? And why, as Hindustan Times journalist Sanjay Maurya reported, was the blacklist clause quietly erased from the final contract signed in September 2025 – a full two and a half months before Co‑Amt was awarded the deal? The CBSE can now only levy a penalty; it cannot bar the company. That is not negligence; that is complicity.

The Scanning Scandal: Blurred Copies and Broken Trust

The consequences of a tender written to favour a crony are now visible on thousands of screens. An Indian Express investigation (by Vidisha Kutta Malla and Shrinivas Janyala) revealed that CBSE has already identified over 5,000 scanned answer sheets that are “blurred” and unreadable. These are the copies of students who applied for re‑evaluation, only to discover that the document they paid to see was not their own. Some received sheets with a stranger’s handwriting; others found stapler pins, bent pages, and loose wires in the photographs – clear evidence that robotic scanners were never used.

Shivraj Mehta, a Class 12 student, broke down on social media after receiving an answer sheet that wasn’t his. “The handwriting is not mine. My teachers, my family – everyone who knows me is shattered,” he wrote. He is not alone. There will be countless others who couldn’t even afford the Rs 2,000 re‑evaluation fee, or who gave up in despair. CBSE has no mechanism to proactively correct these errors. The board only acts when a student screams loud enough on Twitter – and even then, it thanked “ethical hackers” without mentioning Nisharg or Siddharth by name. The erasure of individual credit is deliberate: acknowledge the flaw, bury the whistleblower.

The Financial Extortion: CBSE, the Pocket Thief

Rahul Gandhi called the CBSE a “pocket thief” (जेब कटरा), and the label sticks. When the board’s own negligence – or the outsourced company’s incompetence – produces a wrong result, why should the victim pay to verify the error? Yet students are charged up to Rs 2,000 simply to see their own scanned copies and request re‑evaluation. The Congress leader pointedly asked: if 4 lakh students demanded re‑checking, how much revenue did the CBSE pocket from its own blunders? The answer is tens of crores. Education has been converted into a lucrative business where mistakes generate profit. The government that promised “minimum government, maximum governance” has perfected minimum accountability, maximum extortion.

The human cost is unbearable. In Sikar, Rajasthan, NEET‑UG aspirant Pradeep Meghwal ended his life after a paper leak shattered his hope. Rahul Gandhi visited his family. The Education Minister was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the Prime Minister. For a man who telephones ISRO scientists and film stars, a call to a grieving mother or to the courageous student‑hackers is apparently too much to ask. The silence confirms what the 13‑year record already shows: this government views critical young citizens as adversaries, not as assets.

Media’s Double Standards: Advertising the ‘Mafia’

While the government now labels coaching centres a “mafia”, the front pages of the country’s most respected newspapers – Indian Express, The Hindu, Hindustan – are plastered daily with their advertisements. The same coaching teachers are invited as heroes on TV debates. If they are a mafia, why does the media sell space to them? The double game reveals a brutal truth: in the new India, even crime is a purchasable commodity. The fourth estate cannot excoriate a government for failure when its revenue model depends on the very ecosystem that preys on student anxiety. This is a corruption deeper than any tender: the sale of editorial integrity for a coaching centre’s full‑page ad.

A System in Disrepair: From BPSC to Sewer Exams

The CBSE scandal is not an isolated outbreak; it is the symptom of a systemic decay. The BPSC (Bihar Public Service Commission) exam for the 70th main cycle was held in December 2024. As of June 2025, interviews are still ongoing and final results haven’t been declared. An entire generation of Bihar’s youth is being held hostage by administrative apathy. In Kanpur, students appearing for a B8 exam fell into a sewer because of a broken manhole – the exam was cancelled. A country that dreams of a $5 trillion economy cannot even keep its drains covered on exam day.

Trust in examinations is eroding exactly the way trust in electoral processes has frayed. When every other day brings a paper leak, a cancellation, or a digital fiasco, what message does it send to the young? That merit is an illusion, and the system is a lottery where only the connected win. And the government’s response? A radio show about summer coolers.

Mann Ki Baat of Distraction

The Prime Minister’s address skirted the most pressing crisis in Indian education. Instead, he offered advice on what to drink in the heat. One can almost predict the next episode: tips on the correct technique to bathe, perhaps with anchorman‑style debates on whether mustard oil in the hair improves concentration. The absurd is now normal. A government that cannot tell you how a medical entrance paper got leaked can certainly tell you which indigenous beverage to sip. That is the state of the union in 2025: the Prime Minister as lifestyle influencer, while the students he ignores turn into the true opposition.

Rahul Gandhi’s meeting with the whistleblowers, his tweets, his Parliament questions – none of it receives a sliver of prime‑time coverage on the channels that beam the Prime Minister’s every breath. Yet it is the students who have forced CBSE into repeated confessions and clarifications. They have done what the opposition and the media together could not: hold power to account. The least the country can do is remember their names.

Criticisms

• The Modi government has squandered 13 years without instituting a transparent, leak‑proof examination system, betraying the trust of millions of students.
• When school children exposed CBSE’s corrupted tender process and digital vulnerabilities, the government and its supporters labelled them anti‑national and dragged in foreign conspiracy theories instead of fixing the problem.
• CBSE deliberately altered tender conditions – lowering financial and technical barriers, removing the blacklist provision – to favour a specific company, compromising the integrity of millions of answer sheets.
• The Education Minister remained invisible throughout the crisis; not a single official has been held accountable, let alone dismissed.
• Students are being charged up to Rs 2,000 to view their own incorrectly evaluated answer sheets, turning a systemic failure into a revenue stream for the board.
• The Prime Minister used his monthly address to discuss summer drinks rather than acknowledge the examination meltdown, trivialising the future of an entire generation.
• Mainstream media outlets routinely run full‑page advertisements of coaching centres while simultaneously reporting on the “coaching mafia” – a hypocrisy that reveals the commercialisation of editorial judgment.
• The government’s silence on student suicides triggered by exam‑related stress and paper leaks demonstrates a shocking absence of empathy and responsibility.
• India’s examination infrastructure, from BPSC to CBSE, has become a symbol of administrative apathy, where results are delayed indefinitely and physical safety is an afterthought.
• By refusing to even name the ethical hackers who forced CBSE to admit its lapses, the board and the government sent a clear message: whistleblowers are unwanted nuisances, not guardians of public interest.