When Sarthak Sidhant was asked whether he preferred being called a nerd or a dork, he did not answer in words. He sent a graph.
"If you would refer to the graph sir," he replied on WhatsApp, before explaining that a nerd is someone who is knowledgeable while a dork is someone who becomes hopelessly obsessed.
What is he obsessed with?
"Anything mainly," the 17-year-old from Ranchi replied. "It's so easy to be obsessed with something, for me."
His current top three, he said, are civic technology, archiving his own life and "homelabbing" — building and experimenting with computer systems from home.
That tendency to disappear down rabbit holes has now placed him at the centre of a national conversation about one of India's largest educational institutions.
Sidhant is the author of "how cbse rewrote rules to favor coempt eduteck", a sprawling online investigation into the Central Board of Secondary Education's (CBSE’s) procurement process for its digital On-Screen Marking (OSM) system.
The blog, built around publicly available tender documents, corrigendums and procurement records, went viral recently and has since triggered widespread debate about transparency, data security and the mechanics of public contracting.
The latest development came after CBSE announced that it had removed Coempt EduTeck from the Class X and XII re-evaluation process, while maintaining that the timelines for re-evaluation would remain unchanged.
Sidhant has also attended a parliamentary panel on the back of his investigation.
For him, however, the story began with curiosity.
He was already part of a group chat with fellow researchers, including Nisarga Adhikary and Hindustan Times journalist Sanjay Maurya, after discussions around vulnerabilities in the CBSE's digital infrastructure.
"I understood that CBSE gave the contract to a very insecure platform," Sidhant said. "I wondered why CBSE gave a contract to a very insecure platform. That led me into the tendering process."
There was no grand plan.
"Curiosity," he said, when asked what drove him. "No greater purpose. As I said, I just get obsessed with things for no reason very quickly."
Then, with deadpan humour, he added: "autism."
For most people, a government tender is soporific. Hundreds of pages of technical specifications, legal clauses and administrative language are designed to be complied with, not read for pleasure.
Sidhant read them section by section.
"The first two days of my investigation I wasted, spent on learning the tendering process," he said. "What NITs are, when corrigendums are issued."
He spoke to contractors about how the system worked in practice. He learned the language of procurement. Then he began comparing versions of documents, one against another.
His methodology was almost laughably simple.
"I developed one while researching," he said. "Reading section wise and comparing."
The table of contents became his map. Ctrl+F became his compass.
By comparing drafts and corrigendums, Sidhant argued that a series of eligibility conditions were altered before the contract was finalised. His blog alleged that clauses concerning blacklisting, technical qualifications, turnover requirements and security standards were diluted over time.
The investigation also questioned the quality of the resulting evaluation infrastructure, linking procurement decisions to complaints about blurry answer-sheet scans, grading anomalies and data-security concerns.
The blog did not claim to offer a courtroom verdict. It was, instead, an argument assembled from documents that were already in the public domain.
That, perhaps, is what has resonated.
In an age of leaks and anonymous sources, Sidhant's work is built around a simple proposition: some of the state's most consequential decisions are hiding in plain sight, buried under PDFs that nobody reads.
He believes the problem is not merely transparency but accessibility.
"Do not remove documents from the procurement platform," he said when asked what should change. "Upload all documents related to the procurements. Make the AOC forever downloadable. The government should aggregate its own tenders and keep all this publicly available."
Then came one final suggestion.
"Hire me and make the UX better."
The public attention, he admitted, took him by surprise. "I did not think it would get so much reach or attention."
What, then, does an ordinary citizen do after discovering something they believe deserves scrutiny? "Talk about it," he said. "Raise awareness. Demand accountability."
There are 576 tenders he says he would like to investigate. Will he?
"No," he laughed. "Too much work honestly."
There is another reason. He cannot find all the documents anymore. The tender aggregators are expensive. The archives are incomplete. Public records have a habit of quietly disappearing.
For a self-described dork who built an investigation from the fine print, that may be the most revealing discovery of all.
CBSE has maintained that its post-result process remained "transparent, student-centric and seamless", saying the re-evaluation portal functioned without disruption and that more than 1.6 lakh students successfully submitted requests. The board also announced that it had removed Coempt EduTeck from the ongoing Class X and XII re-evaluation process on Monday 8 June, while insisting that the schedule for re-evaluation would remain unchanged.
The controversy has also reached the courts. The Delhi High Court has sought responses from the Centre and CBSE on a petition alleging irregularities in the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system and seeking an independent probe into the evaluation process.