Union minister of state for education Sukanta Majumdar has lauded Nisarga Adhikary, a teenaged ethical hacker from Bengal, who had hacked into the CBSE website and flagged vulnerabilities in the Central Board of Secondary Education’s online marking system.

“A class X pass out had hacked into the CBSE website. We channelled his expertise and talent and got him connected with IIT-Kanpur. He could have joined a protest. But we decided to give him the space to learn and contribute to the country’s growth,” Majumdar said at the Education for Viksit Bharat conclave held in Calcutta on Friday morning.

“His parents were surprised,” the Union minister said. “They told us, we cannot control him. He comes from a very small town in north Bengal. That is the kind of talent that we have in Bengal.”

Days after the CBSE class XII results were declared with the newly introduced OSM )(on-screen marking) system which facilitates digital evaluation of the answer sheets, Adhikary, who is a Class XII passout, had exposed lapses in the system.

Hundreds of students from across the country had complained about blurred answer sheets, missing pages and mismatch in the physical and digital copies of the answer sheets that they were allowed access to.

Adhikary examined the publicly accessible code loaded through the CBSE’s portal and identified “multiple security weaknesses.”

Last month he was hired by the C3iHub at IIT-Kanpur’s cybersecurity and cyber defence innovation centre as an OSINT and threat intelligence engineer.

The Education for Viksit Bharat event, where the chief guest was Bengal finance minister Swapan Dasgupta, was organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce.

Majumdar rolled out statistics to support the claims on Bengal’s glory days and subsequent decline over the last half a century.

“Bengal was once the driving force of India’s economy. We contributed 10.5 per cent to the country’s GDP. Even till 1961 Bengal’s per capita income was higher than the country’s. Bengal was still driven by nationalistic ideals. Once the nationalistic ideals were discarded, Lakshmi [the Hindu goddess of wealth] too disappeared. We have to bring it back,” Majumdar said.

“The teachers’ recruitment scam has eroded the confidence of the youth in the education system. The challenge is to restore that confidence,” he said.

State finance minister Dasgupta said the challenge before the new government in Bengal was to translate the state’s potential into reality, for which certain realities had to be acknowledged first.

“Education, public education in Bengal is a devastated area. It is not a question of improvement, but fundamental rebuilding,” said Dasgupta.

The finance minister said Calcutta University, which was once among the leading centres of education in Asia, has been reduced to a provincial varsity.

“We have set our sights too low. Our inheritance actually was lofty. We have come down many, many notches. To recover that is a challenge,” Dasgupta said.

He said the government had a limited role to play in the education sector.

“We can create a condition, we can create an environment, we can be an enabler, but the actual work, the operationalising of this has to be done by the private sector,” minister Dasgupta said. “Only upgrading state universities, or only private universities or bringing foreign universities is not the solution. All three have to be taken together,” he said.

Dasgupta also spoke for a complete overhaul of the curriculum and lack of quality teachers in the state.

“We are deficient in skilled teachers. How much can we do to prevent the relentless exodus of the young? In Kolkata it is a rarity to find young people. It is not an observation but a statement of pain. A great metropolis like this has been elevated to an old-age home. It tells us something was wrong.

“We have to reverse it,” he said. “And we can’t reverse it by diktat. We have to reverse it by creating opportunities, by creating centres of excellence, not only for the students to stay and study here but also encourage others to come here.”

Dasgupta assured the stakeholders in the education sector, both from the state and private universities, that the government was ready to listen to them.

Both ministers spoke about what they called the development in neighbouring Odisha and Assam over the last 15 years.

Dasgupta also said some business families had moved out of Calcutta.

“We want to create a situation where it is worthwhile for them to come back, makes economic sense to come back,” he said.