Vedant Shrivastava, Nisarga Adhikary and Sarthak Sidhant | The Gen Z trio that took on the CBSE
Vedant Shrivastava (17), Nisarga Adhikary (19) and Sarthak Sidhant (18) were ordinary teenagers until two weeks ago, before they raised their voice on public platforms
Vedant Shrivastava (17), Nisarga Adhikary (19) and Sarthak Sidhant (18) were ordinary teenagers until two weeks ago, before they raised their voice on public platforms against the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) botched up On-Screen Marking system. After the board admitted to flaws in the system, the Gen Z trio stood vindicated. Class 12 student Vedant was in for a rude shock when he got called ‘anti-national,’ on X, as he flagged receiving a stranger’s answer sheet instead of his own to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). One of the first students to raise his voice against the On-Screen Marking system deployed by the CBSE, Vedant, who is now being referred to as ‘the primary whistleblower,’ says that since he went public on X, what has ensued is utter ‘chaos.’ The trolling did not stop at being called an ‘anti-national,’ or ‘Pakistani’. “People went on to comment about my physical appearance and my speech,” he says. After pointing out the botch-up, senior officials at the CBSE admitted their mistake and traced his original physics answer sheet. “I took to X to voice my concerns as CBSE was not replying to my distress calls. Because I am a minor, X does not specifically mention country or location but highlights the larger region to which the account belongs. In my case, this was South Asia, and I was brutally trolled and called a ‘Pakistani,’” Vedant says. After the CBSE portal for re-evaluation opened on June 2, Vedant applied to get 13 questions re-evaluated in four subjects — Computer Science, English, Mathematics and Physics. An East Delhi resident, Vedant observes that the CBSE implemented On-Screen Marking in a hasty manner. “In my school, some teachers are very aged and they are used to checking answer copies by hand.
They are not well versed with using computers. If the CBSE wants to implement the OSM system in 2027 they should give teachers proper training,” he says. It has been two weeks since Vedant’s post on X, which blew the lid off a massive evaluation fiasco in the CBSE, but the media attention over the teenager has not died down. “The controversy started affecting me but my family was very supportive,” he says adding that he got ‘distracted,’ by the CBSE upheaval for the last two weeks but is now re-starting his preparation for the Defence Academy entrance exams. “I aspire to be a fighter pilot with the Indian Air Force.” ‘Ethical hacker’ Nisarga Adhikary, a West Bengal-based “ethical hacker”, exposed “critical vulnerabilities” in the CBSE’s OSM portal, including leaking sensitive student information. The CBSE immediately slipped into denial after Nisarga went public with his posts on X, and nearly after two weeks, it admitted to the flaws. “It was really frustrating for me that the CBSE and the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) took three months (since he first raised complaints in February) to admit the flaws in their portal,” Nisarga told The Hindu. Between 2023 and 2025, Nisarga found himself embroiled in the Joint Entrance Exams (JEE) race, which he said was ‘pretty depressing.’ “I don’t see a point in putting effort for an institute (Indian Institutes of Technology) when they are not even in top 100 ranking institutes across the world,” he told The Hindu. Life came full circle for Nisarga when an expert IIT team invited him to fix the vulnerabilities in the CBSE’s IT ecosystem. Asked why the students have been forced to take matters into their own hands, Nisarga says: “Gen Z holding people accountable is the way to go as some people in high places are full of ego.” As CBSE shifts to competency-based learning, students embrace AI study partners At age 19, when most students are busy with regular schooling, Nisarga had already started interning in tech companies.
The BriefWire