Following his high-profile exposure of CBSE grading irregularities, 18-year-old Sarthak Sidhant has released a searchable, open-source portal archiving 1.66 crore public procurement files to combat corruption and democratise access to government contract spending.
Sarthak Sidhant, an 18-year-old student and whistleblower from Jharkhand, has publicly launched an open-source civic-tech portal aimed at democratising access to public procurement data. Guided by the principle that “transparency needs to be accessible”, the project is designed to simplify and shed light on government contracts—a sector where Sidhant notes massive procurement-related corruption quietly occurs.
Over a two-week period, Sidhant built and deployed a custom high-throughput scraper to systematically crawl, extract, and clean data from the Government of India’s official, highly complex Central Public Procurement Portal (CPPP). The operation successfully extracted and structured records from 1.66 crore (16.6 million) public files, compressing the raw text into two highly optimised, flat SQLite databases hosting over 8.8 million structured records. These databases map public expenditure paths, tracking everything from initial tender requests to final monetary award selections.
Sidhant shot into the national spotlight in late May 2026 after auditing 576 public procurement records to expose systematic irregularities in how the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) managed its On-Screen Marking (OSM) digital evaluation contract. His investigation revealed that the CBSE had rewritten its rulebook across successive bidding rounds—wiping out standard “poor performance” and “historical blacklisting” safety clauses—to artificially favour the winning vendor, Coempt EduTeck. Coempt was a rebranded avatar of Globarena Technologies, the firm heavily implicated in a catastrophic evaluation crisis in Telangana in 2019.
The findings triggered a massive national row. Hours after Sidhant presented his evidence before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education in New Delhi and met with opposition leaders, the Central Government intervened, ordering a formal inquiry and removing the top leadership of the CBSE, including the Chairman and Secretary.
By hosting the complete dataset for free download on his personal portal (sarthaksiddhant.com), Sidhant has extended an open invitation to developers, data scientists, investigative journalists, and researchers. The initiative aims to build a community-led auditing team capable of writing custom analytics models over the open SQLite databases to flag suspicious bids, monitor public spending, and enforce systemic accountability.
