One of the biggest and most wide-ranging recent news scoops in India, exposing alleged government misdeeds in the awarding of educational software contracts, was broken on social media by students with no journalism training.
On May 22, three teenagers — Nisarg Adhikari, Vedant Srivastava, and Sarthak Sidhant, all in their final year of schooling — scooped education reporters across India by posting on social media allegations of malpractice following their own investigations into the way the country’s Central Board of Secondary Education awarded contracts for its new on-screen marking system. The system is used to grade the so-called Class 12 exams that over 1.7 million Indian students take each year to determine where they qualify to seek university admission.
The three students, all 17-years-old, had found discrepancies in their own answer sheets, which prompted them to independently investigate problems in the evaluation system. Sarthak looked at the bidding process through which the government chose a private operator to get the contract, Nisarga found cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the system, and Vedant discovered instances where students’ answers had been mixed up.
Nisarg, a self-described “ethical hacker,” detailed how he was able to bypass government security protocols to access the CBSE’s website and servers and view personal information from students and teachers. Nisarg said he was also able to see digitized answer sheets assigned to examiners, and modify and tamper with the papers. Vedant exposed what he said were discrepancies in the grade marking system. And Sarthak revealed in a social media post that the “password for a superadmin account with full read/write access to national exam data [was] literally 123456.” Sarthak also discovered, by scouring procurement guidelines and looking through financial clauses, how education officials in the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had allegedly manipulated the contracting process to favor one company, the Hyderabad-based Coempt Eduteck. The company then ran into significant operational issues with the rollout of the system, including students’ answer sheets reportedly being mixed up, digital marks that didn’t match the original sheets, and entries that were blurred so they couldn’t be properly scanned or graded.
For journalists, it is hard to know whether this saga is more ridiculous or shameful. It represents one of the most consequential recent exposés in the education sector, a revelation of remarkable scale, made all the more striking by the fact that the story was cracked open by schoolchildren with no affiliation even to a student-run publication. Their social media posts about it went viral, triggering a flood of similar complaints from students all over the country about errors, and resulting in over 4 million requesting copies of their answer sheets to verify how accurately they had been marked. Students also demanded that the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, be removed.
In Modi’s three terms as prime minister, this has seemingly become the only investigation to which his administration has responded at least in part in good faith. Sarthak was invited by a parliamentary standing committee to submit his findings, and the chairman and the secretary of the CBSE were transferred in gestures meant to appease the students (though they were not suspended). These slaps on the wrist hardly represent substantial disciplinary action, but for a government known for protecting its ranks, it marks an unusual concession. Political analysts say the government is keen to avoid a youth backlash, as it has kept a close eye on the Gen Z protests that went viral on social media, spreading across South Asia and toppling governments in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal over the past two years.
During the tumultuous week that this scandal was unfolding in India, if anyone turned to legacy media seeking explanations for what was happening, they were bound to be disappointed. India’s mainstream journalists — barring a few independent outlets like The Wire and The New Minute — if they covered the story at all, did so by characterizing it as teenagers making mischief with headlines like “CBSE vs. Students,” rather than covering the newsworthy scandal itself. NDTV, the country’s biggest television news channel, which is owned by billionaire Gautam Adani, did not have a single report about the scandal on its homepage through the week. One had to search the “education” tab on the channel’s website to find brief reports that repeated the government’s narrative, including statements justifying the contracting process.
While the media dithered, the robust propaganda machine of the government — led by Ashok Shrivastav, journalist and prime-time host at the state-funded channel Doordarshan News — accused the students of being “Pakistanis.” Internet “troll armies” labeled them “anti-national Soros agents,” and in one case, even called them “terrorists.” Parents were alarmed enough to take to social media to defend their children.
It represents one of the most consequential recent exposés in the education sector ... made all the more striking by the fact that the story was cracked open by schoolchildren with no affiliation even to a student-run publication.
A week after the exposé, when the CBSE had admitted to the vulnerabilities in the system that had been highlighted by the students, a few newsrooms were finally covering the story. But several did so by branding the investigative work that had been done by the students as their own “exclusives,” prompting Sarthak to call out CNN News18 and Times Now for not giving him proper credit.
After more than a decade under the rule of a prime minister who has made a point of repressing independent media, I no longer expect anything from legacy outlets except madness, meanness, and mendacity. However, to me the cowardice on the media’s part to not cover a story with such a huge impact on schoolchildren — who themselves had already done the work of investigating it — is a new low. The state of journalism in India now represents an intellectual violence so predatory that it seemingly does not mind wounding its own children.
This is characteristic of journalism under Modi: It does not consider the community it is reporting on as a moral equal to the government or powerful business interests. It’s a variety of journalism in which the communities we report on — schoolchildren in this case — are incidental to the story, footnotes, really. And it is a practice of journalism that has actively lowered aspirations: telling people not to expect the government to serve us, instead training media consumers to serve the government, to endure and be patient, and to not ask questions, but instead blindly accept whatever garbage is served to them in official press releases. It is journalism that has metastasised and is now eating away at the society it is supposed to serve.
In the case of the exam scandal, the real story is not the noteworthy investigation in itself; it is that young students with no resources were able to scoop seasoned journalists with institutional backing and the means to investigate. It is a particularly shameful example of a story hidden in plain sight, because similar controversies have plagued other national exams this year, including at medical colleges, undergraduate programs and engineering schools.
It has left newsrooms with a difficult question: Is this the organic end point of a media culture that prioritizes opinions over investigations?
As for the children, they are all right. They seem to have a functioning moral compass that is now holding our leaders to account. They are serving as social media influencers, advocates for transparency, and investigative journalists. India’s youth seem to see this government of geriatrics for exactly what it is. Many of them also foresee the inevitable consequences of the current road India is on — unlivable cities, poisoned rivers, deforested lands — and are acting with the urgency one would expect if their future depended on it.
India’s journalists, though, are the real problem. For decades to come, we will be dealing with the fallout inflicted by their mediocrity.
