Show of Strength, Test of Will on the Cards as Cockroach Janata Party's Dipke Plans Jantar Mantar; No End in Sight to CBSE Fiasco
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Snapshot of the day
June 1, 2026
Siddharth Varadarajan
Days after insisting that its on-screen marking portal is fine, the CBSE yesterday noted that it has been monitoring the ‘vulnerabilities’ on it that are being publicly flagged and claimed that they ‘have been contained’. However, the re-evaluation portal which was meant to go ‘live’ on June 1 after being delayed by two days, was still not operational as of Monday night.
The board is likely to act against Coempt EduTeck Private Limited, the Hyderabad-based company that it tasked with building the online marking portal, now that these issues have come to the fore but Sanjay Maurya reports that the CBSE is unlikely to be able to blacklist Coempt because its contract does not have provisions to let it do so for lapses of this kind. “Indeed, the blacklisting criterion made it into the August tender, but was removed in a corrigendum issued on September 20,” he writes. All this while, as this analysis notes, the CBSE’s portal travails have been amplified by the fact that it is teenagers who have shone a light on them.
The deficiencies in the CBSE’s on-screen marking system is one among the various points of consternation among India’s youth that the rise of the Cockroach Janta Party points to – now the satirical outfit’s founder Abhijit Dipke has said he will travel to India on June 6 to demand Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation. The Modi government has sought to curb the roaches’ online reach by having its X account and, for some time, its website withheld from Indian internet users. An early test of the movement’s appeal – and the government’s willingness to crack down on any opposition to itself – is on the cards as Dipke wants to hold a protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. In an interview to The Hindu, Dipke says he “will continue to use every constitutional means available to make people’s voices heard, including satire, and hopes to create a lasting movement” out of the viral handle he created.
Speaking of students, some two dozen candidates for Uttar Pradesh’s BEd exam had gathered at a computer centre in Kanpur to print out photocopies
