Nisarga Adhikary, the 19-year-old cybersecurity researcher whose disclosures about CBSE’s On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal fed into this year’s series of controversies around exams, on Friday join at the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi.
Event Context
He posted on X a photo with CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and NCP (SP) spokesperson Anish Gawande. “The energy here is truly crazy,” he wrote.
His appearance sparked celebratory comments by fellow Gen-Z protesters that “the hacker is here now!”.
It comes as the protest enters its seventh week, with a government delegation and CJP representatives having held a fresh round of talks on Friday, and the deadlock persisting over the demand for education minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign.
Adhikary has said he began examining OSM’s publicly accessible code in February and flagged what he called a hard-coded “master password” to government agency CERT-In — as ethical hackers or whistleblowers do.
The CJP itself began as a satirical social media response — founded and named thus after some comments by Chief Justice of India Surya kant in May — before evolving into a street movement. It has held its Jantar Mantar protest since June 20, demanding Pradhan’s resignation and wider reforms in the examination system.
Activist Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger strike, begun June 28, escalated the agitation nationally, drawing declared support from the TMC, DMK and NCP (SP), plus the Congress and others on a parallel track.
The government has since replaced the CBSE top brass and, this week, changed the Union education secretary too.
Team Analysis
Nisarga Adhikary was one of three teenagers at the centre of the CBSE controversy, alongside Vedant Shrivastava, who received a mismatched answer sheet, and Sarthak Sidhant, who investigated CBSE’s tendering process and collaborated with Adhikary online.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi met Shrivastava and Sidhant in person and shared their accounts on X, crediting them with exposing what major media houses had not. Adhikary was also praised in the same post as Sidhant’s “associate”.
As for the CJP and its demands, Friday’s meeting between Union ministers JP Nadda and Jitendra Singh and CJP spokespersons Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka lasted about two hours. This was the second direct engagement between the two sides this week.
Then came differing accounts from both parties on what was discussed and agreed. The CJP said the government is not yet fine with the resignation demand, though two other demands got “in-principle agreement”.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, meanwhile, has promised fast-track courts and stricter punishment for paper-leak offences.
Match Outlook
He went public in May, saying the flaws let him bypass the OTP or authetication step and reach the examiner’s dashboard, where marks could be viewed and edited. CBSE’s initial response was that his screenshots came from a testing URL, separate from the live evaluation portal; the board later said identified vulnerabilities had been “contained”. The disclosures brought him national spotlight, and in interviews he explained what he did, never revealing his face though. He wore a mask at the CJP site too.
IIT Kanpur director Manindra Agrawal, after reading Adhikary’s blog post, brought him onto C3iHub, the institute’s cybersecurity hub, as a threat intelligence engineer, on contractual appointment. Adhikary called the pay “decent” but below what he’d earned in dollars in freelance work with US clients.
The OSM row landed as Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan was already under fire over the NEET-UG paper leak.
