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)...
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