He doesn’t own a phone. He calls himself a dork. He grew up in a city where nobody asked questions. And his revelatory blog was a major reason the CBSE chairman and secretary were transferred.

Sarthak Sidhant is not who you’d expect a whistleblower to look like. Soft-spoken, self-deprecating, and quietly funny, the 18-year-old from Bokaro spent his childhood surrounded by computers: using a mouse at three, raised by two computer engineers who ran their own academy. But it wasn’t technology alone that shaped him. 

He was growing up in Bokaro, a PSU-owned city controlled by a steel plant, where broken roads stayed broken and nobody was accountable to anyone. “You don’t get to question who is your mayor. You don’t get to question roads because they are never going to be fixed.” 

The civic rage never left him.

When his father passed away and the family moved to Ranchi, something shifted. Suddenly there were politicians to question, wards to investigate, potholes to fix. Sarthak started building civic technology tools, including a website that automatically mails the responsible official when someone reports a pothole. That project led him straight into the world of government tenders. And that, eventually, led him to CBSE.

When thousands of students flooded social media with complaints about the botched On-Screen Marking re-evaluation, Sarthak did what most seasoned journalists hadn’t thought to do: he read the tender. What he found raised serious questions about how Coempt Eduteck was selected to carry out the process. He published a blog post. The sources were attached at the bottom. Last week, he presented his findings before a parliamentary panel. Days later, the CBSE chairman and secretary were removed.

In this exclusive, wide-ranging conversation with Manisha Pande, Sarthak talks about all of it. His formative years, losing his father, the inter-caste marriage that made his parents quietly progressive, the internet freedom that made him fearless, and the moment he knew he had a smoking gun. He also talks about going viral without a phone, building a positive echo chamber to deal with trolls, being called antinational, and the one question Manisha couldn’t resist asking – whether all this fame had finally gotten him some female attention.

Sad moment.

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