India, June 2 -- Leader of the Opposition and Congress MP Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday evening met Sarthak Sidhant, the 17-year-old whose blog exposed alleged irregularities in the procurement of the CBSE's On-Screen Marking (OSM) system. He is the second teenaged whistleblower - of the three overall - whom Gandhi has publicly backed in three days.

The meeting came hours after Sidhant deposed before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, sharing his probe; hours after which the Narendra Modi government changed the CBSE chairman and ordered an inquiry into the OSM procurement.

Sidhant says he caught "at least 15 discrepancies" in successive CBSE tenders, and that rules were rewritten to favour the firm running OSM, Coempt EduTeck;...