Nisarga Adhikary's cybersecurity career has taken him from finding vulnerabilities in India's CBSE examination infrastructure to being recognised by the US Department of Justice. But the 19-year-old researcher believes that India's rank fetish and habit of rewarding mugging up PCM is hurting the tech ecosystem. "India keeps rewarding mugging up PCM and then wonders where the hackers went. JEE is not computer science. GATE is not cybersecurity. rank is not competence. Our examination fetish is killing technical talent," he said in his blog just before getting the recognition from US department of Justice.
In a recent blog post, Adhikary has criticised what he calls India's "examination fetish", arguing that an education system obsessed with ranks, scores and credentials can overlook the skills that matter in technology. His has argued that a rank can measure performance in an examination, but it cannot by itself measure whether someone can build, break or understand a computer system.
Adhikary's comments come at a time when his own career has become an example of the alternative route he advocates.
He first drew national attention in 2026 after publishing details of vulnerabilities he said he had found in the CBSE On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal. He had reported the issues to CERT-In in February before publishing his findings in May. IIT Kanpur subsequently appointed him as an OSINT and Threat Intelligence Engineer at C3iHub. Recently, Adhikary is also named on the US Department of Justice's cybersecurity acknowledgements after reporting what he described as a critical vulnerability in one of the department's law-enforcement systems. The DoJ reportedly validated and patched the issue before crediting him.
'Rank is the fetish object'
Adhikary's criticism is not that examinations have no value. He acknowledges that exams such as JEE can test mathematical ability, discipline and performance under pressure. India also needs a scalable mechanism to allocate a limited number of seats at institutions such as the IITs.
