Source TOI
NEW DELHI — Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Sunday launched a sharp attack against the BJP-led Central government after meeting with CBSE Class 12 students who faced severe online trolling and labels like “anti-national,” “Pakistani,” and “Soros agents” for raising concerns over discrepancies in their board examination results.
The controversy surrounds the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) newly implemented digital evaluation platform, the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system. Multiple students flagged major irregularities after accessing scanned copies of their evaluated answer sheets, reporting missing pages, blurred copies, and entirely mismatched handwriting.
Trolled for Demanding Accountability
Taking to social media platform X, Gandhi shared a video of his informal interaction with a student named Vedant Shrivastava and his friends. Vedant’s case had recently gone viral after he discovered that the pages inside the Physics answer sheet uploaded under his roll number did not match his actual handwriting.
Sharing the 90-second video snippet, Gandhi took a sarcastic swipe at the ruling dispensation:
“A revealing chat with my fellow ‘anti-national Soros agents.’ Vedant and his friends are brilliant, brave young Indians who asked CBSE and the Modi government simple questions—but got insults instead of answers.”
In the clip, Vedant recounted the severe internet backlash his family faced after opening a social media account to voice his grievances. “They started calling us anti-national and Pakistani,” the student explained, adding that trolls alleged they were “deep state agents trying to create unrest.”
Gandhi comforted the students, criticizing the tendency to deflect administrative failures onto citizens. “You are students… You’re asking for your answer sheet, that’s all. Now suddenly you become anti-nationals,” Gandhi said in the video. “You have to accept the problem if you want to solve the problem. You’re just refusing to accept the problem. You’re blaming the poor kids and saying… ‘you’re deep state, you’re spies or terrorists’.”
Allegations of Tender Manipulation and “Fraud”
Beyond the immediate relief for the affected students, Gandhi intensified his political onslaught by alleging systematic flaws in the procurement of the OSM system. He claimed that the initial CBSE tender in May 2025 mandated automated robotic scanners to preserve answer-book spines at a minimum of 300 DPI resolution. However, a re-issued tender in August quietly stripped away those specific requirements, lowering the resolution to 200 DPI.
Gandhi alleged that the contracted firm, COEMPT, subsequently scanned answer sheets using mobile phones, resulting in illegible documents and skipped pages. “These are not ‘errors.’ They are the predictable outcome of a contract written to fit a vendor. This is fraud,” he stated, calling for an independent judicial probe and a Special Investigation Team (SIT) inquiry.
Board Response and Technical Interventions
Following intense public scrutiny and opposition pressure, the CBSE acknowledged the discrepancy in Vedant’s case, reviewed the matter, and subsequently shared the correct answer book with him. The board stated that steps are underway to rectify his final results.
The Union Ministry of Education has also stepped in. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan accepted responsibility for the complications, promising that the issues would be comprehensively resolved and that any established wrongdoing would face strict action.
Government sources indicate that cybersecurity and technical experts from IIT-Madras, IIT-Kanpur, and the Digital Infrastructure Corporation of India (DICI) have been deployed to audit and reinforce the vulnerabilities found in the service provider’s OnMark portal. To ensure smooth handling, the board also adjusted its verification and re-evaluation timeline to strengthen the portal’s stability.
