Congress MP Rahul Gandhi has escalated his offensive against the government and the Central Board of Secondary Education over allegations of corruption in the procurement of the Class 12 On-Screen Marking (OSM) system. He highlighted explosive new claims suggesting that student answer sheets were crudely scanned using mobile phones rather than professional industrial equipment.
Following a personal meeting with several students who have become the face of the ongoing protest against CBSE's maiden digital evaluation drive, Gandhi amplified a document-based investigation spearheaded by student researcher Sarthak Sidhant. Taking to social media platform X, the Congress leader accused the private vendor contracted to digitise the answer books, COEMPT Edu Teck, of utilising mobile phones for scanning after crucial technical criteria were quietly diluted during the tendering process.
Gandhi pointed out that while CBSE’s initial May 2025 tender explicitly mandated the use of automatic robotic scanners to preserve paper spines at a minimum resolution of 300 DPI, a revised tender issued in August systematically stripped away these safeguards. He alleged that the board deliberately tweaked the contract parameters to favour a specific firm, making the institution complicit in what he termed a widespread fraud against nearly 18.5 lakh students. He stated that problems faced by the students like blurring of pages, missing sheets, and lack of evaluation of booklets were not mere technical glitches but the unavoidable result of a defective agreement. He also criticised the Prime Minister Narendra Modi for remaining silent about the problem and called upon him to resign immediately from his position as Minister of Education.
These claims about the structure received more credence after revelations made by 19-year-old ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary, whose research revealed significant weaknesses in the OSM platform. According to him, he had been able to exploit the security loopholes in the system to enable unauthenticated access to answer scripts of students through the portal. Upon examining the images made public by Nisarga, Sarthak Sidhant observed the presence of distinct drop shadows and paper folds on the scanned papers—features associated with mobile phone scans.
The technology-driven revolution that was pitched by the committee to fast-track evaluation and avoid human errors is now creating an unparalleled credibility crisis for the board. The situation worsened following a marked drop in the performance levels of Class 12 students this year, where the aggregate pass rate reduced to 85.2 percent from 88.39 percent along with an alarming increase in compartment candidates. Students all across the nation have protested against the absurdly low marks in major subjects such as Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics.
The situation has been compounded by alarming administrative blunders. In one instance, a Delhi student discovered that the Physics answer script uploaded under his roll number belonged to entirely another candidate— an error CBSE later acknowledged and corrected. Since then, numerous other students have come forward claiming the digital scripts assigned to them do not match their own handwriting or presentation style.
Compounding the anxiety, the board's official re-evaluation portal repeatedly crashed under the weight of traffic, forcing multiple deadline extensions. Whilst CBSE initially downplayed the severity of the system failures, the board finally conceded on Sunday that vulnerabilities existed within a portal managed by its third-party service provider. A team of cybersecurity experts, government specialists, and tech professionals from various IITs has now been deployed to secure the compromised digital infrastructure.
Also read: CBSE opens re-evaluation window for Class 12 board exam today
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