New Delhi : Congress MP Rahul Gandhi stepped up his attack on the government and the CBSE over allegations of corruption in the board’s tender process for the Class 12 on-screen marking (OSM) system. After a sit-down chat with students who became the public face of the controversy over CBSE’s first-ever digital evaluation exercise, Gandhi now amplified concerns raised by student researcher Sarthak Sidhant, whose document-based investigation blew the lid on how the board awarded the contract for the online marking portal.
In a post on X, the Congress leader accused the private vendor responsible for digitising answer books, COEMPT Edu Teck, of using mobile phones to scan physical answer sheets after key technical requirements were diluted during the tender process. “CBSE’s May 2025 tender required answer sheets to be scanned with automatic robotic scanners, spines preserved, at a minimum of 300 DPI.
“‘Scanners’ became generic. Resolution dropped to 200 DPI. Now we know what that meant in practice. It has been exposed that COEMPT scanned the answer sheets using mobile phones. The blurred copies, the missing pages, the unscanned books — they are not ‘errors’. They are the predictable outcome of a contract written to fit a vendor. This is fraud,” he said. Taking aim at the government, he said Prime Minister Narendra Modi had remained silent on the issue despite concerns affecting nearly 18.5 lakh students.
Nisarga shared screenshots of scanned answer booklets and claimed that security safeguards could be bypassed, allowing “anyone on the internet” to access and download answer-sheet scans. While examining the images shared online, Sarthak Sidhant pointed to another anomaly. He observed visible drop shadows and fold marks on several scanned answer sheets.
The board’s first nationwide rollout of OSM was pitched as a technology-driven overhaul that would make evaluation faster, more transparent and less vulnerable to human error. Instead, it unleashed chaos. What began as scattered complaints over unexpectedly low marks has, over the past two weeks, snowballed into one of the biggest credibility crises faced by the CBSE in recent years.
The anger was amplified by a sharp fall in Class 12 performance indicators. The pass percentage dropped to 85.2 per cent from 88.39 per cent last year, while compartment cases rose. Students across states alleged that scores in subjects such as Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics were inexplicably lower than expected.A Delhi student discovered that the Physics answer book uploaded against his roll number appeared to belong to somebody else.
Amid this, a bombshell dropped: that CBSE relaxed key eligibility norms while awarding the digitisation contract. Sarthak claimed his investigation revealed that certain technical and security requirements were diluted between the board’s initial tender issued in May and a revised version released in August. Separately, Nisarga Adhikary hacked the OSM portal twice, flagging major security flaws in the ecosystem.
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