After the results were published by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), one of India’s largest school-leaving examination boards, intense student discontent has erupted across the country. The anger arose after the results of the exams — held from 17 February to 10 April — were published on 13 May, when one report of fraud and mismanagement after another came to light. The hasty rollout of a digital answer-script evaluation process has now thrown the future of more than 1.7 million students into uncertainty. The affair has generated intense anger against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, and demands for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan are growing louder.
The CBSE board, which has more than 30,000 affiliated schools, this year introduced the “on-screen marking” (OSM) method to evaluate tens of millions of answer scripts. Under this method, exam scripts are scanned, converted into digital images and uploaded to a platform, and examiners evaluate them on computers. But blurry scans, technical faults, server outages and the failure to resolve problems in time have cast a shadow of doubt over the entire results system.
Just six months before the exams, CBSE relaxed its rules and handed the task to the Hyderabad-based firm “Qoempt Edu Tech.” The firm’s past record is quite controversial. In April 2019, a firm called “Globarena Technologies” was responsible for digitising exam scripts in the state of Telangana, where faulty results caused 40 percent of students to fail and at least 20 students to take their own lives. That same firm was later renamed “Qoempt Edu Tech” and won this CBSE work.
Academics and teachers had earlier expressed concern about the OSM method. This time, however, students themselves brought the fraud and negligence into the open on social media. A student named Vedant Srivastava, after applying for a review of his exam script, found that the scanned copy CBSE had sent him was not his script at all — the handwriting was completely different. After his post on X (formerly Twitter) was shared more than 13,000 times, CBSE admitted the error, checked the script manually and corrected his result.
Sarthak Siddhant, an 18-year-old student from Ranchi, published detailed information on his blog showing how a major government institution had changed its own rules to hand a blacklisted or controversial firm the responsibility for conducting a national-level exam. Nisarg Adhikari, a 19-year-old from Bengaluru, exposed a security flaw in CBSE’s on-screen marking portal. He showed how it was possible to break the master password, enter the system as an examiner and change marks. Although he had informed CBSE of the matter last February, it had not been fixed by the time the results were published.
Pranesh Prakash, co-founder of the Centre for Internet and Society, told Al Jazeera there is no system in India to encourage researchers to flag technical faults or security weaknesses. Delhi University teacher Apoorvanand said: “This disaster is not a single incident. The National Testing Agency (NTA), an autonomous body under the education ministry, was already at the centre of controversy over national competitive exams and question-paper leaks.” He added: “Students have lost faith in institutions, and any expression of dissent here is being treated as a crime. When one student spoke up about the script mismatch, a presenter on the state channel Doordarshan called him ‘Pakistani,’ though he later apologised after CBSE admitted the error.”
In the face of this intense controversy, the government on Tuesday transferred CBSE’s chairman and secretary to other departments. But opposition parties sharply criticised the move as an attempt to protect the “real culprit,” the education minister, and to divert attention by making bureaucrats scapegoats. Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi said on social media: “Our demand is still the same — sack the education minister and form an independent investigation committee.” Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal said the transfer was like rubbing salt into the wounds of tens of millions of children and their parents, and that through it the government was signalling it would not change the education minister.
Meanwhile, since the results were published, CBSE’s script re-evaluation website has been down, so many dissatisfied students cannot even apply — leaving them with intense anger and frustration. (Source: Al Jazeera)
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report