Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday intensified his criticism of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), accusing it of treating education as a business rather than a public service and questioning the costs imposed on students seeking re-evaluation of their answer sheets.
The Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha also shared a video of his interaction with CBSE students who claim to have faced problems linked to the Board's controversial On-Screen Marking (OSM) system.
“Beware of pickpockets — today, they are sitting right inside the CBSE,” Gandhi said in a post on X.
“If your marks are incorrect due to a CBSE error, what do you get? A bill: Digital scanned copy — Rs 100 per subject. Re-totalling — Rs 100 per paper. Re-evaluation — Rs 25 per question,” he added.
Gandhi claimed that a student could end up spending nearly Rs 2,000 to get an answer sheet properly reviewed and questioned how much revenue the Board was generating when lakhs of students sought such corrections.
“When scanning was done with a phone, wrong marking is a given. And the child is footing the bill to get it fixed,” he alleged.
The Congress leader further argued that the system unfairly burdens students for mistakes they did not commit.
“The mistake belongs to the CBSE. The punishment falls on the student. The profit goes to the government,” he said.
Among the students featured in Gandhi's interaction was Vedant, a Class 12 student who recently alleged in a post on X that the Physics answer sheet uploaded by the CBSE as part of the re-evaluation process did not belong to him.
In the video, Gandhi is seen asking students about the re-evaluation process, the associated costs and the difficulties they encountered while seeking corrections.
“This is what we are seeing not just in NEET, but in CBSE and elsewhere — the education system has been financialised,” Gandhi said.
“The second issue is over-centralisation. The entire system has been centralised. So when there is a problem, it becomes a critical failure of the whole system,” he added.
The remarks come amid an ongoing controversy over the CBSE's On-Screen Marking system, which has drawn criticism from some students and parents over alleged evaluation errors.
Responding to the concerns on Sunday, the CBSE said it had closely monitored vulnerabilities flagged in the OnMark portal operated by its service provider and had deployed cybersecurity experts to strengthen the system and address potential risks.
