Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday intensified his attack on the Centre over the CBSE's re-evaluation process, alleging that students are being forced to pay for mistakes made by the examination board. Citing complaints linked to the Board's On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, Rahul claimed that education was increasingly being treated as a business, where students bear the cost of administrative errors.
Sharing a video clip from his interaction with CBSE students who have raised concerns about the OSM system, Rahul questioned the fees charged for obtaining answer sheet copies, re-totalling and re-evaluation.
"Beware of pickpockets - today, they are sitting right inside the CBSE. 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," Rahul said in a post in Hindi on X, accompanying the video clip.
A student may have to pay up to Rs 2,000 just to ensure the accurate evaluation of their own answer sheet, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said.
Just imagine the revenue CBSE is generating when 400,000 students have submitted such applications, he said.
When scanning is done using mobile phones, incorrect marking is inevitable, Rahul said, adding the cost of rectifying those errors is being borne by the student.
"The mistake belongs to the CBSE. The punishment falls on the student. The profit goes to the government," the former Congress chief said.
"When education is treated not as a service, but as a business, errors are not corrected - they are multiplied. And the heaviest price for this is being paid by our children - with their time, their self-confidence, and their future," Rahul said.
The remarks come amid growing concerns raised by students over alleged discrepancies in answer sheets uploaded during the CBSE re-evaluation process.
One such student, Vedant, a Class 12 candidate, had recently alleged on X that the Physics answer sheet uploaded by the CBSE was not his. His post went viral, prompting several other students to come forward with similar complaints.
In the latest video, Rahul is seen speaking informally with Vedant, his brother and other affected students about their experiences. During the interaction, he sought details about the re-evaluation process, associated costs and the functioning of the system.
"This is what we are seeing, not just in NEET, in CBSE, everywhere, that you have financialised the education system. The second is over-centralisation. So you have taken the whole system and you have centralised the whole system. So if there is a problem, it is a critical failure of the system.
"Whereas if you have a decentralised system, then one node fails, another node fails, you can still manage it. So there is a structural problem now in the Indian education system," says Rahul in the video, interacting with the students.
This is the second video clip Rahul has shared from his interaction with the students.
On Sunday, he had posted the first clip and accused the government of failing to address legitimate concerns raised by students regarding the CBSE OSM controversy.
Asserting that the students deserved a bright future, Rahul had said, "We will make sure they get it".
Posting the clip on social media, Rahul had described it as 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," Rahul had said in his post on X, accompanying the video.
"They deserve a bright and secure future. We will make sure they get it," he added.
Several CBSE Class 12 students had reported answer sheet mix-ups after accessing scanned copies on the Board's portal and discovering that the uploaded answer sheets did not belong to them.
The CBSE subsequently contacted the affected students and shared the correct answer sheets. The Board said it had taken up on "top priority" cases involving alleged mismatched answer sheets and other issues faced by students during the revaluation process.
According to government sources, experts from IIT-Madras and IIT-Kanpur, along with the Digital Infrastructure Corporation of India (DICI), are examining the system and working to strengthen the portal and payment gateway integration.
Meanwhile, Coempt, the company responsible for conducting the OSM process for CBSE examinations, has also come under scrutiny after Rahul alleged that the firm had faced controversy under its previous name, Globarena.
Ramesh questions govt's handling of CBSE OSM crisis
Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Monday launched a scathing attack on the Modi government over the CBSE OSM row, saying the "Pradhan Mantri" has never been known to hold himself or his colleagues to any standard of probity or morality but the "Mantri Pradhan" should follow his "rajdharma" and resign.
Ramesh shared a media report on X and said that after denying the cybersecurity vulnerabilities in its On Screen Marking (OSM) system for weeks, the CBSE has finally acknowledged that the system has been compromised.
But what action is it planning to take against its contractor COEMPT, he asked, adding, "not much".
It appears that the COEMPT's benefactors in the CBSE and the Ministry of Education anticipated that COEMPT would not be fit for the task, he said.
In its August 2025 RFP, the CBSE had retained the power to blacklist vendors who were unable to deliver effectively, Ramesh pointed out.
In September, the CBSE issued a corrigendum which took away its own power to blacklist these vendors, he said.
"This is an inexplicable, government-backed attempt to save COEMPT, and it began even before COEMPT got the contract officially," Ramesh said in his post on X.
How much longer will the nation have to put up with Mantri Pradhan, whose Ministry has overseen and enabled such unfathomable irregularities in its tenders and which has cost lakhs of students their mental well-being, Ramesh asked taking a swipe at Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
"Mantri Pradhan is the very epitome of arrogance and incompetence, insistent on putting his political agenda above and beyond any responsibility to the nation," he alleged.
"The Pradhan Mantri (PM Narendra Modi) has never been known to hold himself or his colleagues to any standard of probity or morality. But the Mantri Pradhan should follow his rajdharma and resign," Ramesh said.