Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday (June 1) hit out at the Modi government over the CBSE’s re-evaluation process and costs, saying that when education is run like a business, mistakes are multiplied instead of corrected.
He also shared a video of his interaction with students grappling with issues in the Board’s On-Screen Marking (OSM) system.
Questions overs revaluation costs
“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.
Also read | CBSE revaluation row: Rahul slams PM Modi, demands judicial inquiry
A student may have to shell out up to Rs 2,000 merely to verify whether their answer sheet has been evaluated correctly, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said. With nearly four lakh students filing such applications, one can only imagine the revenue being generated by the CBSE, he added.
Questioning the Board’s evaluation system, Rahul said that when answer sheets are scanned using mobile phones, errors become inevitable, yet students are made to pay for correcting them. “The mistake is CBSE’s, the burden falls on the student, and the profit goes to the government,” the former Congress chief said.
“When education is treated as a business rather than a service, mistakes are not corrected – they are multiplied. And it is our children who pay the highest price, with their time, confidence and future,” Rahul said.
Students recount OSM ordeal
Vedant, a Class 12 student, had recently alleged in a post on X that the Physics answer sheet uploaded by the CBSE as part of the revaluation process was not his. The post went viral, prompting several other students to come forward on social media with similar complaints.
In the video, Rahul is seen informally interacting with Vedant, his brother and a group of other students about the difficulties they faced during the process. The clip shows Rahul asking the students about the fees charged for re-evaluation and how the entire process works.
“This is what we are seeing not only in NEET but also in CBSE and across the education sector — education has been financialised. The second issue is over-centralisation. You have taken the entire system and concentrated it in one place. So when something goes wrong, it becomes a critical failure of the whole system.”
Also read | How CBSE’s OSM upgrade turned nightmarish for students | Blurred scans and mix-ups
“On the other hand, in a decentralised system, even if one node fails or another encounters problems, the system can still function. So there is now a structural problem in the Indian education system,” Rahul says in the video while speaking with the students.
This is the second video clip that he has shared from the interaction.
On Sunday, Rahul had also targeted the Centre over the CBSE OSM controversy. Sharing the first clip from his interaction with the students, he described them as brave young Indians who posed simple questions to the Modi government but received “insults instead of answers”.
Stating that the students deserved a bright future, Rahul had said, “We will make sure they get it.”
CBSE responds to complaints
Several CBSE Class 12 students had reported cases of answer-sheet mix-ups after accessing scanned copies uploaded on the portal and discovering that the sheets did not belong to them.
The CBSE subsequently contacted the students concerned and provided them with the correct answer sheets. The Board said it was treating on a “top priority” basis cases involving alleged answer-sheet mismatches and other issues raised by students during the revaluation process.
According to government sources, experts from IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur and the Digital Infrastructure Corporation of India (DICI) are reviewing the system and working to strengthen the portal as well as its payment gateway integration.
(With agency inputs)
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