Rahul Gandhi attacked the BJP govt over CBSE exam evaluation issues, alleging students were targeted. He highlighted tender irregularities and accused PM Modi of complicity, while CBSE deployed cybersecurity experts to fix vulnerabilities.
Continuing his attack on the government over the problems faced by students related to the evaluation and post-result processes of the CBSE Class 12 examinations, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday alleged that some of them had been targeted on social media for raising questions.
Rahul Gandhi, who has faced allegations in the past from the BJP over alleged links to American billionaire George Soros, hit back at the BJP-led government at the Centre. The Congress has denied the allegations.
Rahul Gandhi interacts with ‘anti-national Soros agents’
“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. They deserve a bright and secure future. We will make sure they get it,” Rahul Gandhi said in a post on X. The Congress leader also shared a video of his interaction with students.
“Soros? Soros has entered the picture here too. Pakistan, Soros… everyone has been brought into this,” he said during the interaction. A student said that after obtaining a copy of his Physics answer sheet, he discovered that “a portion of it did not contain his handwriting”. The student said he later raised the issue on X, following which the matter gained public attention, but they were targeted.
‘This is fraud’: Gandhi alleges tender manipulation
Rahul Gandhi kept up his attack on the government in another post. “CBSE’s May 2025 tender required answer sheets to be scanned with automatic robotic scanners, spines preserved, at a minimum of 300 DPI. The tender re-issued in August quietly removed all of it. “Scanners” became generic. Resolution dropped to 200 DPI,” he said.
“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. And every child whose marks were wrongly evaluated is a victim of it,” he added.
The Congress leader also attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “This morning, the Prime Minister had time to speak about mangoes. He has not had time to speak about 18.5 lakh children whose answer sheets were scanned with phones. Dharmendra Pradhan ji still sits in office. Modi ji’s silence is no longer indifference. It is complicity,” Rahul Gandhi said.
CBSE deploys cybersecurity experts, fortifies system
Amid the ongoing controversy surrounding its On-Screen Marking (OSM) evaluation process, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) on Sunday said it has been closely monitoring vulnerabilities flagged in the OnMark portal of its service provider and has deployed cybersecurity experts to strengthen the system.
In a post on X, CBSE said an expert team comprising cybersecurity professionals from various government agencies and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has been working over the past few days to secure the platform.
CBSE stated that the identified vulnerabilities have been contained and efforts are underway to ensure that no other exploitable weaknesses remain in the system. The board also thanked alert citizens and ethical hackers who pointed out potential security issues and said it had directly engaged with some of them. “We have been closely monitoring the vulnerabilities in the OnMark portal of our service provider that are being flagged in the public domain. An expert team of cybersecurity professionals has been deployed over the last few days from across various arms of the government as well as the IITs to fortify these systems, including taking them over to a more secure set up. The identified vulnerabilities have been contained, and other exploitable weaknesses are being ruled out. We are grateful to all alert citizens and ethical hackers pointing out such weaknesses, and have gotten in touch with some of them directly,” CBSE said.
This comes at a time when the CBSE is facing mounting pressure following reports of technical failures in its post-result portal and discrepancies in evaluated answer sheets. (ANI)
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Asianet Newsable English staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)