New Delhi: Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi continued his attack on the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) even as it began a re-evaluation process of Class 12 answer sheets, where some nine lakh scanned copies have reportedly been shared online with students.
“Seventeen-year-old Sarthak Sidhant has exposed how CBSE manipulated its own selection process to benefit COEMPT, using CBSE’s own documents,” the Congress leader wrote in a post on X on Friday.
“The details in his blog reveal how CBSE changed the RFP to unduly benefit COEMPT, at the cost of TCS,” he stated.
“He has revealed the hollowness of Dharmendra Pradhan ji’s denials. The PM remains silent, as usual. The question is simple: who are they protecting, and why?” Rahul Gandhi repeated, echoing his earlier posts.
He had alleged that the evaluation contract was manipulated to favour a company called Coempt Edu Teck and claimed there was “massive tampering” in CBSE exam results, describing it as a “deliberate conspiracy”.
While the CBSE dismissed Gandhi’s allegations of impropriety in the award of the contract, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders reminded the LoP that the same company had been awarded projects by institutions in Telangana and Karnataka, both governed by the Congress.
On Thursday, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan chaired a high-level review meeting at the CBSE headquarters in the national capital to review issues related to the evaluation and post-result processes of Class 12 examinations.
Rahul Gandhi also reiterated his demand for a judicial inquiry, writing: “An independent judicial inquiry is now essential to uncover the full extent of this scam.”
He added: “Sarthak’s work shows that India’s Gen Z is brilliant and fearless. And sooner or later, they will find out the full truth.”
Sarthak, a Class 12 student, wrote in his blog that he was among “the 17 lakh students that have been affected by the On Screen Marking (OSM) system” introduced by the CBSE.
Claiming to have investigated CBSE tenders over the past few days, he highlighted what he described as loopholes in the system.
A political slugfest has emerged over alleged irregularities in the digital evaluation system used by the CBSE for NEET and other examinations.
The controversy began with a student, Vedant Shrivastava, whose concerns regarding marks and evaluation transparency raised questions about the integrity of the process.
Vedant applied for a photocopy of his Physics answer sheet on May 19 after receiving what he believed were unexpectedly low marks.
Four days later, he posted on X that the answer sheet emailed to him by the CBSE did not match his handwriting and clearly belonged to another student.
The CBSE later rectified the error and sent him the correct answer sheet, which Vedant acknowledged in a subsequent social media post.
(IANS)
