Rahul Gandhi’s CBSE marking attack turns political
CBSE is defending a new digital evaluation system as Rahul Gandhi pushes a judicial probe, turning a grading dispute into a credibility test.
Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday escalated the Class 12 on-screen marking controversy into a direct attack on the board and the Education Ministry, demanding an independent judicial inquiry and an SIT into what he called “massive tampering” in CBSE results, while naming Coempt Edu Teck as the contractor at the center of the row (
The Indian Express). CBSE’s response was political as much as procedural: it said Gandhi’s claims were “erroneous, misleading, and not based on facts,” and insisted the contract was awarded after a public RFP and under General Financial Rules protocols (The Indian Express).
Why this matters
The fight is really over trust in the machinery. CBSE introduced on-screen marking for Class 12 this year, scanning answer books and having evaluators grade them digitally on a portal; Gandhi says that system was handed to a firm with a bad record, while CBSE says it chose the “qualified bidder” through the Centre’s procurement process (The Indian Express). That distinction matters because a procurement defense does not answer the larger question now hanging over the rollout: whether a digital system that handled nearly 98 lakh answer books can be trusted to deliver clean student-level results at scale (
Outlook India).
The opposition has found a potent line of attack because the complaints are tangible. Students and parents have reported mismatched answer sheets, blurred scans, missing pages and portal crashes during the re-evaluation process, and the Education Ministry has asked IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur to examine the technical failures, including portal stability and payment-gateway problems (Outlook India; 
The Hindu BusinessLine). That gives Rahul Gandhi a ready-made political frame: if the system is opaque, then every glitch becomes evidence of mismanagement rather than a one-off error.
CBSE’s leverage — and its vulnerability
CBSE still holds the operational cards. It controls the verification portal, the re-evaluation timeline and the fixes for any bad scans or mismatched scripts; the board has said the portal for verification and re-evaluation should be available this week once all requested scanned copies are sent in (The Indian Express). If CBSE can move quickly, show audit trails and correct any errors case by case, this becomes a technical rollout problem. If it cannot, the issue will spread beyond procurement and into the broader competence of the Education Ministry.
The political beneficiary right now is the Congress, which can use the controversy to connect student anxiety with a larger narrative of exam governance failure. The loser is CBSE, because in a high-stakes exam system even a few visible mistakes can contaminate confidence in the whole process.
What to watch next
The next decision point is the reopening of the verification and re-evaluation portal, followed by whatever the IIT review uncovers about the system’s stability and data handling (Outlook India). If CBSE discloses clear fixes and a credible audit trail, the row may narrow to implementation. If not, Gandhi will keep the story alive as a wider indictment of 
India’s exam machinery and digital governance.
