Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday criticized Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the CBSE On-Screen Marking (OSM) controversy, stating that the Prime Minister had time to discuss mangoes in his monthly radio address but not 18.5 lakh children whose answer sheets were scanned using mobile phones. Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, said Modi's silence on the matter is no longer indifference but “complicity.”
In his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ broadcast on Sunday morning, Modi spoke about mango varieties from different regions, including Hapus from Maharashtra, Kesar from Gujarat, Dussehri from Uttar Pradesh, and others from Bihar and south India. He noted that every region has its own mango with unique aroma, form, colour, and taste, and that the fruit's journey is reaching from villages to the global market.
Gandhi, in a post on X, pointed out that the CBSE’s May 2025 tender required answer sheets to be scanned with automatic robotic scanners, preserving spines, at a minimum of 300 DPI. He said the tender re-issued in August quietly removed those specifications, making scanners generic, dropping resolution to 200 DPI. He alleged that COEMPT scanned the answer sheets using mobile phones, leading to blurred copies, missing pages, and unscanned books.
“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,” Gandhi said, calling it fraud and stating that every child whose marks were wrongly evaluated is a victim. He added that Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan still holds office, and Modi’s silence amounts to complicity.
Gandhi also shared a video of his interaction with a group of students, describing them as brave young Indians who asked the Modi government simple questions but received “insults instead of answers.” He asserted that the students deserved a bright future and said, “We will make sure they get it.”
The CBSE OSM controversy has raised concerns among students and parents about the integrity of the evaluation process. The scanning and marking irregularities have left many students uncertain about their results, with calls for accountability and justice growing louder.
