New Delhi: Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Congress MP Rahul Gandhi on Sunday accused the Centre and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) of compromising the integrity of Class 12 exam evaluations by permitting answer sheets to be scanned on mobile phones — a practice he said amounted to “fraud.”
Gandhi’s charge followed a post by Sarthak Sidhant, a Class 12 student from Jharkhand, who said he found that the board progressively loosened technical specifications across three rounds of tendering, ultimately benefiting the vendor that won the contract, as reported by Hindustan Times.
The Congress leader’s comments come amid growing scrutiny of the CBSE after students and schools reported technical problems with the post-result portal and irregularities in assessed answer scripts.
Tender Changes Highlighted
In an X post, Gandhi pointed to a CBSE tender from May 2025 and said that strict scanning requirements were later watered down in a revised tender.
“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 reissued in August quietly removed all of it. ‘Scanners’ became generic. Resolution dropped to 200 DPI,” Gandhi said.
He also asserted that some answer sheets were in fact digitised using mobile phones.
“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,” Gandhi alleged.
“This is fraud. And every child whose marks were wrongly evaluated is a victim of it,” he added.
Gandhi Targeted PM, Minister
Gandhi singled out Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan for failing to address the controversy.
“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 still sits in office. Modi’s silence is no longer indifference. It is complicity,” Gandhi said.
Sidhant’s Findings
Sidhant, who analysed tender documents posted on the Central Public Procurement portal and later published his observations on his website, said the main problem was that technical and eligibility criteria for the on-screen marking (OSM) contract were progressively relaxed over three Request for Proposal rounds, clearing the way for Coempt EduTeck. He claimed several revisions closely matched the firm’s capabilities.
CBSE Prepares Vendor Penalty
Officials told HT on Sunday that the board plans to penalise its OSM service provider, Coempt Edu Teck, for problems encountered during the online evaluation of Class 12 answer sheets.
The Hyderabad-based company, they said, will face penalties under terms of the tender issued in August 2025.
The August 28 tender specifies a set of financial penalties linked to the time taken to resolve reported issues, including a fine of ₹1 lakh for every 15-minute delay in fixing a problem after a CBSE official reports it to the helpdesk.
The rules also allow the board to withhold security deposits and terminate the contract.
