‘PM Wants Youth to Make Reels, Fry Pakodas’: Rahul Slams Modi on CBSE OSM Row

The Central Board of Secondary Education finds itself at the center of a major national controversy over its newly implemented digital evaluation infrastructure known as the On Screen Marking system for Class 12 examinations. Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi escalated his political opposition against Prime Minister Narendra Modi by publishing an intensive video discussion featuring 18 year old student Sarthak Sidhant from Jharkhand alongside his technical partner Nisarga Adhikary. The teenage whistleblower systematically analyzed public data to expose severe deviations in how government evaluation contracts were managed and distributed. Rahul Gandhi noted that while the Prime Minister publicly encourages the young population to focus on producing social media reels and running local snack businesses like frying pakodas instead of scrutinizing authority, these determined students decided to comb through state procurement portals to reveal systemic administrative dysfunction. The unfolding crisis has severely damaged public confidence among millions of academic candidates and parents who rely on the absolute precision of national secondary education assessments.

The root of this massive structural failure traces back to a sequence of altered state tender documents that systematically diminished baseline technological requirements. A primary tender issued in May 2025 explicitly stipulated that Class 12 examination booklets must be processed using high speed automatic robotic scanners operating at a minimum threshold of 300 dots per inch while preserving the physical binding spines of the booklets. However, a revised bidding document published in August 2025 quietly removed these critical technical guarantees, substituting them with generic scanning definitions and dropping the required resolution benchmark to 200 dots per inch. The independent student investigation revealed that the selected private technology vendor, Coempt Edu Teck, frequently utilized standard mobile phones to photograph and process the official physical answer documents. This massive operational regression explains why thousands of high school students subsequently received digital verification copies marred by extreme blurriness, massive drop shadows, prominent physical fold marks, and entirely omitted pages. The deliberate shift in regulatory standards across 3 separate rounds of bidding indicates a calculated effort to favor a specific private enterprise rather than securing the most capable technical infrastructure.

The institutional management of this vital academic transition demonstrates a profound lack of oversight and severe operational negligence. When the official verification infrastructure opened for public evaluation, the centralized server system consistently crashed under intense user traffic, forcing multiple late deadline extensions for student re-evaluation requests. More troubling still, multiple candidates discovered that the digital files uploaded directly under their unique registration numbers contained handwriting and structural styles that did not match their own, confirming a highly dangerous mix up of student data files. Although the central administration eventually removed 2 high ranking board officials and instituted a one member inquiry committee under S Radha Chauhan, these corrective actions function as basic damage control rather than structural accountability. Depending on an external educational technology firm with documented performance disputes in other regional states without completing exhaustive trial runs shows how carelessly the academic futures of young citizens were handled. An educational network managing 1850000 Class 12 candidates demands immaculate cybersecurity and uncompromising quality control, both of which were completely missing during this digital rollout.

The complete public silence of senior national leadership on an issue that directly threatens the academic paths of millions of hard working young citizens continues to fuel deep institutional mistrust. While the central ministry attempts to protect its administrative procedures by asserting that regular financial codes were followed, the clear physical evidence of mobile phone scanned examination booklets presents an entirely different reality. This entire development highlights the structural dangers of forcing rapid digitization across vital public sectors without constructing proper technological safeguards or maintaining absolute transparency in state contracts. Real progress for the young generation relies on the preservation of clean, transparent, and strictly merit based public systems rather than dismissing major contract violations as minor administrative oversights. To restore basic organizational integrity, the ministry of education must look past superficial bureaucratic updates and authorize an expansive independent judicial investigation into the complete procurement and grading pipeline.