CBSE chairman, secretary removed amid OSM row; re-evaluation portal under cyberattack
Following controversy over its On-Screen Marking system and alleged anomalies, the CBSE Chairman and Secretary were removed, a high-level probe ordered, and a new portal faced cyberattacks.
Following controversy over its On-Screen Marking system and alleged anomalies, the CBSE Chairman and Secretary were removed, a high-level probe ordered, and a new portal faced cyberattacks.
Following controversy over its On-Screen Marking system and alleged anomalies, the CBSE Chairman and Secretary were removed, a high-level probe ordered, and a new portal faced cyberattacks.
New Delhi: The Centre on Tuesday removed CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta amid the controversy surrounding the board's On-Screen Marking (OSM) system for Class 12 examinations and ordered a high-level probe into the procurement of the digital evaluation services.
Senior bureaucrats Lokhande Prashant Sitaram and Varun Bhardwaj have been appointed as the new CBSE chairman and secretary, respectively.
The Cabinet Secretariat also announced a one-member inquiry committee headed by S Radha Chauhan, chairperson of the Capacity Building Commission, to investigate the procurement of services for the OSM system by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). The committee has been asked to submit its report to the Department of Personnel and Training within one month.
The move comes amid growing concerns raised by students and parents over the implementation of the digital evaluation system. Several Class 12 students alleged that the scanned copies of answer sheets uploaded by the CBSE did not match their handwriting, triggering fears of answer-sheet mismatches in the OSM process.
The issue was also taken up by the Parliamentary Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports, chaired by Congress MP Digvijaya Singh. A 17-year-old student from Jharkhand, Sarthak Sidhant, who appeared for this year's board examination, presented a seven-page submission before the panel highlighting alleged anomalies in the CBSE's tendering process for selecting vendors for the online marking system.
Senior officials from the Ministry of Education and the CBSE, including outgoing chairman Rahul Singh, appeared before the parliamentary panel and submitted a report addressing the concerns raised by students. The board informed the committee that technical glitches on its portal had been rectified and that students would be allowed until June 6 to apply for re-evaluation.
Re-evaluation portal comes under cyberattack
Meanwhile, the CBSE said its re-evaluation portal came under a series of cyberattack attempts while thousands of students were accessing the platform. According to the board, a denial-of-service (DoS) attack generated nearly 1.5 million hits within two minutes, while more than one lakh attempts were made to gain unauthorised access to files on the system.
Despite the attacks, the board said the portal remained operational. By 10 pm on Tuesday, it was supporting nearly 14,000 concurrent users and had processed more than 28,000 successful submissions.
The CBSE has faced criticism in recent weeks over technical glitches, payment failures and delays in the verification and re-evaluation process. The controversy has intensified demands for greater transparency and accountability in the board's examination and evaluation systems.
The online portal for verification of scanned answer sheets and re-evaluation requests opened on June 2 and will remain available until June 6. Students can report issues such as missing pages, missing supplementary sheets, blurred scans and evaluation-related discrepancies through the platform.