On 2 June 2026, hours after 17-year-old Sarthak Sidhant, a schoolboy from Ranchi, made a presentation to the parliamentary standing committee on education, the government transferred the chairman and secretary of the CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education), both IAS officers. It also announced a departmental inquiry committee to look into the hurried introduction of a digital evaluation system that led to this fiasco.

Since the CBSE Class 12 results were announced on 13 May, lakhs of harried students have reported totalling errors, unmarked questions, mismatched answer sheets, blurred scans and missing supplementary sheets. Lakhs have applied for verification. In a tweet on 26 May, the CBSE acknowledged receiving 4.04 lakh ‘applications for scanned copies of answer books’. The same tweet claimed to have received ‘11.31 lakh requests for answer books’. The distinction was not clear to this reporter.

For students waiting for re-evaluation, this is no longer a technical glitch. The results are now suspect and at risk are college admissions that are often provisional pending proof that candidates have secured the necessary cut-off marks in their board exams.

Transferring a few worthies and demanding that the education minister resign does not solve the students’ problems nor secure their future. Even now, after its hurriedly introduced on-screen marking (OSM) web domain has been conclusively proven to be hackable, the CBSE’s response is to accept re-evaluation requests — for a fee! It has even managed to come up with a graded fee structure for this re-evaluation. And, believe it or not, will conduct the re-evaluation on the same compromised web domain. If the CBSE has alternative plans, there have been no public announcements to that effect.

Sarthak Sidhant and 19-year-old Nisarga Adhikary from Siliguri have thoroughly exposed the OSM platform used to evaluate the CBSE Class 12 board papers of 18 lakh students. Sarthak went a step further and exposed how the CBSE tweaked conditions to favour........

© National Herald