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There is a particular kind of political cynicism that doesn’t just spin bad news but deploys the machinery of the state itself to manufacture good news in its place. Over more than a decade in power, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi has refined this into something approaching an art form.

The Union government’s instinct, when confronted with a crisis of its own making, is not to fix the problem but the narrative. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) On-Screen Marking (OSM) debacle of 2026 is one of the most brazen recent illustrations of this tendency, but it is far from an isolated incident.

When CBSE declared class 12 board results on May 13, 2026, it triggered what can only be described as one of the most damaging controversies in the board’s recent history.

The culprit was the OSM system, a digital evaluation mechanism introduced at scale for the very first time this year. The board had promised it would “eliminate totalling errors, minimise human intervention, and accelerate the declaration of results.” What it actually delivered was chaos.

Students flooded social media with accounts of receiving photocopies of answer sheets that were not their own, or sheets so blurry as to be illegible. Correct MCQ answers were given only partial marks, step marking had been ignored, blank pages were uploaded in place of written answers, and scores were inexplicably lower than expected.

To make matters worse, a 19-year-old cybersecurity researcher came forward to allege that the OSM portal contained critical vulnerabilities he had reported to CERT-In back in February, including the potential for unauthorised access to examiner accounts and modification of marks. He pointed out that these vulnerabilities had not been patched by the time results were declared. 

Also read: How India is Failing its Students

The structural reasons for the catastrophe were not hard to find. The OSM contract was awarded to Hyderabad-based Coempt Edu Teck on December 5, 2025, just 66 days before a full nationwide rollout was announced on February 9, 2026.

Teachers who participated in mandatory mock evaluation sessions as late as February 26 reported portal access failures, slow system performance, inadequate internet connectivity, and data errors.

The Delhi Government Schools Teachers’ Association’s (GSTA) formal request to the CBSE to hold the implementation........

© The Wire