Panic set in fast. Students who got their Class 12th results and saw things that didn’t make any sense.Students who received their Class 12 results and found them to be meaningless. There were not enough marks available. The re-evaluation portals gave up. No money was accepted at the payment gateways. This wasn’t just a little bug in an obscure corner of the web. It was a gigantic failure of the Central Board of Secondary Education.
The figures are astounding. We’re talking 17 lakh students. They turned in 98 lakh answer sheets. That equates to about 40 crore individual pages to be scanned and reviewed. A brand new digital tool was decided upon by the board this year, and is known as On-Screen Marking. They just refer to it as OSM. It’s a simple concept. The board takes physical paper out of the hands of human checkers. They photograph the papers and send them by satellite to computers in the country. Examiners log in, read answers on screen and mark electronically. It was supposed to speed things up, eliminate the errors in calculations and provide a clear paper trail. But it broke due to the tremendous pressure from the Indian education machine. Students started protesting. Moments later, angry posts flooded social media from parents. After only a few days, the pressure had been evident and the government had to take the music.
The weight of the constitutional article 75.
Politicians are prone to designating a bureaucrat as the scapegoat when things go wrong with the government department. This is not the case here. Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan visited the CBSE to do something you don’t often see. He took the blame.
He did not dodge. He accepted all the differences. This puts Article 75 of the Indian Constitution right into the spotlight. The essence of the rule of ministers is in that particular rule. It basically states that the Minister responsible is responsible for whatever happens in his/her ministries before Parliament. They can’t simply point to a faulty software or incompetent clerks. In a sense, Pradhan was able to invoke Article 75 by saying that it was a moral and legal obligation to take ownership of the chaotic rollout. He admitted the digital system was flawed. He was apologizing to the students for the mental strain that they were experiencing. This was a non-denial of a huge administrative mistake.
Fixing the Broken Machine
Saying sorry is one thing.Saying sorry is one thing, admitting fault is another. Another is to repair a broken digital infrastructure. Pradhan didn’t walk out of CBSE building after merely speaking with the press. He met with the heads of the best ships and broke down the process. The software used to manage the OSM evaluation was very troubled.
The education ministry was forced to bring in the big guns. They recruited technocrats from IIT Kanpur and IIT Madras. Now these engineers have got themselves into the confines of CBSE tech team and revamp the software code and fix all the flaws. The banking issue was just as bad. The fee payment system was causing students attempting to re-evaluate to be locked out of the process. The government had to rush to the phone to the Finance Ministry. They have hurried to have four major public sector banks directly linked to the CBSE portal. To prevent the transaction failures, now the system has been linked with State Bank of India, Indian Bank, Bank of Baroda and Canara Bank. Pradhan warned the staffers very sternly. Any intentional alteration of the marks, or any causing of any discrepancies in such software will result in serious penalties. He explained that no one is safe, whether they are working inside the board or as outside contractors. The mission is straightforward. Correct the software, handle the money and distribute the proper marks to the public.
By the time he hit the stage, he was already a political savant, an avid debater, and the target of many smears.
This is a crisis of this magnitude and it doesn’t last too long out of politics. Rahul Gandhi spotted a chance and then took a big swing. The Congress leader went online and lashed out at the government for what he termed as “massive irregularities.” He didn’t go so far as to say it was a glitch. He called it a scam.
Gandhi lobbed some big accusations. He alleges the CBSE purposefully gave a digital evaluation contract to a private company company from Telangana. He said that this particular company has a cloudy reputation and dubious history when it comes to data. He called for an immediate and independent inquiry by the courts. He’d like to have a Special Investigation Team put together to take a look at the board’s server and determine who benefited from the mess. In the meanwhile, the fear spread even quicker, as an unusual link on a web started circulating on social media displaying altered marks. The board had to quickly put out a statement expressing the clarification that the fake URL was simply an old test site and nothing more. It was suggested that the actual live servers were safe, but the damage to public trust was already done.
The Minister Hits Back
Pradhan was not going to take the scam allegations lying down. He then fired a shot back at Gandhi. The education minister said that none of the procurement and contracting of the OSM system was irregular and adhered to the government’s regulations. No backroom deals were made.
After that, he moved on to the personal. Pradhan made Gandhi’s complete ignorance of the situation an obvious point. He alleged the Congress leader was only expressing his frustration after having lost many elections. Notice something, the minister said, pointing out a pattern. He said Gandhi’s opposition to every technological advance that the country is seeking is blind. He referred to the previous controversies related to Rafale, e-voting machines and the Digital India initiative in general. Pradhan essentially spoke with opposition to recede. There was a lot of blame already placed on him by the government, he said, so to turn the students’ panic into a political football was a bad move. He urged the opposing factions to end their “games and play” and let the engineers “fix the broken system.
