Hapless school principals scramble to meet CBSE ‘fatwa’ to defend on-screen marking

Students look serious and curious. The teachers look scared. The principals try to appear cool and authoritative while reading out a text. The more savvy among them pretend to speak extempore. Some seem to be reading out the text held in large and bold letters and held before them. At least one of the principals drops all pretences and reads out from a written text. All of them look uneasy, if not scared. At least one elderly teacher looks to be having a heart attack as he haltingly and painfully reads out the text.

With minor variations, what they say is similar. The On-Screen Marking system introduced by CBSE in 2026 is a landmark; it is a much-needed reform which has made evaluation fair, transparent and free from human bias. A few ‘discrepancies’ should not cause concern. Parents and students should trust the system. No student will be allowed to suffer because of technical glitches. The text was apparently circulated by the CBSE to school principals who were asked to record videos and upload them on social media, on Instagram.

The CBSE ‘toolkit’ and the undoubtedly politely worded request had the desired effect. Wednesday and Thursday this week suddenly witnessed hundreds of videos of principals, teachers and students mouthing the same text. The swarm was too many to be missed and both The Hindustan Times and The Times of India got in touch with principals to find out what was happening. While a few brave principals, TOI claimed, had refused to prepare the videos as instructed, most principals did not seem to have much of an option but to become a part of CBSE’s PR campaign.

Schools and principals cannot take ‘panga’ with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), one of the most influential educational bodies in the country with over 28,000 schools in India and several hundred more schools abroad affiliated to it. So, when CBSE wants them to do something, they better oblige. So, we have the unedifying sight of principals parroting the same text circulated across the country. From Bhawna Gupta, principal of Padmapat Singhania school in Kanpur, to the principal of Miles Bronson school at Borjhar (Assam), Nripen Kumar Dutta, or Jyoti Gupta, principal of KR Mangalam World School, GK 2 in New Delhi—they all fell in line.

The smarter principals passed on the task to the teachers, who read the text stiffly or haltingly. All of them had the look of a hunted deer. They knew that OSM roll-out was a disaster. They barely had a week to acclimatise themselves with the digital evaluation system they had never tried before. They had to conduct the evaluation under surveillance as CCTV cameras kept watch and their performance was monitored and timed. If an evaluator took too long to give marks, it would be logged, they were told. The ‘system’ would follow the digital trail and identify which evaluator had examined which answer sheet and given how many marks to which answer. Any deviation from the answer key could have consequences, they were told.

They all kept quiet out of fear. They also kept quiet because in March, 2026 the CBSE issued a circular warning evaluators against sharing ‘rumours’ and ‘misleading information’ about OSM on social media. It was a gag order. Had the warnings been heeded, the fiasco could have been avoided. But now that blurred answer sheets, mismatched answer papers, wrong markings and security breaches in the system are becoming a public scandal, the CBSE suddenly wanted the evaluators to speak up in its defence and provide glowing testimony to OSM.  

The union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who took responsibility for ‘some of the discrepancies’ reported in the OSM, is unlikely to take responsibility for the CBSE’s shameless PR offensive to gloss over the glitches. Being a full-time politician and a part-time education minister, he found it easy on Thursday to blame Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi.   

“Rahul Gandhi is frustrated after repeatedly losing elections. He opposed SIR, he opposed EVMs, he opposed digital India. He is not with the scientific advancement of the country… I request him…this is not the time for politics. Students’ mental stress shouldn’t increase with anybody’s behaviour or words…”, said the minister. This is the time for perception management and PR, not politics, he meant.