Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday sharpened his attack on the Centre and the CBSE over alleged irregularities in the board's re-evaluation process, accusing the education system of being "financialised" and claiming students are being forced to pay for mistakes they did not make.
Sharing a video of his interaction with Class 12 students affected by the CBSE's On-Screen Marking (OSM) system, Rahul Gandhi alleged that students are being charged hefty fees simply to verify whether their answer sheets were evaluated correctly.
"Beware of pickpockets — today, they are sitting right inside the CBSE," Rahul Gandhi said in a post on X.
"If your marks are incorrect due to a CBSE error, what do you get?
A bill: Digital scanned copy: Rs 100 per subject.
The leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha claimed a student could end up spending nearly Rs 2,000 merely to ensure the accurate evaluation of an answer sheet.
The profit goes to the government," Rahul Gandhi said, arguing that when education is treated as a business rather than a public service, "errors are not corrected — they are multiplied.".
The claim went viral, prompting several other students to report similar mismatches.
In the video, Rahul Gandhi is seen speaking with Vedant and other affected students, questioning the costs involved in the re-evaluation process and the functioning of the OSM system.
"This is what we are seeing not just in NEET, in CBSE, everywhere — you have financialised the education system," Rahul Gandhi said.
If there is a problem, it becomes a critical failure of the entire system.
In a decentralised system, one failure doesn't bring everything down.".
