Congress MP and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Sunday stepped up his criticism of the Centre and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) amid the ongoing controversy over answer sheet evaluation and scanning practices. In a post on X, Rahul referred to allegations made by cybersecurity researcher Nisarga Adhikary, who claimed that an Amazon Web Services (AWS) bucket containing scanned answer sheets and question papers from 2026 could be accessed without authentication. Quoting the post, Rahul wrote, “CBSE’s May 2025 tender required answer sheets to be scanned with automatic robotic scanners, spines preserved, at a minimum of 300 DPI. The tender re-issued in August quietly removed all of it. ‘Scanners’ became generic. Resolution dropped to 200 DPI. Now we know what that meant in practice,” Gandhi wrote. He further alleged that answer sheets were scanned using mobile phones and claimed that issues such as blurred copies, missing pages and unscanned booklets were a direct consequence of changes in the tender conditions. “It has been exposed that COEMPT scanned the answer sheets using mobile phones. The blurred copies, the missing pages, the unscanned books – they are not ‘errors.’ They are the predictable outcome of a contract written to fit a vendor. This is fraud. And every child whose marks were wrongly evaluated is a victim of it,” Gandhi said. The Congress leader also targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over their response to the issue. “This morning, the Prime Minister had time to speak about mangoes. He has not had time to speak about 18.5 lakh children whose answer sheets were scanned with phones. Dharmendra Pradhan ji still sits in office. Modi ji’s silence is no longer indifference. It is complicity,” he wrote. Earlier in the day, Rahul had shared a video of his interaction with Class 12 student Vedant Shrivastava and his friends, who had raised concerns about discrepancies in a CBSE Physics answer sheet uploaded under Vedant’s roll number. “A revealing chat with my fellow ‘anti-national Soros agents.’ Vedant and his friends are brilliant, brave young Indians who asked CBSE and the Modi government simple questions – but got insults instead of answers. They deserve a bright and secure future. We will make sure they get it,” Rahul wrote.
