For the 2025–2026 batch +2 exam, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) transitioned from physical answer sheet evaluation to digital evaluation method of On-Screen Marking (OSM). Although this transition was promised to reduce human error while increasing transparency and efficiency, it has instead resulted in blurred scans, incomplete answer sheets, missing supplementary pages, unchecked answers, re-evaluation portal failures, payment gateway issues, download errors, and delayed results.
CBSE outsourced its OSM technology to Coempt EduTeck, which had rebranded itself from Globarena Technologies. The name change followed a disastrous contract with the 2019 Telangana Intermediate Board, where digital evaluation failures caused over 3.5 lakh students to fail, nearly twice the usual rate. Students received zeros for completed work, blank pages replaced written answers, and personal details were mismatched. This catastrophic breakdown led to the tragic suicides of 23 students.
You would expect an incident like this to force government accountability and a strict ban on future contracts. Instead, the government practically rewarded the company responsible by giving it control over the nationwide CBSE examinations.
Rather than launching an inquiry into the portal failures and the contractor’s track record, CBSE chose to distribute a social media toolkit to school principals nationwide. Principals were told to make reels, post tweets, and release statements praising the OSM system.
This response demonstrates whose interests CBSE and the government is working for. CBSE and the government have acted as facilitators, directing public money into private pockets.
We must understand that OSM method was not introduced to modernize or make the evaluation more transparent or maintain anonymity during evaluation or reduce the workload of the teachers but was rather introduced because it creates a multi crore market for IT firms, scanner operators, and cloud service providers.
This push for OSM and the digitization of student records is heavily promoted by global financial institutions and ed-tech corporations. It is not a domestic policy choice but a structural demand of imperialist finance capital.
The difficulties faced by teachers in the OSM method exposes the deep exploitation at the heart of the system. Teachers were informed less than ten days before the examination that they would have to evaluate on a screen, using unfamiliar software, with no training. They were expected to adjust their pacing and their judgment to a platform designed for speed and cost cutting. Every step is monitored, timed, and measured, teacher who pauses to carefully read an answer is penalised by the system’s productivity metrics, thus removing any autonomy, and intensifying the pace.
Under the pretext of efficiency, the OSM system was imposed to convert public education into a market for IT contractors, scanner vendors, and imperialist backed ed-tech capital. While education remains a commodity, no reform can serve the people, expelling imperialist finance, and nationalizing education is what would liberate education.
