In a major action in the CBSE row, the union govt on Tuesday transferred the board’s chairman and secretary, and instituted a one-member inquiry committee to probe the procurement process of On-Screen Marking System (OSM).
CBSE chairman Rahul Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta were transferred after criticism kept pouring in from several quarters over the OSM system and the glitch-ridden re-evaluation portal that remained inactive on June 1, when the revaluation submissions were slated to begin.
S Radha Chauhan, chairperson of the Capacity Building Commission has been appointed as the sole member of the inquiry committee, and will submit its report within a month to the Department of Personnel & Training.
The re-evaluation portal was activated only in the early hours of Tuesday. However, hours later the CBSE claimed massive cyber-threats targeting the platform. “While thousands of students accessed the CBSE re-evaluation portal today, malicious actors attempted to disrupt services through a barrage of cyberattacks,” the board said in a statement.
The board claimed that over 1.5 million hits were received in a matter of two-minutes and more than one lakh attempts of unauthorised attempts to file access.
Earlier, the board had postponed the commencement of the process to June 1 from the initial date of May 29 citing security hardening efforts to ensure smooth and glitch-free operation of the portal.
On Tuesday, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education had invited a student named Sarthak Sidhant, who flagged the discrepancies in tendering process and seeming dilutions of the eligibility clauses, to make a presentation over the same. Sidhant claimed the changes in tender clauses relating to performance standards, removal of blacklisting provisions and other qualification criteria appeared to favour Coempt Edu Teck, the company at the head of the storm.
OSM has been flagged by Class 12 students for issues like blurred answer sheet scans, mismatched copies and evaluation discrepancies. OSM is a digital evaluation method where physical exam answer sheets are scanned and graded by teachers on a secure computer screen instead of checking paper copies manually.