How India’s CBSE exam scandal set off student outrage against PM Modi

India’s largest school board has been mired in controversies, prompting calls for Modi’s education minister to step down. Some students are leading the fight.

New Delhi, India – Nandini Singh had been waiting for weeks for her high school examination results, her scores in different subjects being the pathway to the colleges of her choice.

She was surprised and disappointed when she saw that her chemistry score was much lower than she had expected. Singh was torn over whether to seek a review of her answer scripts or accept the results – and the window to apply for a review lapsed.

Now, though, she is convinced that she’s been cheated of the score she deserved, and her faith in the body conducting one of the world’s largest school-leaving examinations has been shattered by a spate of controversies over the tests conducted from February 17 to April 10. The results came out on May 13.

“They are liars and a corrupt bunch of people taking our lives, our future hostage,” Singh told Al Jazeera, speaking from her home in Dehradun.

Singh is far from the only student furious with India’s Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the largest of India’s multiple school boards. More than 1.7 million students like her sat the CBSE exams this year. Now many of them are in a state of limbo after the results of the exams have come under a cloud of suspicion following a series of revelations about a digitised answer-sheet evaluation process that the board rushed through this year.

Student-led disclosures have snowballed into outrage against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and its handling of the crisis amid growing calls for Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign.

So what’s the exam scandal all about, and why is it turning into a political crisis for Modi?

The CBSE, which is affiliated with more than 30,000 schools, introduced the On-Screen Marking system this year to evaluate millions of answer sheets.

After students finish writing their papers, the answer sheets are scanned into digital images and uploaded to an integrated platform for evaluation. An evaluator can sign in on a computer and mark copies electronically.

But the system has been hit with criticism of blurry scans, technical glitches, server outages and delayed resolution – casting a shadow over the results, which impact the futures of millions of students.

While On-Screen Marking is not a novel idea, its implementation by the CBSE across its schools has drawn widespread ire.

The board went out to look for bids from private companies to implement the system. It could