The Delhi high court on Monday issued notice on a petition seeking an independent inquiry into alleged irregularities, technical deficiencies, and grievance redressal failures related to the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) digital evaluation On-Screen Marking (OSM) system that affected class 12 students.An NSUI protest over alleged irregularities in CBSE’s OSM system. (HT PHOTO)A vacation bench of Justices Neena Bansal Krishna and Madhu Jain sought the government and CBSE’s response to the petition of the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the Opposition Congress’s student wing, and fixed June 12 as the next date of hearing.This came even as CBSE’s counsel, MA Niyazi, questioned the plea’s maintainability, arguing that a political party’s student wing filed it. He said that educational matters should not be politicised.The OSM, where examiners assess scanned answer sheets online instead of checking them physically, has been under scrutiny amid allegations of technical glitches, blurred scans, evaluation discrepancies, and concerns about data security and transparency following the declaration of class 12 results on May 13. Its contract was awarded to Coempt Edu Tech on December 5, 74 days before the commencement of the board examinations on February 17.On June 1, the Union education ministry sought a report from CBSE on the OSM system’s procurement process. The CBSE opened the portal for verification of marks and re-evaluation of Class 12 board examination results on June 2 after repeated delays. On the same day, the government replaced the CBSE’s chair and secretary, and started a probe into the procurement of services.In the petition, NSUI chief Vinod Jakhar said that the board’s repeated public clarifications reflect serious doubts among students and the public regarding the integrity of the evaluation system. It sought directions for manual rechecking and physical verification of answer sheets where students dispute the accuracy of scanned copies or the evaluation process.The petition, argued by advocates Rishav Ranjan and Eesha Bakshi, sought an extension of the verification and re-evaluation portal by a month to enable students to pursue remedies, along with compensatory marks for students whose answer scripts were allegedly missing, blurred, or incorrectly evaluated.NSUI’s petition pointed out that the board acknowledged, through public communications, that the portal for obtaining scanned copies of answer books faced technical glitches. It noted that nearly 127,146 applications relating to 387,399 scanned answer sheets were submitted within a short span, reflecting an extraordinary level of concern and lack of confidence among students regarding the evaluation process.The plea said such a significant volume of requests made immediately after the declaration of results cannot be dismissed as a routine post-result procedure. It added that the CBSE issued a clarification regarding allegations against the OSM portal, asserting that the impugned URL was merely a testing site containing sample data.The plea said that the need for successive public clarifications indicated that serious doubts had emerged in the public mind regarding the integrity of the digital evaluation system.