"Digital transformation of public examination systems in India must be accompanied by robust grievance-redressal mechanisms." Discuss with reference to the 2026 CBSE On-Screen Marking controversy.

In CBSE v. Aditya Bandopadhyay (2011), the Supreme Court held that an examinee has a right to inspect their evaluated answer-book as "information" under the RTI Act [1]. The 2026 CBSE On-Screen Marking (OSM) controversy shows that digitising evaluation, without an equally digitised redressal architecture, converts an efficiency reform into a fairness crisis.

Promise of digital evaluation

• OSM replaced physical dispatch of scripts to examiners' homes, cutting transit loss, delay and handling errors; roughly 98 lakh scripts were digitised in the 2026 cycle.
• Aligns with NEP 2020's push for technology-enabled, standardised assessment through bodies like PARAKH [2].

How the 2026 OSM rollout failed

• Technical: blurred scans, missing and mismatched pages, unmarked answers; trial runs had already flagged login and portal glitches.
• Administrative: rushed rollout without adequate pilot-testing; the CBSE chairman and secretary were shifted out, and a one-member committee under S. Radha Chauhan was constituted to probe OSM procurement [3].
• Accountability: outsourcing core evaluation infrastructure to a private vendor raised data-security and oversight concerns.

The grievance-redressal deficit

• Of about 18 lakh Class XII students, only a small fraction could actually access their evaluated scripts; payment failures and portal crashes blocked even the filing of verification requests.
• The result was a right without a remedy — the Bandopadhyay guarantee existed on paper but was unusable in practice [1].
• The Supreme Court, hearing a PIL, asked CBSE to protect students' interests and sought a status report from the Centre, treating this as a question of administrative fairness [4].

Way forward

• A published SOP for scan quality, re-scan on complaint, time-bound verification and a free-of-cost second look.
• Mandatory pilot-testing, third-party security audit, and vendor accountability clauses before scaling.

Digitisation should widen, not narrow, a student's access to justice. Embedding auditable, low-cost redressal into examination technology — as the Radha Chauhan review and judicial scrutiny now demand — is what will convert efficiency gains into durable public trust in India's examination bodies.