Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan during a meeting with CBSE officials in New Delhi on Thursday | Photo Credit: ANI

Facing mounting criticism over the NEET paper leak and anomalies in CBSE Class XII answer-sheet evaluation, the government on Thursday sought to signal a more serious and coordinated response, with Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan publicly owning responsibility for the controversies.

Parallely, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh chaired a high-level meeting attended by the Education Minister, Communication Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia and top officials, where measures were discussed to ensure that paper leaks do not take place in the NEET re-examination on June 21. A proposal to involve the Indian Air Force in transporting question papers for enhanced security was discussed in the meeting.

“We are taking a ‘whole of government’ approach to ensure the integrity of the examination process, in which all departments are involved. The examination papers were transported by the Postal Department, and the possibility of the Air Force being used for transporting papers was discussed,” Dharmendra Pradhan told a TV channel.

On the controversy over CBSE’s on-screen marking (OSM) System, about which hundreds of students have flagged concerns, Pradhan said: “This is the first time CBSE has implemented this system in the country. Certain discrepancies have come to our notice, and I take responsibility for them and I want to give assurance that these issues will be rectified, and appropriate solutions will be worked out. All of us are engaged in this task. We will not leave a single student’s unanswered query or concern unresolved.”

Review meeting

During the day, Pradhan chaired a review meeting at the CBSE headquarters which was attended by CBSE Chairperson; Secretary, Department of School Education & Literacy; and Directors of IIT-Madras and IIT-Kanpur. In the meeting, the progress of the CBSE Class XII evaluation and post-result processes was discussed and reviewed. Deliberations focused on providing student-friendly re- evaluation portal, strengthening CBSE’s digital platforms, enhancing student exam and result facilitation mechanisms, and improving evaluation and monitoring systems.

“Stakeholders also highlighted measures undertaken for student support and outlined future plans for robust, transparent and technology-enabled service delivery aimed at greater student benefit,” CBSE stated in a post on X. The re-evaluation portal is expected to go live on May 29.

Pradhan said around 17 lakh students took part in the exam and that there were nearly 98 lakh answer copies, with 40 crore scanned pages in total. “So far, about 4 lakh students have retrieved their answer sheets, covering nearly 11 lakh copies,” he said.

However, students and parents have continued to flag concerns regarding mix-up in answer sheets, discrepancies in scoring and missing pages in their scanned answer sheets among others.

On the issue of a teenage ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary having hacked into the CBSE portal, the Board asserted that it was a “secure and robust IT platform”, which cannot be hacked. Adhikary responded by saying: “Everything can be hacked...even giants like Google and Facebook aren’t 100 per cent secure.”

He was supported by tech experts who pointed out that the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) also acknowledged the disclosure of the ethical hacker’s mail to them with a boilerplate e-mail.

Published on May 28, 2026