'Mantri Pradhan's Ministry of Scandals': Congress flags massive data breach of CBSE answer sheets

Jairam Ramesh's statement came after a X user claimed that the CBSE had not configured its AWS bucket properly and that now 'we can paginate and enumerate all their media which has 2026 answer sheets and question papers.'

New Delhi: Congress on Sunday alleged "data breach of monumental proportions" after claiming that the answer sheets of CBSE Class XII students had been found to be available in the public domain.

General Secretary (Communications) Jairam Ramesh said the "incompetence and callousness" of COEMPT Edutech, the company engaged by the CBSE for on screen marking of Class XII answer sheets, had been "once again exposed".

He claimed COEMPT Edutech is the very same company to which CBSE gave the contract to after fiddling with the technical specifications in the RFP.

"In today's developments on Mantri Pradhan's Ministry of Scandals, the answer sheets of 2 million CBSE Grade 12 students have been shown to be available in the public domain. This is a data breach of monumental proportions and it compromises the privacy of two million students," he said.

"The answer sheets that have emerged also bear folds and drop shadows - which are associated with scans made via mobile phones rather than scanning machines. We know that the third RFP dropped the specification for a robotic scanner. The question then is what kind of scanners did Coempt eventually use? Why are the scans of such poor quality?" he questioned.

Ramesh's statement came after a X user claimed that the CBSE had not configured its AWS bucket properly and that now "we can paginate and enumerate all their media which has 2026 answer sheets and question papers".