Centre on Friday appointed senior bureaucrat Mandeep K Bhandari as chairperson of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet approved Bhandari's appointment as the CBSE chairperson, an order issued by the personnel ministry said.
The education board got its new head months after the removal of Chairman Rahul Singh. The government had removed Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta on June 2, following a massive national controversy over the board's new digital On-Screen Marking (OSM) system.
Who Is Mandeep K Bhandari?
Bhandari, a 2001 batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram, and Union Territories) cadre, is currently working as Principal Secretary to the Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir.
Govt's Big Action Against Top CBSE Officials
Earlier in June, the government removed two top CBSE officials following alleged irregularities in the Class 12 digital evaluation system and ordered a probe by a high-powered committee to investigate how the national educational board procured these marking services.
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Simultaneously, a 17-year-old student from Jharkhand affected by the CBSE's online marking system, appeared before a parliamentary panel, where he pointed out the anomalies in the tendering process of the CBSE to select vendors for online marking and put forth a set of questions for the board. Sarthak Sidhant, who himself appeared in the board examination, presented a seven-page copy of his findings before the Parliamentary Committee for Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports, chaired by Congress MP Digvijaya Singh.
What Is OSM Controversy?
A few months ago, the CBSE was engulfed in a controversy after some Class 12 students alleged that the scanned copies of their answer sheets uploaded by the board did not match their handwriting, raising concerns over possible answer-sheet mismatch in the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system.
Then CBSE chairman Rahul Singh and secretary Himanshu Gupta were transferred and were replaced by senior bureaucrats Lokhande Prashant Sitaram and Varun Bhardwaj respectively. Subsequently, the Cabinet Secretariat, through a memorandum announced the constitution of a one-member committee to inquire into matters relating to the procurement of services for the on-screen marking system by the CBSE.
(With PTI inputs)