PM talks mangoes, silent on 18.5 lakh students: Rahul

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday lashed out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the CBSE OSM row, saying he had the time to speak about mangoes during his monthly radio address, but not about 18.5 lakh children whose answer sheets were scanned with phones.

The Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha said Prime Minister Modi’s silence on the Central Board of Secondary Education’s (CBSE) On-Screen Marking (OSM) issue is no longer indifference, it is “complicity”.

In his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ radio broadcast on Sunday morning, Modi referred to the king of fruits, saying there is hardly a home where mangoes are not talked about in the summer season.

In a post on X, Gandhi said the CBSE’s May 2025 tender required answer sheets to be scanned with automatic robotic scanners, spines preserved, at a minimum of 300 DPI (dots per inch).

“The tender reissued in August quietly removed all of it. ‘Scanners’ became generic. The resolution dropped to 200 DPI. Now we know what that meant in practice. It has been exposed that COEMPT scanned the answer sheets using mobile phones,” the former Congress chief said.

“The blurred copies, the missing pages, the unscanned books — they are not ‘errors’. They are the predictable outcome of a contract written to fit a vendor,” Gandhi said. This is fraud, and every child whose marks were wrongly evaluated is a victim of it, he said.

“This morning, the Prime Minister had time to speak about mangoes. He has not had time to speak about 18.5 lakh children whose answer sheets were scanned with phones. Dharmendra Pradhan ji still sits in office. Modi ji’s silence is no longer indifference. It is complicity,” Gandhi said.

In his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ broadcast, Modi noted that every region has its own mango and its own aroma.

“Hapus or Alphonso of Maharashtra, Kesar of Gujarat — these are the lifeblood of ‘aamras ’; Dussehri of Uttar Pradesh and Langra of Kashi. There are mangoes from Bihar, whose aroma can be smelt from far. Chausa, Malda — memories of people are tied to every name,” he said.

The prime minister said if someone goes to South India, people will find other varieties like Banganapalli, Totapuri, Neelam, Malgova; there is Himsagar in Bengal; Suvarnarekha of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.

“In other words, the place changes, and so does the mango’s form, colour, and taste... This journey of the mango is now reaching from villages to the global market,” he said.

Gandhi on Sunday targeted the Centre over the CBSE’s OSM row, sharing a video of his interaction with a group of students and describing them as brave young Indians who asked the Modi Government simple questions but received “insults instead of answers”.

Asserting that the students deserved a bright future, Gandhi said, “We will make sure they get it.”