CBSE Should Stop Playing God of All Things

In the grand architecture of Greek myth, Zeus rules Mount Olympus not through consensus or empathy, but through the absolute terror of his thunderbolts. From his celestial heights, detached from the dust and sweat of the earth below, the King of Gods demands unquestioning compliance. To question his decrees is to invite immediate divine wrath. The tragic flaw of such Olympian rule, however, was always its complete blindness to human reality—the assumption that because you sit at the highest peak, you possess the right to micromanage every mortal breath. 

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) seems to have styled itself after this very brand of autocratic deity. In its modern incarnation, the Board has increasingly shed its role as an academic facilitator and assumed the mantle of an all-seeing, all-powerful deity, ruling its affiliated institutions not through partnership, but through bureaucratic absolutism. The latest manifestation of this "Big Daddy" syndrome is the chaotic implementation of the On-Screen Marking (OSM) system for the Class 12 evaluations—a digital experiment that has left students devastated, teachers overwhelmed, and school administrations caught in the crossfire. 

The introduction of on-screen marking a.k.a OSM was heralded by the Board with characteristic divine certainty: a tech-driven saviour designed to eliminate manual calculation errors and accelerate results. Yet, the ground reality tells a profoundly different story. We see here this olympian detachment unfolding in real-time. What was heralded from the celestial heights of Delhi as a flawless digital saviour quickly transformed into a devastating thunderstorm on the ground. Scrambled pages, illegible digital scans of student handwriting, and technical glitches on portals left thousands of students broken-hearted and schools completely caught in the crossfire.

Yet, the true tragedy of the OSM debacle lies not in the failure of the technology implementation itself, but in the unilateral arrogance with which it was handed down. Like Zeus hurling a lightning bolt without regard for where it lands, the Board executed this massive structural shift without genuinely listening to the educators who live on the frontline. The teachers—those who actually understand the nuances of a student’s ink, the rhythm of a classroom, and the fragile psychology behind an exam booklet—were treated as mere data-entry clerks in a grand digital design. A brief, controlled trial run was deemed sufficient justification to force thousands of varied institutions into immediate, expensive compliance. Schools were issued strict directives to upgrade computer labs and ensure uninterrupted power supplies under strict deadlines. 

Why did school leaderships not collectively rise up in protest against an obviously unseasoned system? Because the Board operates on a theology of fear. The "thou shall be disaffiliated" attitude has effectively silenced institutional feedback, creating an environment where compliance is driven by survival rather than conviction. This authoritarian pattern is not an isolated glitch; it is an attitude issue deeply embedded in the Board’s administrative DNA. One need only look at the CBSE Affiliation Bye-Laws to see how far the roots of micromanagement extend. While it is entirely reasonable for a regulatory body to cap total student enrolment based on available campus acreage, the Board insists on playing God at a class-wise, section-wise level. Under these rigid bylaws, schools find their sections blocked at individual levels of schooling. To demand that a school accurately forecast the exact number of section-wise admissions a year in advance is to completely ignore the fluid reality of human life. Families relocate, local economic climates shift, and neighbourhoods evolve. By forcing school administrations to seek formal, algorithmic approvals for single-digit changes in section sizes, the Board places an impractical, artificial stress on institutional operations. It is administrative claustrophobia disguised as standardization. 

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this centralized overreach is the language of governance the Board employs. A regular review of CBSE circulars will reveal a recurring, ominous motif—the explicit threat of disaffiliation. Whether the directive concerns the timely uploading of data on the OASIS portal, the mandatory deployment of staff for evaluation duties, or sudden changes in textbook advisories, the ultimate penalty is almost always waved like a weapon. This continuous brandishing of the ultimate penalty—hurled at schools via routine circulars over the slightest administrative detour—sends a toxic ripple through the entire educational ecosystem. It creates an atmosphere of permanent insecurity that directly traumatizes the parent and student community. When a school is perpetually forced to defend it’s very right to exist over rigid, mathematical section caps and documentation piles, it cannot focus its core energy on its true calling—the holistic development of the child. 

When the Board’s own unilateral experiments—like this year’s OSM rollout—go awry, resulting in a sudden drop in the pass percentage and widespread panic, the financial machinery is only moving faster. Just like the God’s coffers fill faster when human beings are in distress. Desperate parents are forced to run from pillar to post, paying hefty fees just to verify marks or request a scanned copy of an answer booklet. It all seems a brilliant, tragic business model: designing a flawed system, the schools forced to execute the grunt work under immense pressure, the teachers grading the papers like data entry operators, and ultimately the Gods get to mint millions off the resulting anxiety of the student community!

And yet the Gods still seem to have the audacity to demand absolute altruism from the earth while acting as a commercial enterprise from the heavens! Education is not a factory assembly line to be optimized by distant digital servers, nor is it a kingdom to be ruled by divine decree. It is an ecosystem built entirely on trust, collaboration, and localized empathy. The heads of the Board must realize that they are not sovereign entities ruling over subjects; they are teammates playing the exact same game, standing on the same field, chasing the same goal.

When the ancient myths spoke of the twilight of the gods, the descent was always caused by a complete loss of connection to the realities of the earth below. If CBSE continues to play Zeus, ignoring the voices of its teachers and suffocating the independence of its schools, it risks a similar institutional fall. It is time for the Board to step down from the celestial heights of micromanagement, put away its thunderbolts of fire and brimstone, and start treating its schools as partners in a shared, deeply human mission.