What began as a genuine grievance over a CBSE Physics answer sheet soon spiralled into a social media controversy after a senior Doordarshan journalist wrongly labelled a Delhi student as “Pakistani” for raising concerns online.
Vedant Srivastava, a Class 12 student from Delhi, had taken to X after discovering that the Physics answer sheet uploaded by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) during the re-evaluation process was not his. The student had applied for photocopies after receiving unexpectedly low marks in the subject.
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Vedant’s case surfaced amid growing criticism surrounding CBSE’s newly introduced On-Screen Marking (OSM) system for Class 12 board evaluations. Following this year’s results, which recorded the lowest pass percentage since 2019 at 85.2 per cent, several students complained of unchecked answers, blurred scanned copies, incorrect totals and repeated crashes of the re-evaluation portal during payment and submission stages.
As Vedant’s post gained traction online, Doordarshan News anchor Ashok Shrivastav reacted to the issue after noticing that the X account location displayed “South Asia”. Assuming the handle belonged to someone from Pakistan, Shrivastav posted sarcastically in Hindi, asking whether Pakistanis had also appeared for CBSE examinations.
The claim was soon amplified by several right-wing social media accounts and influencers, leading to online abuse against the student and his family. Vedant and his brother Siddhant Srivastava later clarified that the account had only recently been created to raise the grievance publicly after technical difficulties with the re-evaluation process.
Siddhant explained that X often displays a broader regional location such as “South Asia” for newly created accounts before assigning a specific country. Vedant also uploaded a video showing that he was unable to manually change the location on his profile.
Following backlash and clarification, Ashok Shrivastav deleted his original post and issued an apology to Vedant and his family. However, his clarification still questioned why the account location had initially shown “outside India”.
The controversy eventually took a positive turn after CBSE officials reportedly contacted Vedant and provided him with the correct Physics answer sheet. Sharing the update on X, Vedant thanked those who supported him and wrote that people had called his family “anti-national” and “Pakistani” merely for raising a genuine issue.
