The red pen is dead. Long live the flickering cursor.

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) recently sent out a directive that reads like a threat wrapped in a memo. Principals are now officially the digital wardens of the staff room. Their new mission? Ensuring every single teacher under their roof completes "on-screen marking" (OSM) practice. It’s a mandate that smells of panic and bureaucratic theater.

In the high-stakes world of Indian board exams, where a single percentage point can determine whether a teenager becomes an engineer or a disappointment to their zip code, the grading process has always been a slog. Traditionally, this involved stacks of physical answer sheets, the smell of cheap paper, and the frantic scratching of ink. Now, the Board wants it all digitized. They want "efficiency." They want "accuracy." What they’re actually getting is a bunch of overworked educators staring at clunky interfaces until their retinas burn.

The logic is simple, if you’re a bureaucrat sitting in a ventilated office in New Delhi. If teachers practice on the software, they’ll make fewer mistakes during the real thing. It’s the kind of logic that ignores how actual human beings interact with technology. You don’t learn to love a poorly designed grading portal through repetition; you just learn to resent it more efficiently.

Let’s talk about the friction. This isn’t just a matter of clicking a mouse. For a teacher in a tier-two city school, this means navigating a UI that likely hasn't seen a meaningful update since the Obama administration. It means dealing with server timeouts, "Invalid Session" errors, and the peculiar lag that happens when ten thousand people try to upload marks simultaneously. The Board isn’t providing new hardware for this. They aren't handing out high-resolution monitors to save the teachers' eyesight. They’re just handing out orders.

The trade-off is obvious to anyone who isn't a policy maker. For every hour a teacher spends "practicing" on a screen, that’s an hour taken away from actual lesson planning or, God forbid, sleep. We’re asking people who are already paid too little to perform more unpaid labor in the name of modernization. It’s a classic tech-solutionist trap: assuming that replacing a physical task with a digital one is an inherent upgrade, regardless of how much friction the software introduces.

The principals are caught in the middle. They’ve been turned into middle-management enforcers for a board that loves top-down directives but hates providing the infrastructure to support them. If a school doesn't hit its practice targets, the principal gets the heat. It’s a accountability shell game. If the final results are delayed or riddled with errors, the CBSE can point to the data and say, "Well, we told them to practice. It’s a local implementation failure."

There is a specific kind of cruelty in forcing a 55-year-old veteran math teacher, who can solve complex calculus in her head, to wrestle with a buggy drop-down menu just to prove she can "digitally" grade a paper. It’s performative tech-literacy. It treats teachers like data-entry clerks rather than subject-matter experts.

And for what? The Board claims this will speed up the results. Maybe it will. But we’ve seen this movie before. Digitizing a broken or bloated process usually just results in a faster, more expensive version of the same mess. We’re swapping ink stains for carpal tunnel and calling it progress.

The circular makes it clear: this isn't optional. It’s a "mandatory prerequisite." It’s the educational equivalent of a software update that you can’t skip, even though you know it’s going to break your favorite apps and drain your battery. Except here, the "battery" is the morale of the teaching staff.

The CBSE is obsessed with the optics of being a "tech-forward" institution. They want the dashboards. They want the real-time analytics. They want the fancy spreadsheets. But they’re building that glossy exterior on the backs of people who are still trying to figure out why the "Save" button didn't work the last three times they clicked it.

The red pen was simple. It didn't need a login. It didn't require a high-speed internet connection. It didn't crash when the weather got bad. By killing it, the Board is trading reliability for the appearance of sophistication. They’re betting that a few hours of forced screen time will fix a system that’s fundamentally overworked.

If the goal is truly to help teachers, maybe the Board could try simplifying the rubrics or reducing the sheer volume of paperwork. But that would require actual work. It’s much easier to just send a memo telling the principals to make sure everyone clicks the buttons.

How many hours of "practice" does it take to make a bad interface feel like a good idea?