Kapil Dutta

This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification. Let me explain what he found, in simple terms. Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system. He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender. The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck. Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide. A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck. So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen. The tender was issued three times. > First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely. > Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled. > Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify. Here is what changed, one by one. 01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier. 02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past. 03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through. 04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company. 05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process. 06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS. 07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure. 08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own. 09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders. 10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning. 11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely. 12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand. 13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed. These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field. The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded. Following things need to happen immediately; 1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process. 2. A parliamentary debate on the topic. 3. An independent investigation into > Why the first tender vanished? > Why the disqualification clauses were deleted? > Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was? > Why the security level was dropped? > Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment? Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)

All of reality is just energy, moving flowing, emerging in different shapes and forms, like an ocean without a surface, circular, endless. Interconnected, looping through cause and effect. We are reality experiencing itself.

What is speed? It's movement of thing relative to other things. What is thing? It's matter condensed in different form. What is matter? It's emergent shapes materialized in higher dimensions from energy. What is movement? It's energy applied on matter, displacing it's position

You are measuring the speed at which things around you are moving. We use 24 hours because of the speed at which our planet is spinning on its axis, and the speed at which our biological world is moving. If we were computer programs, we wouldn't be using the 24 hour clock.

Your average 10K marathon runners enjoy to run. Winning requires a different kind of mindset

I agree with the sentiment of this but not the example. The winners in a race do care about the score board and they do change their pace or go harder specifically to win, not just because they love to run.

Glide. Surf. Dance. Flirt. Just be. Effortlessly. Live the life you were worn to live. Yes, you can. What is your true limit? Fear and Anxiety are your friends, let them be. Just feel. It's OK to be delusional. Let's fuck around and find out. Do you have the audacity? Just be.

Meri ek duniya hain, main apke duniya se bahar jita hu. Mujhe jine do

@SamaHoole @cremieuxrecueil thoughts?

India ran the most important cardiovascular study of the 20th century by accident, and then immediately forgot about it. In 1967, Dr. S.L. Malhotra published a study in the British Heart Journal examining heart disease rates among 1.5 million Indian railway employees. The population was extraordinarily useful for research purposes: same employer, same healthcare access, comparable income and working conditions, spread across the entire country. The only meaningful variable was geography. Which meant diet. North Indian railway workers: Punjab, Rajasthan, UP, ate a diet built around ghee and dairy fat. They consumed up to 19 times more fat than their southern counterparts. The fat was primarily saturated: clarified butter, milk fat, the short-chain saturated fatty acids that Ancel Keys had recently been telling the Western world were arterial death. South Indian railway workers ate a diet based on rice, sambar, and seed oils: groundnut oil and sesame oil, primarily. They ate considerably less fat overall. By the standards of dietary advice being formulated in the 1960s, they should have been the healthy ones. Heart disease mortality in South India: 135 per 100,000. Heart disease mortality in North India: 20 per 100,000. Seven times higher in the population eating seed oils. Among railway sweepers specifically, the lowest-paid, most physically active workers, the gap was even wider. Heart disease was fifteen times more common in the South Indian sweeper population than in the North Indian sweeper population. Malhotra controlled for everything he could reach: smoking, where Northerners actually smoked more. Activity levels, where the relationship was inconsistent. Socioeconomic status, where executives died more often than sweepers regardless of region. He found no variable that explained the gap except the type of fat in the diet. He published the data. In a peer-reviewed journal. In 1967. The study was cited periodically, acknowledged as methodologically interesting, and then set aside. The decade in which Malhotra published was the decade in which Ancel Keys's fat hypothesis was being converted into policy. The American Heart Association was issuing guidance recommending polyunsaturated vegetable oils as replacements for saturated animal fats. The food industry was producing seed oils at industrial scale. The infrastructure of seed oil promotion was being built, expensively and with great institutional momentum. A study showing that populations eating animal fat had a fraction of the heart disease of populations eating seed oils was not, in that context, a study that anyone particularly wanted to follow up. Nobody followed up. Almost sixty years later, the finding stands unrefuted in the literature. It is not in the dietary guidelines.

@0xSero @petheth What is a Droid?

@petheth it's not a skill it's in Droid I think you can use this for free, but I'm not sure since I pay

How I am de-slopping my code-bases This feature has made my codebases so much less messy /readiness-report in Droid compares your codebase against best standards and suggests ways to de-slop. 2x speed.

A high quality Solution Architect with founder background is a fusion of both of these. Exciting times ahead ;)

@Finance_Weights I think we should speak. I can't DM you. You have wisdom that can help me. About me : 29 yr old, working as Senior Solution Architect, have oppertunity to move to US, 40LPA package rn, live in a gated society in Hyd, but nothing feels right still

@Finance_Weights @virinchi__ Can you convince him that you can lend him the money under the condition he is able to build a fully functional app with the help of AI tools with modern tech stack and deploy it within the next two weeks and explain to you how its built. That should help him get a job as well

@virinchi__ He said as soon as he finds a job which i doubt will be easy. He's 44 and was in cms/ Drupal which is not so hot a tech sector

I just want to know why @paulg hasn't spoken about Iran yet. The numbers are staggering

this concept + the idea that success = how quickly you take action on a decision / intention, are the two profound software upgrades to my psychology

@justinskycak What do we do about social media addiction. This thing sucks out all attention for endless hours. Hours and hours of mindless scrolling, losing patience for even 10 mins for real forced work/study. I clearly have it worse than others

f-you skills f-you audience f-you money It starts with skills. You gotta get good. Like, alien-level.

@p_droaraujo @minordissent This is so true

Correct in spirit, but very naive. Although IQ correlates with financial success, it rapidly reaches a sigmoid ceiling. IQ is most valued as prestigious workforce. There is a clear limit to gains as an employee. To explore beyond this, intelligence is not enough. Most intelligent people get trapped in idea space. Intelligence does not grant you skill. You can understand the problem and what to do, but you will fumble and fail to execute. The path of least resistance is technical employment or academia. Intellectual bubbles that protect against feeling stupid. In reality the world values brain capacity a lot less than you think. Iterate, be dumb again and again and brute force your way to victory.

Every problem you experience in life is a puzzle. IQ is puzzle solving ability. Finding a job is a puzzle. Learning how to be persuasive is a puzzle. Learning how to build a network is a puzzle. Learning how to sell yourself is a puzzle. Learning to be conscientious and disciplined is a puzzle. Yes, sure many people dumber than you were taught these things or stumbled on them without having to figure them out themselves. But that is not an excuse to not learn them. Especially when the answer is one conversation with an LLM away. The world is always changing always adapting. Every person wins some lucky draws and loses others. You, for all your bad draws, have been given the ultimate good draw of puzzle solving ability. The only draw which, with time and focus, can mostly negate all bad draws. You can definitely use it on the puzzle of “come up with all the reasons i’m in this shitty position” if you want. And your case would certainly be powerful. But at the end of the day, that does nothing for you. If you simply took all the energy you spend justifying your shitty position and shifted it to solving the puzzle of “how do i get out of this shitty situation?” you’d literally get out of it in only a few years. At the end of the day, there are many people who were handed far worse starting hands than you who are now doing better than you AND many who were handed far better starting hands who are now doing worse than you. And that’s all you need to know. Stop making excuses and get to work.

Went to the post office first time last week to send a big 15kg parcel via @IndiaPostOffice to Himachal Pradesh. Wanted to do Speed Post, but they didn't let me. Handed over the parcel and made payment, they promised it will deliver in 2 days. It's 4 days, and I can't track the package on the website. Says "article not booked" - wow. No idea where the package is right now. Not even able to file a complaint, website keeps crashing and OTP doesn't work.

a king, a sage, a soldier, a daily wage householder, a lion roaring through his cage, a young boy masquerading his rage, bhikkhu bodhisattva, leonardo painting shakespeare's plays