You won't understand the sheer struggle to send 100 applications to hear back from none, not because you're incompetent but because people with connections filled your seats. They won't even report to the office everyday!
It's been almost 2 months since the Supreme Court Recruitment Cell admitted their mistake in discrepancies, yet the Law Clerk exam results are still in limbo.
Supreme, but not infallible, shouldn’t that be questioned?
During the Chief Examination of the victim (client) the arguments got so heated between my senior & and opposite party that the defendants, his wife, their associates and me (intern) were sent out of the courtroom.
Public outrages over normal banters in High Courts and Supreme Court.
They'll go insane if LiveLaw and B&B start covering trial courts, especially in Tier 2 cities.
We are unbelievable. The alacrity with which FIRs are lodged in undeserving cases and the reluctance to lodge FIRs in the most deserving cases could be a case study.
I'm part of a SC Clerkship Exam WhatsApp group. Honestly, I feel sad for the candidates. No updates on revised results since more than 1.5 months. No posts, no protests, no petitions just silently suffering.
A friend just back from Meghalaya: “Purba, it didn’t feel like India at all. People follow traffic rules. No one cuts you off. No one leans on the horn. Garbage goes in bins.”
And I thought — of course it didn’t feel like India. Because what we call “India” now is really just North India and Gujarat exported everywhere. Loud, entitled, convinced that rules are for other people.
The senior bar in Delhi litigation is quietly performing a public service by keeping city's rental market in check. By paying no stipend to the 1000s of juniors entering the profession every year they ensure there simply aren't enough people with the means inflate rents.
Now that Delhi Police has arrested the cook, they should also arrest the sweeper, the security guard, the receptionist and the liftman.
Arrest everyone but the corrupt MCD engineers, the inept fire dept officials and the extortionist local police personnel.
Arrest that officer who came to do the fire inspection and went quietly after taking a bribe. Arrest that corrupt municipal official who gave the NOC to the building.
But that's not going to happen. This guy Bajaj will be in the news for a few days, and everyone will forget about the actual issue.
Corruption has become the national character of India.
People who celebrate 10-minute deliveries as a sign of India’s progress should read this.
During the Malviya Nagar fire incident, locals say fire brigades reached nearly 45 minutes late. Residents had to spread mattresses to rescue people trapped inside, including foreign nationals.
Development is when emergency services arrive in minutes, not when groceries do.
Multiple casualties in the Delhi fire. One after another tragedy. India is the only country where groceries comes in 10 mins, pizza in 30 mins but fire brigade, police, ambulance takes hours.
One office I know gave their associates academic assignments during vacations. They would come to the office everyday and research which the partners would use to publish papers, books, conferences etc.
I hope advocates flaunting going to this vacation/ that trip are also taking care of junior lawyers of their offices.
Am also sure most of these seniors spend more on their pets than paying their junior most lawyers!
Just ranting out of general observation!!
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. :)
#WATCH | Ranchi, Jharkhand | A class 12th student, Sarthak Sidhant, says, “…I have written a blog that compares the tender documents of CBSE. I have uploaded and published it… There were at least 15 discrepancies, as per my blog. I would like to highlight three or four of them. Let me give a background about Coempt. It was known as Globarena, and they have a very shady background. 23 students killed themselves because of coempt… Now, I would like to tell you about RFP (Request for Proposal). What happens is the government issues a tender and asks the bidder to bid for it. CBSE issued this tender three times… I have compared the old RFP and the new RFP, and I found some discrepancies… The first discrepancy is that there were three clauses of poor performances which was completely wiped out from the new RFP. In the earlier RFP, there was a clause called blacklisted earlier, whereas in the new RFP, it was changed to blacklisted currently. Why would the board want a service provider which was blacklisted earlier? The third thing I found out is the 50 crore limit, which you needed to qualify, and coempt qualified that by 1.7% … The time frame of corrupt practices was halved, and there were project criteria changes… It shows a pattern that the industry giant TCS was not preferred, but coempt was preferred, which works as a very fragmented group of institutions…”
nothing irks me as much as spending time with products of nepotisms, no matter how nice they might be, after a hectic and tiring day at work. even though you know it’s unfair, it feels worse when you’ve had an exhausting day at work.