Simran Pavecha

Building community @YouthKiAwaaz

Education. Law. Fiction. Humanities. email: [email protected]

[Simran Pavecha @SimranPavecha]

@HitchhikerQ Whattt

[Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) @internetfreedom]

One of the most significant aspects of the judgment is its interpretation of Section 69A. The Court accepted the government's position that the power to block "information" can extend to an entire application or platform. This effectively recognises that platform-wide app blocking falls within the scope of the government's powers under the Information Technology Act. 6/8

[Kunal Purohit @kunalpurohit]

🚨For over a year, I've worked with a small team of researchers to clinically document evidence of the role Big Tech platforms play in encouraging Hindutva Pop music.

We found a total of *523 SONGS*, encouraging violence against Muslims, stoking hate. YouTube, Meta, Apple and Spotify, were all found complicit in not just amplifying but even *funding* these songs. #HPop

For @csohate @raqib_naik

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

So I bought six books and read all six before buying more. Please clap. This is a peak act of restraint you will likely never see again.

[Vijaita Singh @vijaita]

Excl: Ground reality vs official records: Census fieldwork is throwing up data that differ from govt records on open defecation free villages, use of cow dung cakes/kerosene/crop residue for cooking in urban areas despite LPG connection, no electricity. Enumerators asked to revisit and review the “data discrepancies”.I ✍️

https://t.co/1LaYwpiiED

[Article 14 @Article14live]

This is an urgent message from our Founding Editor @samar11. If you like our work and want to see it continue, please listen and subscribe:
https://t.co/2XjoqhVGwO

[sidharth @sidharthify]

almost every single OnMark portal built by EduTek is fundamentally insecure, and CBSE is lying to you about the safety of student data.

we found default passwords, URL-based RCEs, and raw MD5 hashes. millions of students are at risk.

read the blog here: https://t.co/D4CXnIadmd

[Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) @internetfreedom]

Exposed vulnerability : "Password : 12345"

CBSE : "An expert team of cybersecurity professionals has been deployed over the last few days from across various arms of the government as well as the IITs to fortify these systems, including taking them over to a more secure set up."

CERT-In : ................

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

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. :)

[Nikhil Kamath @citizenkamath]

I am back to sharing my thoughts on @YouthKiAwaaz ✍️✍️
This time with #BookReviews 📚 taking #SaltPepperBookClub to a new place thanks to a little nudge from @SimranPavecha 🙏🏻🙏🏻
Follow my journey here ⬇️⬇️

https://t.co/s6oLcEfJs3

[Tanuj Solanki @tanujsolanki]

Excited to announce this short-story writing workshop. It's for everyone who's grappled with the idea of the perfect short story and wondered what goes into it.

Click on the link below to apply, and please RT. My DMs are open for any queries.

https://t.co/G2WNV6cuOn

[Simran Pavecha @SimranPavecha]

@tanujsolanki Hi Tanuj, thanks a ton for doing this. Have applied. Just checking a small thing - what's a rough timeline for the selection process? Will help plan a lot of stuff around :)

[Simran Pavecha @SimranPavecha]

We want to use the findings to shape a large-scale public awareness campaign with road safety nonprofits and other orgs in the law & justice space.

It's an anonymous exercise and won't take more than 10 minutes of your time. Please RT for max reach. 🌸

[Simran Pavecha @SimranPavecha]

Hello! At @YouthKiAwaaz, we're doing a detailed study, with lawyers, on road crashes and public safety in 11 cities. If you're a lawyer who's worked on cases related to road accidents, the Motor Vehicles Act, and other public safety issues, please comment or DM? List of cities 👇

[Simran Pavecha @SimranPavecha]

Cities:

Ludhiana
Kolkata
Jaipur
Indore
Kanpur
Mumbai
Varanasi
Chennai
Delhi
Bengaluru
Hyderabad

[Centre for Internet and Society @cis_india]

We are hosting a Twitter Space (in Hindi) on perspectives from grassroots leaders and researchers on envisioning cooperative structures for platform workers
https://t.co/gHI9ZXQPkc

[Supriya Sharma @sharmasupriya]

🚨Does your masala have carcinogenic pesticide residue?

Quite likely. Not just in other countries, even in Maharashtra, the carcinogen did show up in five samples of a spices brand

Yet there has been no nationwide action

@tabassum_b reports

https://t.co/DQdfhJqrh8

[Sukanya Shantha @sukanyashantha]

In all the mismanagement and sudden termination of contracts at TISS, the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies stands to lose the most. Almost the entire centre, including its chairperson, has lost their jobs. #TISS #WomensStudies
https://t.co/7OsGBKwKaa

[Jeet @6482912t]

In Congress-ruled Himachal, a Muslim man’s shop was vandalised by a Hindu mob while the police watched. In Congress-ruled Telangana, an FIR was filed against @revathitweets for tweeting about power cuts. Rahul Gandhi ka birthday manane se fursat mile toh thoda yahan bhi dhyan do.

[Kavya Mukhija @KavyaMukhija]

I appeared for the UGC NET on June 18, which has now been cancelled. It is ableist and does NOT care about disabled candidates.

Here's what happened. 🧵

#DisabilityTwitter