നത്ത്

Biodegradable

[നത്ത് @__ngaa]

പണ്ടൊക്കെ "ചെകുത്താൻ കുരിശ് കണ്ടപോലെ" എന്നായിരുന്ന്, ഇപ്പൊ "സമസ്‌ത വിളക്ക് കണ്ടപോലെ" എന്നാണ്

[Krishnan @skk_ls]

വെളിച്ചം ദുഃഖമാണുണ്ണി, തമസ്സല്ലോ സുഖപ്രദം...
#അക്കിത്തം

[നത്ത് @__ngaa]

പയിനഞ്ച് ലക്ഷം കോടി

[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. :)

[Mohammed Zubair @zoo_bear]

#CBSEToolkit. After mismanaging the entire system, CBSE has now switched to damage control mode. CBSE is sending scripts to school principals to defend the On Screen Marking system. Principals making insta reels repeating the same lines given by CBSE.
1. Principal DPS Siliguri

[നത്ത് @__ngaa]

" ഉണ്ണിക്കൈക്കെടുക്കുവാൻ , ഉണ്ണിവായ്ക്കുണ്ണാൻ വേണ്ടി
വന്നതാണീ മാമ്പഴം വാസ്തവമറിയാതെ "

[നത്ത് @__ngaa]

ഉറങ്ങാൻ നേരം മോൾക്ക് എപ്പഴും ചൊല്ലിക്കൊടുക്കുന്ന കവിതയാണ് മാമ്പഴം. പണ്ട് ഞാനൊരു കുഞ്ഞുവാവ ആയിരുന്നപ്പോൾ അച്ഛൻ ചൊല്ലിത്തരുന്ന കവിത. ഇന്ന് അപ്രതീക്ഷിതമായി മോള് അതിൻ്റെ കഥ എന്താണെന്ന് ചോദിച്ചു. ഇരുട്ടിൽ, കണ്ണുനിറയുന്നത് പെണ്ണ് കണ്ടില്ല. ശബ്ദമിടറുന്നത് അറിഞ്ഞോ ആവോ

[Business Today @business_today]

One in two petrol vehicles sold before 2023 seeing mileage drop with E20: Survey https://t.co/wRkbb0qiM9

[Abhijeet Dipke @abhijeet_dipke]

As expected Cockroach Janta Party’s account has been withheld in India.

[തകഴി™ 🇧🇷 @tk_zy]

ആകെയുള്ള കിടപ്പാടം പോവുന്നേന്റെ വേദന ഈ എലീറ്റ് കുണ്ണകൾക്ക് മനസ്സിലാവില്ല.

[നത്ത് @__ngaa]

@Otta_yaan അപ്പൊ , ഏറ്റവും ഇഷ്ടമുള്ള പീസ് തുടയാണെന്ന് പറഞ്ഞതോ ?

[നത്ത് @__ngaa]

അല്ലേലും വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ വകുപ്പ് ലീഗിന് തന്നെ കൊടുക്കണം. പണ്ട് മതമില്ലാത്ത ജീവൻ എന്നൊരു പാഠഭാഗം കണ്ട് പുസ്തകം കത്തിച്ച ടീമാണ് , ഇതിനേക്കാൾ യോഗ്യത ആർക്കാണുള്ളത്

[നത്ത് @__ngaa]

എന്താണ്? ലഹള കഴിഞ്ഞോ ?

[Karthik Balachandran @karthik2k2]

If Trisha didn't look this good, she would have been criticised a lot (more).

Morality has an aesthetic bias.

[@ @godofgoodthings]

സത്യപ്രതിജ്ഞ പോലും വിജയ് അഭിനയിച്ചു എന്ന് പറയണ ചേട്ടന്മാർ പത്ത് കൊല്ലമായി രാജ്യം ഭരിക്കണ ഉലകനായകനെ കുറിച്ച് ഒന്നും മിണ്ടില്ല.

[നത്ത് @__ngaa]

He actually did it!

[UFC @ufc]

SHOCKED THE WORLD 🤯

@SStricklandMMA defeats Khamzat Chimaev by Split-Decision to become the NEW middleweight champion of the world!

[ B2YB @HSpecialSurgery ]

[നത്ത് @__ngaa]

@tk_zy ആ

[നത്ത് @__ngaa]

റോഡ് സൈഡും കടപ്പുറവും ട്രെയിനിലെ സീറ്റും ഒക്കെ ഇതിലേത് ഭാഗത്തായി വരും?

[Allah Islam Quran @AllahGreatQuran]

The rewards for prayer in different mosques 🕌

[ηαяαуαη @menontefriend]

ഒന്നാം മുഖ്യമന്ത്രി ലഹള (2026)

[നത്ത് @__ngaa]

ഹിഹി