Shiv

[ParteekNotPrateek @randomcricfacts]

You guys must have noticed that there was this innate sense of calm and peacefulness because we did not have to see or hear Gambhir for 2 months. Felt like being in the Himalayas

[Zenia D'cunha @ZENIADCUNHA]

One more incredibly inspiring moment from @Phogat_Vinesh

I may not have to or be able to face half the challenges she has because of (not just in) Indian sport, but hope I can have a quarter of the courage she has to keep fighting every single time she is pinned down

[Viren Rasquinha @virenrasquinha]

Thank you Vinesh for giving everything on the mat. Unbelievable after 2 years out of competition, giving birth to a child a few months ago & still competing this well.

Thank you for fighting the good fight off the mat. You will be remembered for generations to come

[geeta phogat @geeta_phogat]

जिस तरह @Phogat_Vinesh देश के लिए फिर से मेडल जीतने की ज़िद, जुनून और हौसले के साथ आगे बढ़ रही हैं, उसे देखकर बहुत गर्व होता है। लेकिन जिस तरह WFI उन्हें रोकने की हर कोशिश की जा रही है, उसे देखकर दुख भी होता है और शर्म भी महसूस होती है।

[Saurav Das @SauravDassss]

Good to see the Leader of Opposition give clear visibility to a young student who has exposed what many in the media could not even think of in their imaginations.

[jonathan selvaraj @jon_selvaraj]

Wow. WFI stops Vinesh Phogat from competing in the women's 53kg category at Asian Games selection trials. Says she is only allowed to compete in 50kg category. She is only informed of this decision in the morning as she prepared to give weight for the selection trials.

[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. :)

[Mihir Vasavda @mihirsv]

Flying Sikh.

Gurindervir Singh runs the fastest 100m by an Indian.

As he puts it, 'Indian genes tagde hai.'

Incredible.

[Mihir Vasavda @mihirsv]

Delhi HC Chief Justice rips apart WFI for not allowing Vinesh Phogat to compete:
"She reached the finals and was disqualified for being overweight by how many grams?… Can you describe it as a national shame? Don’t act in vengeance."
@thanda_ghosh reports
https://t.co/79wT3Z6IH3

[✒ @Aarzaai_Ishq]

— Jaun Elia

[Stan Collymore @StanCollymore]

Set a treadmill at 21kph ( max most will go to) and try to run for 30 seconds on it.

That's what he did for 1 hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds.

The peak of human physical achievement. Insane, absolutely insane.

[Abhishek AB @ABsay_ek]

Gujarat Titans have assembled a bowling attack that looks like a fantasy draft gone right. Rabada still touches 150 kmph after a decade. Ashok Sharma sends speed guns into meltdown. Prasidh Krishna collects wickets through the middle like a hobby. Rashid Khan remains the ATG of T20.
Among all these names, Mohammad Siraj simply does what he has always done for India: he works, persists, delivers & asks for nothing in return.

Impact Player rule arrived in 2023 & turned bowling into punishment. Batters swing without consequence, lineups run deeper & death overs have become a war zone.
Yet since that rule dropped, Siraj has taken 55 wickets, 2nd most among all IPL pacers. Only Arshdeep sits above him, but Arshdeep concedes at 9.5 an over while Siraj operates at 8.68.
That economy rate might not jump off the page until you place it next to Bhuvneshwar Kumar at 8.97 & Sandeep Sharma at 9.1, both more expensive while taking fewer wickets. Infact Siraj has the best economy among top 10 wicket takers(pacers) in this period in IPL.

What makes this staggering is the body producing these overs. Siraj is not a T20 specialist resting between franchise gigs. He is India’s workhorse in whites, having bowled 744 overs in same period which includes back to back 5 Test series last year, collecting 93 wickets at strike rate of 48.
Add 52 wickets in 33 ODIs at strike rate of 28 & you realize this man spends more time in bowling spells than most youngsters spend in scrolling reels.

Siraj does not rely on sheer pace like Rabada or mystery like Rashid. He bowls with the angry discipline of a man who knows his worth but refuses to advertise it. He hustles in, moves the ball just enough & builds pressure through persistence rather than spectacle.
In a league designed specifically to demolish bowlers, he has become one of the most reliable unsung pacer in the competition, the player coaches trust when the run flow needs choking & captain simply needs a breather.

He will not always end with the best figures or Purple cap, but when the season ends & the stats settle, his name sits near the top again, silent & immovable. Not because he did something viral, because he stopped the bleeding while everyone else was looking at the fireworks.

[Ravi Prakash Official @raviprakash_rtv]

I’m a Telugu journalist based out of Hyderabad and I’m writing this on behalf of EVERY SOUTH INDIAN STATE.
India needs to pay URGENT attention !!

This is not delimitation. This is political punishment.
Punishment for controlling population.
Punishment for investing in education.
Punishment for doing exactly what the nation asked us to do.

For decades, South Indian states acted responsibly , built human capital, strengthened public systems, and contributed disproportionately to India’s economy.

And now, the reward?
Fewer voices in Parliament.
Let that sink in.
States that governed better are being pushed to the margins, while political power shifts purely on population numbers.

This is not federalism. This is a structural imbalance in the making.
Is India still a Union of States or are we heading toward permanent dominance by a few, at the cost of others?

Representation cannot come at the cost of balance.

Democracy cannot mean silencing those who performed better.

If delimitation happens without safeguards, it won’t just redraw constituencies , it will redraw the idea of India itself.
SOUTH INDIA IS NOT ASKING FOR PRIVELEGE.
It is asking for fairness.

@narendramodi @PMOIndia @ncbn @AndhraPradeshCM @revanth_anumula @TelanganaCMO @siddaramaiah @CMofKarnataka @mkstalin @CMOTamilnadu @pinarayivijayan @CMOKerala

[Venkata Krishna B @venkatatweets]

Mumbai has four cricket venues, a fifth on the way, and no world-class stadium for badminton, hockey, athletics or any Olympic sport. A city that once produced champions across disciplines is erasing them from its own sporting landscape.
By Shivani Naik.
https://t.co/AZ6twBapLs

[AIN @Tejusurya_]

Living my best life ❣️
•Brushed twice with Sensodyne
•Ate Malai Paneer sandwich(FSSAI certified) and drank “Real” fruit juice.
•AQI at -40
•Living in Faridabad’s world class infra.

[AK @altered_Karbon]

@rajeshkmoorthy @fssaiindia

[K. RAJESH @rajeshkmoorthy]

Everything is a joke in this country.

@fssaiindia - why do you even exist???

[that poonam ka chaand @sabsezyadaa]

Hinduism in the hands of RW Hindus has become a trashy, cheap, vulgar. Violent, gutter level religion. It’s been made so dirty and disgusting that we will not be able to save it. It’s only about hating/ killing Muslims now, or dancing in front of mosques or promoting rape culture

[Navin Mittal @NavinSports]

This is my moment of the day ❤️
This should be news of day!!

LIMBLESS PAYAL Nag def. World champion Armless Sheetal Devi to win 🥇 in her 1st Senior international tournament at Bangkok , Thankyou to both of you for inspiring us every time 🙏🏻

[Travis Miller @travismillerx13]

Femke Bol 🔥 on 4x400m anchor