Akshita.

ख़ुश रहें, आबाद भी रहें, और कोशिश करें कि थोड़ा आज़ाद भी रहें! 🕊️ Journalist at @AFP || Byline: @HindustanTimes, @The_Mooknayak

[Akshita. @akshitaxk]

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes RELIGION!

[Peek TV @PeekTV_in]

#PeekOnGround: Sonam Wangchuk has lost more than 9 kgs of weight over the last 19 days of his hunger strike. He currently weighs just around 57 kgs, while he started the strike weighing 66 kgs. Visuals taken during Wangchuk's medical examination.

[Peek TV @PeekTV_in]

#PeekOnGround: On a hunger strike for tribal rights, social activist Amit Bhatnagar has accused the police of using force against people participating in Bundelkhand's 'Chita Andolan'. The government, however, maintains that all those eligible have already received compensation.

[SAG-AFTRA @sagaftra]

Meta now lets anyone use your Instagram photos in AI images without your consent. SAG-AFTRA recommends that #SagAftraMembers (and all Instagram users) opt-OUT of Meta’s new AI image generation tool, Muse Image. Take action to protect your likeness.

[Rajendran Narayanan @rajendran_naray]

Hats of @the_hindu for carrying this splendid page. Although what should be considered normal, it's a pity that in today's times this is courageous. Here is hoping that other media houses learn.

May Umar be out soon.

[Manish Pandey (मनीष पाण्डेय) @join2manish]

sonam wangchuk sir said to all the people at the cockroach janta party protest, specially to abhijeet dipke:

main yaha amaraan anshan pe baithaa hu aapke liye aur aap sab thuuus thuuus ke kha rahe ho

at least bari bari se ek ek din karke aap bhi anshan pe baithooo 🤦‍♂️

[Sarthak Sidhant @sidhant_sarthak]

read the thread. 10 students died of suicide in the past few days.

the education system of india,
and the government has blood on their hands.

[Vinay Aravind @vinayaravind]

This is part of his initiation rituals. You have to make the newbie perform the most embarrassing clownery, the likes of which would absolutely destroy any last semblance of dignity he might have possessed in a past life. Amazing what people do for some proximity to power.

[Sonam Wangchuk @Wangchuk66]

IF NOT US, WHO?
IF NOT NOW, WHEN !
I will be joining the CJP members in Delhi on 6th June if nothing changes by 5th June. Any self respecting Minister should resign if things go so wrong... Not to mention the effect on millions of young lives and in fact the future of India.

#CockroachJantaParty #CJP #SonamWangchuk
Please share; No copyright

[The Hindu @the_hindu]

Sensitive data, including students' personal information, was processed by Google's Gemini through automation scripts prepared by quality assurance engineers at COEMPT Eduteck, CBSE's tech vendor. Ethical hacker Nisarga Adhikary (@ni5arga), who exposed #CBSE, calls it "scary" and "sad" that a third-party company allegedly sent such data to the U.S. for processing.

"Data Privacy Laws are not respected, and they should get sued for doing this without student consent," Adhikary says in conversation with Maitri Porecha (@dawalelo) and John Xavier (@johnXavier777).

[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. :)

[sunetra choudhury @sunetrac]

France has made meals in student cafetarias across the country just 1 euro ie 110 rupees. All students- rich and poor - they get starter, main course and even dessert for that because they are investing in their future. What are we doing for our students? #CBSE12thResults

[The Emmys @TheEmmys]

The #NewsEmmys Award for Outstanding Continuing Coverage: Short Form goes to Earthquake in Myanmar (@BBCWorld).

[The Quint @TheQuint]

Opinion | The suicide of Twisha Sharma and the rape of Dalit women are two sides of the same social problem: Brahmanical patriarchy. The more Giribala Singh (Twisha’s mother-in-law, a retired district judge) spoke, the more mechanisms of Brahmanical patriarchy made themselves visible.

The Brahmanical social order is organised along two inseparable hierarchies: caste and gender. The control over upper-caste women is essential to maintain the purity of the caste order and control patrilineal inheritance. The control is central to the preservation of status and landed property.

Read the full piece by Dr. Ujithra Ponniah on our website: https://t.co/7kgf8rSj27

[BBC News Hindi @BBCHindi]

बीबीसी न्यूज़ हिन्दी के संपादक @Tweetnitins ने नॉर्वे की पत्रकार @HelleLyngSvends से ख़ास बातचीत की है. सुनिए प्रधानमंत्री मोदी की प्रेस मीट, प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता, लोकतंत्र, मानवाधिकार और भारत में पत्रकारिता की स्थिति पर हेला ने क्या कहा.

वीडियो प्रोड्यूसर: @AbhayVishen
वीडियो एडिटर: सदफ़ ख़ान

[Naresh Gyawali @GyawaliNaresh]

भारतको गोरखपुरमा बसेर खोजी पत्रकारिता गर्ने मनोज कुमार सिंहले बटुक सरकारमाथि @thewirehindi मा लेखेको यो लेखोट निकै महत्वपूर्ण छ।

https://t.co/1hfTsXw4d3

[Parth MN @parthpunter]

Important story

Brazil police seize devices from a famous bird expert.

He is suspected of coordinating the illegal purchase of endangered animals for Vantara, a private zoo in Gujarat, India.

https://t.co/XCAl1p1pZI

[CinemaRare @CinemaRareIN]

A long lost unreleased film from the year 2000, #TheLastTenant directed by @sarthakdasgupta, featuring #Irrfan and @vidya_balan in their only collaboration, finally sees the light of the day.

Link: https://t.co/6lHdfYtlGn

[Siddharth @svaradarajan]

Proud of my old newspaper, @the_hindu, take a bow @nambath, the only paper to have the correct headline for what transpired in parliament yesterday. All other newspapers seem to have bought the government’s spin that the ‘opposition defeated women’s reservation’!

[Kunal Kamra @kunalkamra88]

“While We Watched” - A film by Vinay Shukla Out on my YouTube Channel - https://t.co/AOkWaXAUel

[Akshita. @akshitaxk]

@nehaGurung1692 hey @nehaGurung1692, can I know who shot this video. thanks!