Valar Morghulis

Rationalist🖤
Belongs to the Dravidian stock♥️
First Generation Graduate.
Software Engineer.

[Plus Point | India @PlusPointIndia]

📢 Karnataka unveils Bengaluru's next mega mobility vision.

Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar says the state is targeting:

🔸500 km Metro network
🔸40 km of twin tunnels
🔸44+ km of double-decker corridors
🔸133 km of new flyovers
🔸123 km Bengaluru Business Corridor
🔸₹50,000+ crore for Phase 1 of the Peripheral Ring Road project, with ₹26,000 crore earmarked for the first 67-km stretch

The infrastructure push is aimed at supporting Karnataka's goal of attracting 500 new Global Capability Centres (GCCs) by 2029

[Krishnan @cvkrishnan]

Need these three greenfield routes to be 4-lanes with paved shoulders for Chennai to decongest its arterial highways and serve newer areas connecting them with highways.

[Satish Acharya @satishacharya]

An investigative reporting which should've been done by a mainstream media house was done by a 17 year old boy. Our godi media is busy protecting the people in power.

[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. :)

[P R Sundar @PRSundar64]

@CherieMagi7447 காமராஜர் படிக்காதவர்,
படித்து தேர்ச்சி பெறாதவர்
இல்லை.

[Chennai Super Kings @ChennaiIPL]

Kodiyil Oruvan! 🦁💛

#WhistlePodu #Yellove

[Valar Morghulis @bigOhNotation]

@indiainpixels TN doesn’t care about either of these idiots

[Frontier Indica @frontierindica]

> be me, 28m wagie living in Delhi
> wake up at 8 AM for my IT coolie job
> look out window, can’t see anything except a Grey haze
> neighbhourhood looks like the inside of a tandoor that hasn't been cleaned since 1947
> chest feeling heavy, congestion built up in lungs
> must be the weather changing
> check phone
> open IQAir app (Western propaganda tool)
> screen is deep purple
> AQI 650: "Hazardous. Do not breathe. Just die."
> panic.jpg
> am I being gaslit by the atmosphere?
> turn on nationalist TV news channel
> see senior Minister
> looks calm, composed, probably breathing filtered Himalayan air in the studio
> “Global rankings are not official. WHO guidelines are just suggestions.”
> “India sets its own standards based on geography.”
> realization hits me
> foreign AQI is a colonial construct
> Westoid lungs are weak, cannot handle the texture of Desi air
> they need ‘clean air’ because they lack civilizational immunity
> delete IQAir immediately
> install ‘Sarkari Vayu Sewa’ app
> refresh location
> AQI is 45: “Satisfactory”
> it’s not PM2.5, it’s ‘Atmanirbhar Particles’
> it’s not smog, it’s ‘Viksit Vapor’
> go to balcony
> take a deep breath of sovereign, non-aligned air
> taste the sulphur
> cough up a black glob
> stare at it
> it looks vaguely like a map of Akhand Bharat
> tears stream down my face (mostly from the nitrogen dioxide, but also patriotism)
> Global Index: Rejected
> Lungs: Congested
> Nation: Protected
> mfw I successfully rejected Western imperialism by reducing my life expectancy by 10 years

[Daniel Lemire @lemire]

When you look at people who appear to get « big » things done, like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or the current Chinese leadership… it is easy to conclude that a strong top-down push is responsible for the progress.
But that is incorrect in my view.
Let us focus on Elon Musk and his various projects. No matter how smart and hardworking Elon is, he can’t build giant rockets, self-driving cars, and robots all by himself.
Fundamentally, human beings are social animals. It is how we get things done.
Some people are several times more productive than others. Elon might think several times faster than I do, he may work more hours… but if he worked alone, I can assure you that he would not have built hundreds of giant rockets in his backyard.
He might have been a da Vinci who could describe multiple ideas, without ever implementing them… and never learning from his mistakes.
So people like Elon should be thought of more as enablers.
Think about it. If you have any kind of experience in the workplace, you have encountered aggressive bosses that can’t get much done. They order people around, and it works, but barely.
Economists working on history tell us that slavery was inefficient. Force only gets you so far.
How do you get giant rockets built? You get them built because there is already a pool of people who would like nothing better than to build these rockets. And then someone comes along and says, “If you want to build giant rockets, follow me.” And the rockets get built.
What is the underappreciated technological marvel of our time? Open-source software. Nearly everything around you that matters was built on top of open-source software. Why? Because there is a whole “culture” of people out there who want to build great software that people can use, and they have found that coming together in the open is the best way to make the software happen.
There are charismatic leaders in open source, certainly, but they would be nothing without the community.
To sum it up, it is not by force or top-down management that great things get built… great things happen on top of a receptive culture. In this sense, great things are an emergent phenomenon more than a grand design.

[cowboy @nextokens]

Here Comes Another Bubble (AI Edition)

[The Index of Gujarat @IndexofGujarat]

Have you seen world class Aquatic Gallery in Gujarat?

📍Science City, Ahmedabad

[Valar Morghulis @bigOhNotation]

@original_ngv @RaWhoolVijay What does moving to AWS have to do with privacy concerns?

[Valar Morghulis @bigOhNotation]

Cc: @mkstalin @CMOTamilnadu @narendramodi @PMOIndia

[Arkansas Worker @ArkansasWorker]

Xi Jinping on 'welfarism'…
-----
In pursuing common prosperity, we must not resort to welfarism. In the past, some countries embraced populism, and pampered a large number of lazy people who were given something for nothing.

Consequently, the fiscal burden became too heavy, and they were caught in the middle-income trap.

Once welfare has gone up, there is no way to bring it back down again.

Welfarism beyond the means of the state is unsustainable and will inevitably have severe economic and political consequences.

We should respect the principle of doing what we can to the best of our ability, focus on improving public services, provide basic public services in a targeted manner in education, health care, elderly care, housing, and other fields that concern the people the most, and ensure subsistence for those in difficulty.

We should not set expectations too high or make unrealistic commitments.
-----
Speech at the Central Conference on Economic Work, December 8, 2021

[kuldeep @ku1deep]

OK. I will tell the Whatapp story. Remember success has many fathers and we are talking about events 16 years past. Events that did not seems to extraordinary when they are happening. This is the memory of memories, and a lot of detail of that time is now lost.

As I remember it : WhatsApp's dominance in India wasn't engineered through sophisticated market entry strategies or massive marketing campaigns on their end. Instead, it emerged from an extraordinary confluence of timing, technology transitions, and cultural alignment that transformed a simple messaging app into the communication backbone of the world's most populous nation. Whatsapp has 550+ million users in India today and India represents WhatsApp's largest market globally.

Lets go back to 2009. App store is only a year old. Mobile internet is slow but the smartphone era is dawning. Whatapp is founded in San Jose by Jan Koum. Push notifications become a thing only in July that year which finally whatsapp to become a "instant messaging" app. Whatsapp 2.0 launches in august 2009 and it looks like the app we know today. At the end of that year the app has 300k users.

Back home in India it is a different story. No one cares about the iPhone or the App store. In the vast sun baked lands of the subcontinent, Nokia rules the market. D Shivkumar, the man who ran Nokia India had engineered a distribution engine using the lessons he learnt at HUL. in his own words, Nokia had "invested before everybody else - in the brand, in people, in distribution," ; At the end of that year Nokia has 58% market share in India and 50k retail outlets.

But as it happens the world is changing around Nokia's empire. It is a strange world, there are almost no smartphones, Almost all high end devices run on Nokia's Symbian devices. Android is starting to show up but the real status is in owning Blackberry devices. The elite use case for phones is email and Nokia lags there. There are no great email phones. Nokia had tried to fight that with QWERTY devices but blackberry rules the email use case. Then everything changed.

It is now 2010. TRAI imposed limits of 100 SMSes per device to combat spam and suddenly Blackberry Messenger became the dominant messaging platform. BB launched phones in the ₹10-12k range and it became the cool phone to own among the young crowd. Nokia needed a horse in the race.

And like Tolkien's eagles whatsapp presented itself. Teams from Nokia worked with whatsapp, convincing them that they needed to invest in Symbian devices. Giving them unprecedented access to the OS as well as guiding their dev teams on the specific data conditions that existed in India. Nokia has its own app store called Ovi that boasted about 3.5 million downloads daily. Special featuring on the store was promised and the app was shipped preloaded on the Nokia E-series devices. That was not enough, TV, Newspaper and radio ads led with whatsapp as a main feature.

Remember this was a company that was less than a year old at this point. Jan had only registered whatsapp inc in Feb 2009. the app had less then half a million users at this point. Nokia was one of the most innovative companies in the world at this point of time and it was an amazing leap of faith. Not only did Nokia India bet on whatsapp preloads and Ovi store preloads, The partnered with Airtel to launch special data packs so that whatsapp messaging did not cost the user anything. To solve for adoption Nokia India deployed promoters at every retail outlet and every e-series phone at retail was sold by a human demoing whatsapp to the customer. Activating their account and helping them update the app.

BBM's dominance rested on exclusivity - you needed a BlackBerry device to access the platform, and owning one was a status symbol in India. This position was demolished in less then 4 quarters by Nokia's unrelenting push with whatsapp. Besides Whatsapp let you talk to everyone not only the elite. That mattered in India. it soon became the default messaging app in India. Nothing else survived.

Best I can tell, Nokia E-series devices ended up selling well over 20 million units in their lifetime in India and in those initial days of the smartphone era, they formed almost all of India's power users on mobile. But it was a losing battle in the end. Whatsapp also launched their Android version a few months after the Symbian version and the rising tide lifted that boat also. How Nokia lost that battle is a tale for another time and better people than me have told it so I will leave that be.

In 2014 Facebook bought Whatsapp. They had 70 million users in India at that point. A lot of that part of its history has been scrubbed from the internet but I remember Jan Koum and Brian Acton being spotted carrying around E71 phones. There were references that Jan was inspired to launch whatsapp while travelling around the world using a Nokia phone. I think it was sometime in 2014 that Jan finally acknowledged publicly Nokia's contribution to Whatsapp's growth.

I have told the story as I remember it. I was in the trenches, cheering on the faceless few who led this fight from Nokia's side. I know @pribos19 was there. So were many of my friends. They were shaping the way India used tech for decades, they just did not know it then. It was not by accident that a company less than a year old had TV ads in India for their "app" ; My friends made it happen. I was there cheering them on as it happened.

[Valar Morghulis @bigOhNotation]

@SanjaiGandhi Zoho writer was launched in 2005.
Google docs launched 1 year later in 2006.

Can we say Google copied @Zoho ?

@SanjaiGandhi Don’t put down a homegrown company from Tamilnadu just for your political bias.

Please refrain from commenting on topics that you don’t know.

[Valar Morghulis @bigOhNotation]

@sumanthraman Ministry is directing to use the office suite integrated in NIC Email suite ( https://t.co/YooQVP5HfP )

@Zoho is integrated in NIC email because it won a competitive bidding, 2 years back, fair and square.
@sumanthraman

https://t.co/yNuNzlcC70

[Rupali Chadha, M.D.🩺 @RupaliChadhaMD]

What I call “The Candy Bowl Problem” is the reason why Indians, who almost no one in the our country thought about 25 years ago, are increasingly hated.

During Halloween, kiddos go door-to-door saying "trick or treat" and receive candy. Sometimes, a person isn't home and so they leave a bowl of candy on their front porch.

When you come across the porch candy bowl, what do you do? We Americans mostly know the implicit morality to take ONE piece of candy. Some folks will come across the candy bowl and immediately dump the entire bowl into their bag!

Indians keep taking from the candy bowl. They're mistaking a vulnerability for an opportunity. It’s a low trust/scarcity mentality, no doubt.

But… the candy bowl isn't an opportunity. It's a morality test that Indians are currently failing.

All of the diploma mills, scammer job placement firms, and HR kickbacks, and people who max out their credit cards before leaving (never intending to pay it back), are perceived in India as capitalizing on an opportunity but to us, they're exploiting a vulnerability. You're taking the candy bowl and we HATE people who do that.

A lot of Indians are confused and angered by the criticism because they actually expect to be praised for being so clever. They think what they're doing is good and maybe even admirable. To us Americans though, it's immoral.

Vulnerabilities are NOT opportunities. Not in our nation. This is the most important lesson to learn before coming here, or to any high trust society. The new generation of Indians aren't interested in this in part because their entire education system is built for job skills and not life skills. The remnants of this are even visible in Americans of all low trust ancestral cultures.

Morality and ethics occupy less than 2% of the pre-college education in India. This is half of what it is in most of the world and 1/5 what it is in America. Nearly every high school in the country requires a course on civics (how to be a good citizen). In fact, in Gurgaon (India’s Silicon Valley, now white folk are inspiring civic sense and city clean up)!

The only reason India isn't the wealthiest nation on Earth is because its people spend too much time looking to dump the candy bowl into their bag and not enough time trying to build trust.

Anti-Indian sentiment isn't a racism problem. It's not skin color or even religion. It's because instead of learning about and respecting American morality, y’all just keep looking for candy bowls to take from!

[Vishakh Ranotra @VishakhRanotra]

I’m sorry to spam you guys with this again but I love sharing our achievements with such a supportive community here.

We just crossed another milestone with our indigenously built CNC machine. We just achieved a machine speed of 769 pcs/minute.

Thank you for your attention.

[Chennai Super Kings @ChennaiIPL]

Engu thodangum engu mudiyum...💛

The journey of Yellove that lives in every heartbeat! 🦁✨

#ThankYouAsh #WhistlePodu

[Pratap @Pratap_btp]

How did Ashwini Vaishnaw turn ₹1 lakh into ₹113 crore?

That is 11,000 times growth.

The trail runs through one shell-like company called Adler Industrial Services and one tainted client called Thriveni Earthmovers.

🧵👇