Mahesh Notani

If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same.
SEO. Tennis & Politics.

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

A permanent bootlicker and prisoner of a political party is talking about "freedom to report"

You sold your soul at will, Tihadi.

[Sudhir Chaudhary @sudhirchaudhary]

The harassment of journalists at #JantarMantar wasn’t an attack on one reporter or one channel it was an attack on the freedom to report.
The most disappointing part? The silence of our own fraternity.
When journalists are intimidated on the ground, every newsroom should stand together, regardless of ideology or competition. A united stand by all news channels could have sent a clear message: reporting cannot be bullied into submission.

If we don’t defend the right to report today, tomorrow there may be no one left to report.

[Maheshwer Peri @maheshperi]

I am sorry sir. It is just another promise with no commitments nor time lines. Earlier, you enacted a new law. Now a fast track court. Your own NTA said there were no paper leaks at all. This is what you said on paper leaks just in the last 3 years.

October 2, 2023
“The paper-leak mafia will be held accountable and punished. Those who have played with the future of young people will not be spared.”

November 9, 2023
“Issues such as paper leaks, which worried the country’s youth, have been dealt with very strictly…..”

April 21, 2024
“The government has now begun taking action against the paper-leak mafia.”
July 2, 2024 | Lok Sabha

“The government is extremely serious about stopping paper leaks and action is being taken on a war footing…..those who endanger students’ futures will not be spared.”
December 17, 2024

[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. :)

[Sarthak Sidhant @sidhant_sarthak]

CBSE has systematically rewritten its rulebook to favor Coempt Eduteck.

check out the blog.

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

@RazOlsRF To think that someone on the men's side will get their first major, absurd.

[Tom Bacon @TomABacon]

I... genuinely don't understand Google's long-term strategy here. Let me run you through what the consequences of this kind of approach are. 🧵

[Devesh Mankar | @[email protected] @Devz15]

🚨 WARNING for all Pixel owners in India. 🚨

My Pixel device was sent to official Google repair. After inspection, Google declared it “not repairable” and gave me only 2 choices:

1️⃣ Pay ₹22,620 for a replacement device
2️⃣ Get the phone returned unrepaired

Now comes the shocking part.

Before taking ₹22k+, Google India REFUSES to disclose:

❌ Which exact device they will send
❌ Whether it’s NEW or REFURBISHED
❌ Battery health details
❌ Water Resistance Rating
❌ Replacement quality standards
❌ Google cannot guarantee battery health percentage
❌ Google cannot guarantee IP/water resistance rating

And in writing, Google Support confirmed:
⚠️ Once payment is made, there is NO refund and NO return — even if you are unhappy with the replacement device quality sent later.

Most shocking part?

Google could not even confirm whether they have any minimum measurable quality standards/policies for refurbished replacement devices:

Battery health %
Water resistance integrity like IP rating

So basically:

Pay first.
Find out later what device you got.
No refund. No choice.
Without transparency, measurable quality benchmarks or refund rights.

This is not premium after-sales support.
This is “trust us after payment.”

Attaching screenshots of Google Support’s own email response.

Indian Pixel buyers deserve transparency before payment, not blind acceptance.

@GoogleIndia @madebygoogle
#GooglePixel #PixelIndia #Pixel6 #GoogleIndia #ConsumerRights #RightToRepair #MadeByGoogle #TechTwitter #Android #Smartphones

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

@iArpitSpeaks His spine leaked and fell to the ground, guess he hasn't realised it.

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

@RazOlsRF I am glad your prediction was wrong haha!

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

Congratulations Jack and the fantastic team at Airwallex. Such an inspiring and humbling story. Pleasure to be part of this team. :)

[Jack Zhang @awxjack]

Stripe offered to acquire us for $1.2 billion when we had $2M in revenue.

Today, we've raised $330M at an $8B valuation and reached $1B ARR.

We could've died three times during this journey.

This is the story I've never told anyone before:

[Jack Zhang @awxjack]

Stripe offered to acquire us for $1.2 billion when we had $2M in revenue.

Today, we've raised $330M at an $8B valuation and reached $1B ARR.

We could've died three times during this journey.

This is the story I've never told anyone before:

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

@Vibhor1911 Anyone who is not crazy about extracting every ounce of benefit from cards/miles nnd buys this for 70-75k secures a great deal for a device just launched.

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

A party like @BJP4India and its gov. which usually has many data/surveys to "sense the pulse of the nation" has failed/ignored a one sided sentiment of the nation for Ind vs Pak cricket, why?

Paisa sabke upar hai kya? #INDvsPAK

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

@ankurmittal I think hotels will go on to cancel existing books using some excuse to jack up more profits as they did during coldplay concert.

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

@Navkirat18 @outofofficedaku You'll be charged a preclosure charge of 3 pc + gst on the principal. So yes it's overall beneficial.

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

@CardNiti Okay.. membership required?

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

@CardNiti How is the base price 74791 to you? Did you apply exchange?

[Mahesh Notani @mnotanii]

Today is the day I officially stopped missing the Federer, Nadal & Djokovic era.

Tennis peaks once again and is in safe hands.

#alcarazsinner #Alcaraz #Sinner #FrenchOpen