HeretoHelp

Development finance professional.
Ex-UNDP. Alumni @imperialcollege and @IITRoorkee. Here to help!

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

गजब देश बना दिया है|

छात्र को तपती गर्मी में अपना हक़ माँगने सड़क पर उतरना पड़ता है।

किसान को अपनी ही फसल के दाम के लिए सड़क पर उतरना पड़ता है।

महिला को इंसाफ के लिए खुद लड़ना पड़ता है।

और ऊपर से सीना ठोक कर कहते हैं — "विकसित भारत"।

यह विकास नहीं, यह विफलता है|

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

No party, no minister, no mafia must be shielded. Every student who studied honestly & was cheated out of their rightful rank deserves justice — they are tomorrow's doctors, engineers, and leaders. A nation that fails its students fails itself!

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

The #NEETpaperLeak & #CBSE #OSM debacle aren't just exam controversies — they are a national crisis. When merit is stolen, India's future is stolen. These issues must be confronted fearlessly and fiercely, regardless of political affiliations.

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Thank god that it’s a student @sidhant_sarthak uncovering such matter of national importance! Others would’ve been threatened and jailed!

[Raju Parulekar @rajuparulekar]

What a shame for Narendra Modi Regime.

Dharmendra Pradhan should be kicked out and the Secretary of his Ministry should be immediately suspended.

A young kid, has to focus his productive energies on unearthing Modi Regime’s Corrupt practices rather than on Research and Education.

The GenZ won’t give in to their Communal Jumlas anymore. They know their future is at stake.

Hats off to Sarthak @sidhant_sarthak for exposing the lid off the corruption nexus.

Every single thing that is prohibited by the Central Vigilance Commission’s Guidelines, to ensure competitive bidding, was not followed by CBSE. Heads have to roll.

Sarthak is many times braver than all the supine, immoral Principals who came online to provide cover fire to Modi Regime.

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Absolutely!

And what is opposition doing with their millions of lawyers and retired babus with expertise in such matters?

Bas Twitter pe PR? @RahulGandhi

[Sasikanth Senthil @s_kanth]

The Modi government should be embarrassed. The recent CBSE controversy exposed a system where a student showed more commitment to transparency than those sitting in positions of power and responsibility.

If a teenager has to dig through documents and raise questions on procurement practices, what exactly is Dharmendra Pradhan and his ministry doing? Accountability cannot be replaced with spin, silence, and damage control.

The biggest irony is that while the government keeps lecturing young people about the future, a student had to spend his time exposing the present. That is not a success story for the regime, it is an indictment of it.

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

If true, this is a matter of utter shame for the ruling government!

[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. :)

[𝗗𝗿.𝗝𝗮𝘀𝗿𝗮𝗷 𝗣𝗿𝗮𝗷𝗮𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶 @Its_Me_Jasraj]

Let’s put and end to this debate and misconception. Rice has been a part of our culture, local food and plate for a long time. Share this with your friends who think eating rice is fattening!!

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Dear @quantmutual: Please fix your web portal. Super slow! Generates OTP but doesn't give the placeholder to enter the OTP and carry transactions @SEBI_India

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Now Imagine the power of Nexus that works to leak National Exam Papers!

[Anuradha Tiwari @talk2anuradha]

"Air Force To Be Used For NEET Re-Exam Paper Transport": Dharmendra Pradhan

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Modi Govt is Active on Politics, Reactive on Economics.

FII selling pain is now visible in markets.

LTCG tax cut is coming!

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Jensen: Go use AI and Elevate yourself!

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

@dpradhanbjp @PMOIndia

[Geetu Moza @Geetu_Moza]

Complete mess. #CBSE

My daughter finally received the scanned copies of 4 answer sheets and to our shock, page number 22 is missing from one of the documents. On top of that, marks have not been awarded for several answers that exactly match the official answer key. And this isn’t limited to just one paper the same issue appears across multiple subjects.

Instead of focusing on competitive exams and college admissions, students are being forced to run from pillar to post just to understand why correct answers were ignored or pages went missing.

Do the authorities even understand what 30-35 marks can mean for a Class 12 student whose entire future and admission process depends on these scores?

This is not a small administrative lapse. This is playing with the careers, mental health and future of thousands of students.

Shame on a system that continues to fail students. And shame on those at the helm who continue to remain silent while young lives are pushed into anxiety and uncertainty.

The system has failed us once again. Alas. #CBSE @cbseindia29 @AllCBSENews @cbse_guide @dpradhanbjp @PMOIndia

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

As OIL Price Cool- FIRE!

[Al Jazeera Breaking News @AJENews]

BREAKING: US strikes on Iran's Bandar Abbas a 'small hurdle' but unlikely to derail peace talks

🔴 LIVE updates: https://t.co/FkKoYpzbsr

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Talent is overrated. Strategy is overrated.

The real edge?

Training + Practice — every single day.

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Marco Rubio showed up to Agra in a full coat like he’s attending a winter summit. Bro, it’s 45°C outside!

Modi Ji missed a golden opportunity — a crisp white Kurta Pyjama would’ve been the perfect diplomatic gift 😂

[ANI @ANI]

#WATCH | Agra, Uttar Pradesh: US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, arrives at the Taj Mahal

[Safir @safiranand]

Interesting take from Helios. Says reduced large caps in favour of mid and small. To @ETNOWlive 😎

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Keep the Fireworks going!

Let Oil stay HIGH!

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Two major energy-producing nations are at war. Both sides benefit from HIGH oil & gas prices. Stop expecting relief at the pump. Elevated energy prices are the new normal — near to medium term at minimum.

#usirantalks

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Police verification for Indian passports means cops should visit YOUR home — that’s the whole point of address verification. Instead, police summon applicants to the station. Moreover, identity is already verified through the documents submitted during passport application.

[Parth Rastogi @theparthrastogi]

My uncle went for passport verification. The police officer demanded Rs. 2000 bribe just to approve the passport...

Is this legally allowed?

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

It’s time India adopts reciprocal visa policies — match the scrutiny & fees that Schengen/US visas demand. And our iconic monuments & heritage sites should charge foreigners market-rate entry fees like Europe does for its palaces & museums. We’re undervaluing our heritage.

[sandip sabharwal @sandipsabharwal]

One of my daughter's friend from the USA applied for an Indian E Visa for a month yesterday by paying just a USD 10 fees

The Visa was issued today. Extreme efficiency and low cost

On the flipside Visa costs for a Schengen, UK, US, Canada etc are substantially high and take much more time.

[HeretoHelp @SacredAid]

Dear @USAmbIndia,

Send Jet Fuel to Delhi before Air India One takes off. 🛫

Trump's mood changes faster than Delhi weather in May — and with India's energy crisis, we simply can't afford to fly halfway to Washington only to turn back! 😀

[Ambassador Sergio Gor @USAmbIndia]

News! Secretary Marco Rubio extended an invite on behalf of President Donald Trump, for Prime Minister Modi to visit the White House in the near future! 🇺🇸🤝🇮🇳