Sayak Dasgupta

Working somewhere at the intersection of media, law, policy and civic issues.

[Prashant Bhushan @pbhushan1]

An astounding Badminton tournament between Indian Judges & Lawyers is being sponsored in London today by the Law Ministry! Other sponsors are various corporates. Inaugurated by the CJI & Law Minister!~150 judges & lawyers are participating!
What happened to PM’s call for austerity?
What of the code of conduct for Judges?
What of the Independence of the judiciary?
Abominable!

[anuradha raman @raman_anuradha]

A first for graphic novelist Joe Sacco as Penguin pulls plug on his book on Muzaffarnagar riots. Not Palestine, not Balkans but Muzaffarnagar https://t.co/j43Um8gpIG

[shoaib daniyal @ShoaibDaniyal]

Modi government forced a 69-year old Assamese Muslim woman with failing memory into Bangladesh.

A kind family found her lost and confused on the streets of Dhaka. She does not even speak Bangla.

Read about the incredible cruelty of Modi's India in @ZamanRokibuz_'s report.

https://t.co/w8W7ie2HKB

[Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay @SanghamitraLIVE]

From a sea of vibrant blooms to a pile of rubble. Asia's largest flower market in Howrah was crushed by bulldozers today. A devastating loss for thousands.
Poriborton 👏

[Kakababu's Exile in England 🇵🇸🍁 @ShinMarginalScr]

This was some years back. Urmi Rahman passed away in 2024, she was a Bangladeshi journalist in Calcutta. Miratun Nahar is an Indian Bengali Muslim feminist writer & activist.

Tells you how even in ‘better’ times, Muslims have been treated with fear and suspicion by the majority

[Tamal Saha @Tamal0401]

Silence is neither a choice nor an option!

She is Pratima Har - Hindu
She is Sulekha Chitrakar - Muslim
Both #Bengali
Both helpless & devastated
Their shops were bulldozed outside Dumdum Railway station #Kolkata - without any eviction notice or rehabilitation

And there are many

[Sayak Dasgupta @sayakd]

Aside from the fact that these videos were actually released after the person/party OP is referring to came to power, I would rather not see this sort of bullshit orientalist-gaze representation of India with Indian people/culture as exoticised backdrops to western pop stars.

[Mukesh @mikejava85]

Indian PR game was lit till 2014-15 , then some Uneducated got elected and his IT cell destroyed Indian image on SM ..

Another gem was Coldplay - Hymn For The Weekend

[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. :)

[Aprajita Nafs Nefes 🦋 Ancient Believer @aprajitanefes]

This so-called “critical minerals deal” and the Quad’s new port project in Fiji are two sides of the same dirty coin.

India is being locked into supplying RAW RARE EARTH MINERALS especially Neodymium, Praseodymium, Dysprosium, and monazite-rich beach sands to America and its allies. The primary Indian operator is the government company IREL (INDIA) LIMITED. The main foreign partner is Japan’s TOYOTA TSUSHO CORPORATION (through its subsidiary Toyotsu Rare Earths India), which has been taking processed rare earths from IREL for years.

Here’s the layer no one dares to say out loud:

The real mining will hit the coastal communities of Chavara (Kerala) and Manavalakurichi (Tamil Nadu) hardest. These areas already suffer from high background radiation due to monazite. Studies have shown severe soil and water contamination toxic heavy metals, radioactive waste, and destroyed ecosystems. Local people already report high rates of cancer, respiratory diseases, skin ailments, and other chronic illnesses.

This deal will intensify that destruction.

Fisherfolk will lose their beaches and livelihood. Groundwater will get further poisoned. Entire villages will face rising cancer clusters and generational health damage. The land, the sea, the air everything that sustains life in these areas will be stripped away so that America and Japan can secure their defense and tech supply chains against China.

Meanwhile, the Quad port project in FIJI (announced on 26 May 2026) is the military counterpart turning small Pacific nations into strategic outposts.

India is not gaining sovereignty or industrial power. It is voluntarily becoming a raw material colony and a geopolitical tool for the US-led bloc. The elite will call it a “strategic partnership.” The truth is far darker: India’s coastal poor will pay with their health, their land, and their future while the profits and finished products flow outward.

This is not development.
This is SACRIFICING INDIAN BLOOD and soil on the altar of American strategic interests.

The mainstream narrative of “win-win trade deal” is a complete and utter lie.

[Sarayu Pani @sarayupani]

Muslims around India are forcing Hindus to acknowledge their own dependence on the cattle economy. Good.

For too long, we have been making money (at all levels from dairy farming to beef export) while Muslims and Dalits bear the brunt of the violence.

[Sarayu Pani @sarayupani]

Call me petty but having been an adult in 2014 with clear memories of that election campaign cycle, I will never let this “we voted for Modi for economic transformation not bigotry” lie become normalised.

Everyone voting in 2014 knew who he was from 2002 - everyone.

[Bruno Brezenski @bbbrezenski]

Eai, quem disposto a ir pra Índia nos próximos dias? 🇮🇳🥵
Boa parte do país terá sensação térmica acima de 50°C, alguns pontos chegando nos 55°C.

Pensa na loucura.🫠

Detalhe, essa região que atingirá a sensação de 55°C, significa também que vai atingir 33°C do bulbo úmido.
Lembra do que eu sempre falo sobre o bulbo úmido letal?

Acima de 35°C do bulbo úmido, quando a umidade está saturada e a temperatura do ar acima de 35°C temos o BULBO ÚMIDO LETAL. Nesse nível NENHUM ser humano resiste por mais de 2 horas, idosos e bebês cerca de 30 minutos para entrar em colapso térmico.

A Índia é um grande exemplo de uma nação a beira de uma catástrofe, e estamos falando do país mais populoso do mundo, quase 1.5 bilhão de pessoas.

Com o aumento na média da temperatura mundial em 3°C até 2050, essa região irá atingir o bulbo úmido letal várias vezes, significa que teremos migração de milhões de pessoas nas próximas décadas, isso só falando da Índia.

Esse é o caos que muitos analistas geopolíticos não estão incluindo nas suas análises sobre a mudança na ordem global.
Eu incluo porque é o fator principal, estamos falando em colapso civilizatório global, isso conta muitos mais do que as loucuras dos EUA em desespero pelo seu declínio hegemônico.

Os países precisam correr para conseguir fazer adaptações climáticas profundas, com o atual modelo de governança assimétrico e imperialista, não está sobrando dinheiro para as nações investirem nem na transição energética para reduzir a velocidade em que o planeta aquece.

É uma loucura ver isso e saber que um país está tentando sabotar a sobrevivência de várias nações e a estabilidade internacional.
Insanidade pura.

[PunsterX @PunsterX]

Muslims in West Bengal have played the Uno Reverse card.

- They've refused to buy cows
- Stopped consuming beef
- Demanded total ban on cow slaughter
- Demanded cow be declared national animal

Now Hindu cattle rearers are protesting, as they are making losses.

[Unworthy Hand @kisstheblade_]

The french are a tolerant, broad-minded people, but they will not forgive a president for the crime of not fucking his mistress.

[Arjun* @mxtaverse]

Indians got to know 100 people got killed in UP due to storm because of Putin's tweet. Absolute state of Indian media.

[Harsh @huntheharsh]

In peak India moment today, I got scolded by an uncle on bike for walking on the footpath during traffic hours. He said and I quote, “pagal hai kya be, footpath koi chalne ki jagah hai?”

[MrsG @Marvellous_MrsG]

लगेगी आग तो आएँगे “अपर मिडल क्लास” भी जद में ..
यहाँ पे सिर्फ “मिडल क्लास” और “लोअर मिडल क्लास” थोड़ी है

[Atul Khatri @one_by_two]

For all those saying Govt is not providing jobs.. this is a big slap on their faces..

[The Wire @thewire_in]

Data Shows SIR Helped BJP Win Bengal

In 150 seats, more than half of West Bengal’s 294, total deletions were greater than victory margins, and BJP won 99. In 2021, it had won just 19 of these.

@chhuti_is✍️
https://t.co/JPAWjKK4Jk

[shoaib daniyal @ShoaibDaniyal]

The SIR ended up deleting, in total, nearly one crore Bengalis from the voter rolls.

What was its impact on the West Bengal results?

Just look at this chart 👇