Taposik

Interested in social choice, voting theory, puzzles and several other worthless things.

[UN Human Rights Council Investigative Bodies @uninvhrc]

Israeli forces have killed over 20,000 children & injured 44,000 more since 7 Oct. 2023, Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the @UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory & Israel, told reporters today. #HRC62

More on their new report ➡️ https://t.co/gK2KhtlgFb

[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. :)

[Mohammed Zubair @zoo_bear]

West Bengal SIR Pattern:

MANIKCHAK (Malda District) : Hindu voters: 50.2% Muslim voters: 49.4%.
Voters placed Under Adjudication: → 97.4% are Muslim → 2.3% are Hindu.
Total adjudication rate: 25.7%

MOTHABARI (Malda District): Hindu Voters : 30%, Muslim voters: 69.5%.
Voters placed Under Adjudication: → Muslim: 97.4%, 2.3% Hindus.
54.2% of all Muslim voters flagged.
Total adjudication rate: 38.7%.

SAMSERGANJ (Murshidabad district) : Muslim voters: 82%, Hindu Voters : 18%
Voters placed Under Adjudication: → Muslims: 98.8%, Hindus: 0.9%.
More than half, that is 55.1%. of every Muslim voter in this constituency has been placed Under Adjudication.
Total adjudication rate: 45.7%

Now here's where it gets interesting.
BAHARAMPUR constituency (Murshidabad district)
Muslim voters: 26.9%. Hindu Voters : 72.1%.
Share of adjudicated voters who are Muslim: 61.6%, Hindus : 37.3%
Total adjudication rate: 4.7%

Now Look at the 2021 results:
Samserganj → TMC won by 26,379. Voters under adjudication: 1,07,663.
Mothabari → TMC won by 56,573. Voters under adjudication: 78,797
Manikchak → TMC won by 33,878. Voters under adjudication: 65,421

In all 3 TMC-won seats: adjudicated voters outnumber the winning margin.

Baharampur → BJP won by 26,852. Voters under adjudication: 11,088
The one BJP win in our sample is also the one constituency where adjudication is lowest.

[Marci Shore @marci_shore]

I've taught European history for 30 years. Americans have always asked me how the Holocaust was possible, how Germans could have enabled a madman reveling in mass murder to carry out his plans. Now we can see in real time how this is enabled; now we have front-row seats.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

It's astonishing that you, a world leader who many respected for standing up to an illegal attack on your country, now support an illegal attack on another country. It completely kills your credibility.

Right now. Iran is Ukraine. You may not like to hear that but that is a fact

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

“Israel is accelerating the genocide against the Palestinian people.”

UN special rapporteur @FranceskAlbs addresses Israel's apartheid death penalty law, which was passed earlier this week.

“Israel has been emboldened by the impunity that has been granted to it,” Albanese explains, adding that all the countries conducting ‘business as usual’ with the apartheid state are, to an extent, complicit.

[Alt News @AltNews]

West Bengal's 2026 electoral rolls are 'public' for the record. But they are published as scanned image PDFs, behind CAPTCHAs, with watermarks obscuring voter names. You can't search them. You can't analyse them. And that's not an accident. @Holytripper

https://t.co/j2apSxRXua

[Grok @grok]

Yes, the ECI's practice of publishing West Bengal's 2026 electoral rolls as scanned image PDFs (non-OCR, watermarked, CAPTCHA-protected) is non-compliant with the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016.

Section 3(3) requires all public documents in accessible formats. Electoral rolls are explicitly cited as public documents in official RPwD handbooks (e.g., must use OCR-enabled PDFs or ePub per Rule 15 of 2017 Rules and Section 42 on ICT access).

This blocks screen readers/OCR for visually impaired voters, violating Section 11 (ECI must ensure electoral materials are accessible). Similar issues flagged by disability advocates nationwide.

[Mohammed Zubair @zoo_bear]

The ECI already holds this data in structured form. It chose to release scanned images instead — effectively locking out public scrutiny. We broke that barrier. Here's everything we found, in full, open to verification: https://t.co/dwwZ1vgiEq

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

After the right to torture Palestinians, Apartheid Israel claims the right to HANG Palestinians. The shame of the century continues.

Ben Gvir belongs in The Hague.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

Israel has passed the death penalty solely for Palestinians, enforced through military courts with a 96% conviction rate.

Israeli Minister Ben Gvir popped champagne.

The Israeli government is raising a toast to genocidal apartheid. The UK government is arming and funding it.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Israel's legislators chose dispassionately to turn their Apartheid State, formally, into a Genocidal State. Not only is Israel a state formally demoting Palestinians to second class status but also one free to hang them, and only them, legally. https://t.co/RlRXAVdoAO

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

58,000 Americans died in Vietnam.

Over 3,000,000 Vietnamese died.

And for fifty years, American culture has centered the grief of the 58,000 while treating the 3,000,000 as a backdrop.

As scenery. As context. As "the Vietnam War experience."

They built a wall in Washington with American names on it.

A beautiful wall. A solemn wall.

Good. Mourn your dead.

But understand what that wall does not say.

It does not say why they died.

It does not say what they were doing there.

It does not say what was done in their name to the people whose country it actually was.

It does not mention My Lai, where American soldiers massacred an entire village, old men, women, children, babies, and the officer who ordered it served three years of house arrest before being pardoned.

Three years. House arrest. Pardoned.

For five hundred people murdered in a ditch.

It does not mention the 2.7 million acres of Vietnamese forest doused in Agent Orange, a chemical weapon disguised as herbicide, that is still deforming Vietnamese children today.

Not in 1970. Not in 1985. Today.

Children born in 2020 with bodies twisted by a war their grandparents fought.

And the chemical companies that made it are still in business.

Still profitable.

Still un-prosecuted.

And yet they send us human rights reports.

They grade our democracy.

They warn us about our behavior.

The audacity is so enormous it becomes almost impressive.

Almost.

[Native American @_nativeamerica]

✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽

[LPC @landpalestine]

Billie Eilish, Finneas, Cillian Murphy, Joaquin Phoenix, Annie Mac, Peter Gabriel, and more come together for Palestine

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel murdered every single person in this photo today in South Lebanon.

Every. Single. One.

2 journalists
7 paramedics
1 Lebanese soldier

They bombed the journalists’ vehicle — then bombed them again when paramedics rushed to help.

[Lowkey @Lowkey0nline]

“We will continue to broadcast the truth, reality and crimes of the Israeli occupation until our last breath….”

Lebanese journalist Fatima Ftouni after surviving a previous Israeli bombing.

[Lowkey @Lowkey0nline]

Israel has just killed Lebanese journalist Fatima Ftouni. I am honoured to have known her.

Just at the beginning of the month she reported on Israel killing seven members of her own family live on air.

[Rajdeep Sardesai @sardesairajdeep]

Just 3 hours after putting out this tweet, @ftounifatima was killed in an IDF attack in southern Lebanon , our man on the spot @ashraf_wani tells me. Journalists literally in the line of fire. Thoughts and prayers. 🙏🙏

[Taposik @taposik]

Apologies for the self-promotion. I’m happy to share my new publication, “Acyclic k-rationalization of a choice function: a characterization,” in the Indian Economic Review. If you’re interested, you can find it here: https://t.co/i5Gx1aD8ss