Vishy Kuruganti

Active squasher. Recovering marathoner.
Building a squash community.
Blog: to:

[bhupendra chaubey @bhupendrachaube]

Dear Sarthak, I think this country first owes you an apology. And then it owes you a salutation. In my career, I have seen a few change makers / disruptors. @sachin_rt rewrote the rules of test match batting and one day opening , @Vaibhavsooryava has completely rewritten the rules of t-20 cricket , you, Sarthak have completely rewritten how we will ever look at an 18 year old student. The fact that senior journalists can only ask you such tired questions as you batting for opposition, exposes only our breed even more. More power to you. 👍👍👍#cbseclass12result

[james hawkins @james406]

parents: "move out"

girlfriend: “quit being such a loser”

boss: "work harder"

claude: "uber for dogs (the dogs are the drivers) is a great idea, you should absolutely pursue it"

[Vishy Kuruganti @ulaar]

@acorn @seemay @bombaywallah @jaffrelotc It's The Wire after all..

[anand mahindra @anandmahindra]

“To beard the lion in his den.”

The dictionary defines it as boldly confronting a powerful rival on their own turf.

For years, Norway Chess has been Magnus Carlsen’s den. His turf. His domain.

So I woke up to this news and my jaw dropped.

You didn’t just win a title, @rpraggnachess.

You walked into the lion’s den and emerged victorious

This title is important. Not because of the trophy, but because of your challenger spirit.

And that’s something all of us can learn from…

🇮🇳👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

underrated to the degree to which every company that is great at fundraising in the last 20 years adopted explicitly millenarian frames:

ant/openai: death by unaligned ai
palantir: death by terror
anduril: china/taiwan
spacex: death by climate -> death by woke

[Uday Kotak @udaykotak]

Google which is cash surplus, just announced an additional capital raise of $80 bn.
Google annual profit is $160 bn, last quarter $62 bn, and market cap $4.5 trillion. That is close to total profits and market cap of all Indian listed companies put together.
It’s a wake up call to all companies to invest into the future, whatever the present maybe.
Now that IPL is done and dusted, time for India to focus on business of business.

[Nick Collins @nickcollins1953]

1/ My three-volume history places the Indian subcontinent at the centre of world civilisation. On the question of continuity, it is the most impressive case on earth, and the one Western scholarship has most consistently underestimated.

2/ At Bhimbetka's 30,000-year-old paintings, a dancing deity with bangles and trident immediately recalls the dancing Shiva of today, as Michael Wood observed, and as I cite in my own work. A 14,000-year-old yoni stone near Allahabad was recognised on sight by local villagers. This demonstrates continuity. Therefore the seal is a middle chapter in the whole story.

3/ The argument that Indian sacred symbols require a Elamite or steppe source was constructed in the 19th century by Max Muller, who never visited India. He later called his 1,500 BC date for the Rig Veda 'merely hypothetical.' Subsequent historians copied the original date and ignored the retraction. Voltaire said 'everything has come to us from the banks of the Ganges.' He was wrong about most things but right about this.

[jss @jsensarma]

somewhat different take on CBSE drama - core problem is Modiji's preference to do big bold things ("Go Big or Go Home" style) that sometimes backfires spectacularly.

why so?

because other issues - incompetence, crony-ism, corruption - are endemic. there's no silver bullet. the primary mitigation at scale is to go slow and avoid major disasters like this.

let's look at public's favorite culprits:

1. the firm (Coempt) was fly-by-night: well not really. its a 25 yr old firm. it has 170 employees and you can check their profiles on LI. it is not a shady successor to Globarena. these are sibling firms of same age. it's Directors are legit (two of them run a decades old reputed Medical Diagnostic firm, Prof Sadagopan is the new one).

2. corruption/cronyism is unique in this case: lol. how else do we think Govt. business is acquired without a healthy side of crony-ism or bribes? why are no VC funded startups chasing Govt. edu business?

Coempt hired Prof. Sadagopan as Director. Why might that be. Well he was deep in GoI - involved in many high profile digitization initiatives. Of course - he was bought on-board to acquire more Govt. business via contacts. Wouldn't you do that if you were running the business?

(hell - even our most highly valued desi AI startup has a Govt. insider at the top (no ding on him - he's a legend). this is how the world works)

3. it was a process problem and blacklisting would have solved the issue. sorry - Coeempt and Globarena are legally different firms. how would you do this do this legally?

4. the company is uniquely incompetent: with due respect - i would invite everyone to check out their developer profiles on LI. this is the garden variety tier-3 Indian software firm run at low cost and competence. the kind of firm the now famous 19-yr old hacker (full credit to him) will not touch with a long-pole when he grows up.

incompetence is the norm in such firms and peer firms would be no different.

5. the minister is uniquely incompetent: well he certainly seems like a strong no-hire - but can i ask what NIC, Cert-IN etc were doing? does anyone even work here? if the responsibility of checking security of prominent Govt. sites is not with these departments - then whose is it?

ie. - the circle of incompetence is all pervasive in Babudom. CBSE, this minister - are just par for the course.

6. hiring TCS would have fixed the issue: dear brother and sisters - have you forgotten the new IT Tax portal and the fiasco that was unleashed by Infosys a few years back?

fact: there is no company or state in India that has rolled out OSM at this scale. Ask chatGPT. other rollouts have been much smaller. so any company one hired would not have seen the problem at this scale. (also see below)

7. this is a simple problem, if only for incompetence and corruption.

cyber-security goofup is certainly a self-inflicted wound. but scanning 2 million exam booklets in a short burst is not easy or cheap. you need a lot of machines at once. you need a lot of reasonably competent people administering that process at once. then you have no use for most of them for next 11 months.

this is the equivalent of Christmas or Diwali shopping traffic for Amazon and Flipkart. scale makes problems hard. sudden bursts makes them much harder.

-----

which brings me back to the initial point - a major root cause of the problem here is an operational one. one simply should not rollout stuff at this scale at once.

roll it out in one state. roll it out for one exam paper only. learn, fix, repeat. (chatgpt indicated states like Punjab had done that). slow velocity mitigates blast-radius of rank incompetence.

you cannot fix all the tier-3 software firms in the country suddenly. you cannot change how Govt. business is acquired through a central diktat. but you can, much more easily, ask officials to go slow. (hell - your Babus love to go slow).

while I can certainly see that commission-maxxing also may have led to a sudden large contract and rollout - a more obvious big big reason is that Mudiji just loves to go BIG. (not something that needs elaboration).

culture percolates down. every Minister would be answering Mudiji what BIG initiatives his ministry has done. And this was probably Pradhan-jis. Blew up big time.

so I dunno if he's gonna ask Pradhan to resign - when Pradhan was Go-Big-or-Go-Home-maxxing just like the PM loves. after all - is the PM going to fire himself now for Demonet or botched GST rollout or .. ?

[Vishy Kuruganti @ulaar]

@jsensarma Also because of the backdrop.

[Revathi @revathitweets]

Way back in 2019, I reported extensively about the Globarena Intermediate marks fiasco in Telangana.
In fact, I had run a major campaign on my media company Mojo TV. We were the first TV channel up pick the story too.

23 students died by suicide, I spoke with all their families and it was truly heartbreaking.

I remember one particular case where a single mother who worked as a farm labour was very proud of her bright daughter. The entire village came to support her education, everyone pitched in with books, commute and all expenses. When the Globarena marks mess up happened, she cried the whole night. Her mother told her it is okay, and she can go for reevaluation or write the exam again, morning the mother wakes up to see her daughter hanging in the middle of the house.

I had demanded blacklisting Globarena, arresting the officials. But I guess companies like Globarena are pests that never die, they just transform into something bigger and dangerous and come back to haunt.

Globarena now has become Coempt Edu Teck that messed-up the CBSE evaluation.

Globarena in 2019 messed up results of 9.74 lakh students in Telangana. Out of this total, approximately 3.8 lakh students failed. 23 suicides were reported. Back then too Globarena failed to provide the answer sheets.

After all this, Globarena transforms into Coempt Edu Teck, messes up the future of 18.5 lakh CBSE students across the country.

It is almost like they got rewarded for bad behaviour.

The officials who were giving approvals for CBSE just 74 days prior knew the history of Coempt Edu Teck. They knew the company is incompetent, but still decided to go ahead and give them the tender.

Yes, the Globarena/ Coempt Edu Teck guys are fabulous at landing tenders. The names and associations of Coempt Edu Teck board now seem to run pretty deep in the highest offices.

Unless the rot is burnt right from the root level, this won’t stop. All board members, directors, CEO, investors, government employees that tweaked the system to ensure Coempt Edu Teck got the contract should be dragged to the courts & never should be allowed near any business again.

But in this country that is so much in love with corruption, I doubt if this will ever change. Coempt Edu Teck may soon get the tender for all exams across the country.

PS: To all the students, one exam is not the end. Kudos to your fight. Keep fighting, never ever give up.

And if you are feeling low, speak with friends and family or reach out to any helplines.

Roshni Helpline, Telangana
[phone]

[Vishy Kuruganti @ulaar]

@ainvvy https://t.co/Z63NfOPr1s

[Sarthak Sidhant @sidhant_sarthak]

CBSE has systematically rewritten its rulebook to favor Coempt Eduteck.

check out the blog.

[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. :)

[V Vinay @ainvvy]

Brazen. But nothing deters them because there are no consequences, and they have no conscience.

It is all about managing the narrative. Suffereing students be damned.

[Vishy Kuruganti @ulaar]

Series H? Ok. I guess it's fitting that next round will be Ipo

[Vishy Kuruganti @ulaar]

@NilanjanUdwin Elsewhere someone shared that this was from the prep for the Madame Tussauds sculpture

[Vishy Kuruganti @ulaar]

“This isn’t Shiva” -> outright challenge
…
“more likely adapted from” -> CYA just in case

[HindolSengupta @HindolSengupta]

Even before the case, we must challenge the sheer audacity of a White woman in the US telling the Indian Ministry of Culture that she knows what Indian culture better than them is staggering. Can any Indian ever get away directing something like this towards America? This happens

[Vishy Kuruganti @ulaar]

@jsensarma @sabeer Savage

[jss @jsensarma]

i just can't unsee this now ..

[Vishy Kuruganti @ulaar]

@runbikehurry Been off FB for 7 years and when this notif hit my Inbox at 11:50am from my Chicago friend.. in hind sight I should have known it was a music giant..

[Vishy Kuruganti @ulaar]

@runbikehurry Feel so fortunate to have seen him perform live..