Hopeless if this comes to pass. It will take 5 years to get a new site to the same stage (assuming no new protests over LA). BLR and HYD will leave the city far behind.

Something that needs more thought is if Chennai would benefit from having a thru-station for the HSR hub (ideally at CMBT). The Bengaluru and Hyderabad HSR lines are aligned to approach from the north. A southbound line to MDU with a branch to CBE allows for a lot of flexibility.

I think Ship of Theseus jokes are popuIar on twitter because you can change one bit every day & cIaim it's the same joke

One of the best streets in India I’ve ever seen… absolutely stunning Proof that Indian streets can look truly world-class when planning, design, and maintenance come together. 📍KNK Road, Chennai

Even a broken clock like AAI is right twice a day. Very good to see them make the case.

Assuming this is standard gauge, it would make a lot of sense to integrate this with a planned Chennai - Coimbatore HSR via an extension to Kochi. No reason why Chennai-origin HSR trains cannot continue on the Kerala line to Thiruvananthapuram.

Americans interested in government should study Australia for an extreme example of how different the state vs local government relationship can be. In Australia, the state governments control almost everything. Councils have meetings, adopt policies, and do micro-planning …1/

And I used to think the mess of shire counties districts vs unitary authorities in England was bad!

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. :)

If this ridiculous CBSE situation is not an example of a situation where a minister needs to resign, I don't know what is. I feel so sorry for those students suffering at the hands of such staggeringly incompetent people at every level.

Really happy and proud to have played a small part in this in a previous role. The biggest shift has been in MTC's mindset towards low floor and AC buses both of which they were not very enthusiastic about about 5 years ago. The shift in focus is great for bus passengers.

The HSR to Bengaluru will mean you'll never need to fly there from Parandur in the first place. For longer flights, the same HSR from Central near Parrys will get you to the Parandur airport very quickly. Stop with this half-baked nonsense.

Anyone who has travelled on a weak passport will celebrate investigative reporting into VFS global, the near monopoly intermediary that handles visa applications for 71 countries. lighthousereports.com/invest…

The distance problem would have been solved by the HSR and the RRTS both connecting to Parandur. It would have been far yes, but that is an outcome of years of planning inertia. MAA expansion (beyond reconverting Meenambakkam) is unrealistic given its land constraints.

Google is revamping its entire search engine to this btw

Adding 6 years to the development of a 2nd airport pretty much kills TN's aim of a 1 trillion economy. Bengaluru will develop its second airport and TN's service sector will be hobbled. There's an outside risk AP builds a greenfield airport and cripples TN with the 150 km rule.

Sounds like a hugely ambitious project. 2 hour journey time savings!

god what a bleak chart

Waterfront is pretty as ever! #vividsydney

The #sydneymetro station at Martin Place is beautifully designed. The cavernous feel and long escalators really gives it a Jubilee Line at Westminster vibe.