go down the path of surgery. That is certainly the experience in the other centres across the United Kingdom. It is very interesting that we had a summit of mesh centres in London in December, and that was one of the key messages that came forward. Surgery might be an answer for some, but not for all. Even if surgery does go forward before mesh removal, patients will need non-surgical care and other interventions in the future. It is important that we have that expertise. I understand that. Do you have any wishes to respond on that point? To emphasise that the patients who elect not to have surgery are not left bereft of care. A GCC patient might see a urogynecologist in the mesh centre, but if they elect not to have surgery, they can still be referred to a urogynecologist subspecialist in the service. As they could if they came from Lothian, they would go back to a specialist in that area. As Dr Lamont said, it is not just about pain. There are some women who will have continence issues, recurnt urogynecologist, and things that will require on-going specialist care in that particular area. Do you wish to respond to that? Yes. It is just to confirm that the survey conducted by the committee did one of the respondents mention the identity of the service. I think that everyone agrees that it is not just a surgical service, it is a holistic service, as we are saying. So, whether this holistic service is delivered in the mesh centre or in the local health board, I think that needs to be communicated very clearly to the women, so they do not feed back in the subsequent survey that there are still concerns about the identity. That could come in the mesh, in the centre information leaflet, or the information leaflet that perhaps we provide locally in the hospital, is that this is a holistic service and surgery is just part of it. I think that we really need to consider perhaps whether we need to keep the name surgical in the title. You have both said, Dr Lamont and Dr Argyll, that it is about a holistic approach, and that is something that just in reading the notes, there seems to be information about continuation of feelings of being let down, prolonged and continued anxiety, already disappointment because the expectations were already low and therefore expectations were not met. It seems that they are in the conveyance of lack of empathy for the experience. It is almost like there needs to be a mesh centre equivalent for the people who have had mesh injuries. It is quite difficult to read some of what has been presented. How would you describe or talk about the holistic approach? I know that psychologists are involved and clinical nurse specialists in that. How would you see the progress being taken forward based on feedback from the surveys about people's experiences? I am in response to the survey that I said earlier that I personally and on behalf of NSS always sincerely regret that that has been the experience. You talked about how do we progress, and I believe that we have progressed, but that is not to be complacent. The surveys that have been published just in the last week and the surveys that will be published by Greater Glasgow and Clyde, I believe, do show that we have progressed. I can certainly point to the information that we have and the feedback about providing an independent provider pathway. It is my thanks to the Scottish Government and my colleagues here for highlighting the issue and making it possible to have this independent provider pathway, which is one option. We also have the specialist service, which continues to be responsive. I believe that the continued survey response will show how we are responding. Dr Mavis can speak about how specific pieces of feedback have been acted on to change how the way that care is being delivered in the service. I have said where we can improve, we will improve and we are improving. Thank you. I am not sure if Dr Lamont or Dr Agar would be the best person to answer, but Dr Mavis referenced the specialist urogynological specialist. As of July 2022, there is a vacancy and there is no consultant in post. My question is, how does this impact the service? I would probably refer back to Dr Mavis, but I would also say that there is an active recruitment for that position. We are also looking at how the service can be supported by other areas in Scotland to fill that position. The numbers at the moment of women that are being seen surgically through the clinic are below the capacity that could be seen if we were functioning under recovered entirely from Covid pressures. At the moment, I do not believe that that vacancy has significantly affected the waiting list and that has reflected in the improvement in waiting times. However, as I have said, it is not to be complacent that we are actively recruiting and we are also looking at how that support can be provided from elsewhere. I do agree with that. There are urogynacologists already in the service and there are two colorectal surgeons, which is absolutely wonderful. However, the absence of a urologist is a concern. I am not part of the service, but I refer to the service. The absence of a urologist is a concern. The vast majority of these mesh devices are implanted close to the bladder, and this is where the urology specialist comes in. Clearly, there has been engagement with urology before. There was a urology member in the service before, and I think it is quite important that the service ensures that a urology joins the team because that will improve the confidence in the care from both clinicians and patients. Do you wish to commend Dr Mithers, if you would like to refer your microphone? Just to be very clear, we have urogynacologists who come from gynaecology and urologists. Both of those are present in the UK. Services that are having a great deal of difficulty recruiting to and appointing to. However, as Dr Agour mentioned, we did have an arrangement with Lothian and we have developed a specialist in Lothian who we will be hoping that they will be able to come to Glasgow to work from their contract in NHS Lothian. We continue to sculpt and try to attract a urologist to the current post, but we are in no way complacent about the need to have urologists in the service. Dr Lamont, I do not want to get into a comparison. What I am looking for is reasoning. NHS England has established a number of specialist services for women with medical complications. How many of those services have been rolled out? What differences do they have? If not, why? My understanding is that there are nine specialist services that have been developed in NHS England. That reflects the difference in population sizes between England and Scotland. The specialist service in Glasgow and the specialist service in England have the option for a referral between them. There is certainly the option there for NHS England if the women chose that they did not wish to have surgery, similar to the independent provider pathway that Cambridge referred up to. I am not aware of any women who have taken that option yet. That reflects the evolution of services. The service in Greater Glasgow and Clyde is a very advanced service. The expertise is recognised nationally in that. UK nationally, not just Scotland nationally. I am confident that the service that we have in Scotland is UK-leading. As Dr O'Kerry speaks about, there have been recent conferences and shared experiences. There is a move to credentialing, which has not been spoken about so far, but it is really just to acknowledge that it is work that continues to be developed. There is an expectation that, once that is up and running, all the services within DGNC will meet the requirements for that and will be effectively credentialed as well. On one final, hopefully quick question, Dr O'Kerry, if I could ask you, whenever we talk about mesh specifically in this environment with all the concerns we have, the specialist mesh service that we have, people are concerned about implantation of mesh in other ways and other devices, other types of mesh, with other types of surgery. I suppose my question is, do you feel that those patients having mesh in different scenarios is safe and something that they should not be overly worried about? Sorry, could you repeat the question again? It is really looking at the difference between the specialist service we have here and the complications women suffered with mesh. When people hear the word mesh, they think it applies to absolutely all mesh and they think it applies to all different types of surgery, so I am looking for your opinion as to whether we can reassure women that mesh in other circumstances is very different and safe. I can only comment on mesh used for gynaecological procedures because as a gynaecologist I am unable to comment on the use of mesh for hernia surgery, for example. I am aware that there is a petition in front of the petition committee with regards to mesh devices in other areas. I am unable to reassure or not reassure women about these issues, but since September 2018, since the health minister at the time confidentially suspended the mesh procedures, no mesh procedures have been implanted vaginally. However, there are abdominal mesh procedures being performed for gynaecological surgery and the risks are different. The risks are perceived as to be less, however, we have gone so far in providing the information and offering the alternatives to abdominal mesh surgery for prolapse. While I have my own views on this, the standard in Scotland now is that mesh for gynaecology can only be implanted abdominally after full informed consent and after the patient has fully understood the alternative. This is a significant improvement since the height of the crisis about nine years ago. Mr O'Kaley, want to come in? To the mesh sensors in England, we have worked closely with the development of the sensors in England. It should be recognised that the centre in Scotland was established almost a year prior to publication of the Cumberlatch report. We recognise the need for this, so we work for all runners. Colleagues in Glasgow asked me to congratulate them for the work that they have done and now for the evidence that they have from patient engagements, public involvement and the improvement in performance that they are registering. Anna, the comments that she makes about the Glasgow sense of being a leader are right. In a number of fields, we call mesh removal surgery in taking forward a credential etc. Colleagues are to be congratulated for that. It should also be pointed out that they have achieved all this at a time of intense scrutiny both in the media and in the Parliament. I think that that has been very difficult for them, so I think that we should recognise that. With regard to mesh and other sites, I think that your colleague on the committee spoke at the and I may correct him if I wrong, there was a debate in Parliament about mesh used in other sites, particularly in hernia repair. I think that this is an issue that has been considered at length. The Scottish Health Technologies Group undertook two reviews, one into ingol hernia repair, predominantly in men because men are affected, but subsequently in herniocytes elsewhere and involving more women. I think that the conclusion is that in hernia repair mesh should be used although alternative should be available and the use in mesh in other sites is supported. We know from the longevity that mesh has been inserted for hernia repair that there are not the same volume of issues that are being dealt with with women. Back to Dr Agur's comment about transvaginal mesh. Yes, there is a halt and there is no prospect that that will be removed from the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs. With regard to the use in gynaecology of mesh through the pervicore abdominal routes, those are the subjects of a high vigilance protocol. The Accountable Officers and Aluminades is one of those responsible for ensuring that there is attention to detail with dotting of eyes, crossing of teeth to make sure that patients understand etc. This can only be used where there really aren't reasonable alternatives to recognise that, but also where there is a high degree of scrutiny to ensure that patients completely understand what is going to happen, why it is happening and that they have had the information that is empowered to make decisions for themselves. My question is to Terry O'Neill. Mr O'Neill, there should be scrutiny and it is more than just dotting eyes and crossing teeth. What I read in the papers for this meeting was harrowing. What has happened to many of those women is harrowing. Has the service for women in Scotland been set up in line with the NHS England service specification? If not, why not? It is just Terry O'Kelly rather than Terry O'Neill. The commissioning of services in England, as you know, is different. Certainly in England, there have been a number of commissioned specialist services for women who suffer from stress union incontinence and pervigal control apps. I think that the number is 40. Within that, there are nine centres that have applied for and have been designated as mesh removal. It could manage mesh removal surgery should that be required. The commissioning is different and the payments are different. As you know, it is commissioned through health boards here in Scotland. Each health board in Scotland has a council officer. We have been meeting with council officers since 2018-19. They are responsible, they are either medical directors or senior medical managers such as Alan Mathers, who are responsible for ensuring that the care for women goes forward in a way that they need and is commensurate with their problems. I am absolutely not complacent about the management of these women. In fact, I am probably at the end of the spectrum of engagement and demand. The stories that women tell are absolutely harrowing. I have great sympathy with what has happened to them, but we need to move forward. We need to ensure that the services that we provide for women and the way that we communicate with them are at a level where not only do they feel supported but that they are empowered to make decisions. When that treatment goes forward, it is provided at the highest possible level. We have worked very hard with boards and clinicians to ensure that that is the case. I am sorry, but I was very concerned to read the SPICE report and was very troubled by it. It is not clear whether all the comments that have been made are contemporary and it would be helpful to spend some time with and just look at that. I would draw your attention to the work that has been done, and it is on-going in Glasgow with the patient engagement and public involvement team. They are addressing those issues and it does appear, given the satisfaction that patients are reporting, that a lot of what has gone on for has been addressed and has been corrected. I hope that that answers your question. I would like to come back in, Tess. Not really, Mr O'Kelly. If you could actually say what has been set up in line with NHS England, if not why not, if you could answer that question. Are you talking about people and mesh complications or the treatment of patients, the care for patients, presented with stress union incontinence and public warm products? The latter, thank you. We have worked with the health boards and the council officers that we have looked at provision of services for those patients. I think that the work that is on-going, but I have no reason to suspect that what we are asking of boards and what they are delivering is really any less than what is being delivered in NHS England. The IPP, in part, is looking at a pelvic floor oversight group. I will move to Carol Mocken to lead us on options for non-surgical treatment. Thank you. I think that today has really raised for me the importance of this non-surgical side, and I am sure for other members as well. I really appreciate you speaking about that. A lot of the issues have been covered as you have gone through the session. Is there anything in terms of communication with the boards that we need to do around that? Specifically, whether you think that there should be an expansion around the multidisciplinary team and any pain management, because there is a lot of working pain management out in the community and with other services that provide that, and whether that would be helpful for women who cannot or choose not to go down the surgical route? Thank you. I hope that you recognise what I have been saying that we really value that non-surgical approach with the elements of that, the pain management, the psychological support, but also the explanation and understanding about what has happened to them. Sometimes the survey reflects the difficulty with communication and understanding what has actually happened, and we see women that have had multiple surgeries, multiple partial removals, and the question is asked about what has happened to them, what is left. A significant part of this is about re-establishing trust, and I think that is reflected by the fact that we are having these committees and these meetings. A lot of this is about establishing that trust relationship with women again and demonstrating really what the measure was in there for the first place. Why was it put in? What were we trying to do? No one put this measure in with the intent to harm. No doctor would have done that. Everything that was done was with the true belief that this was going to help the women, and it is a sad reflection, and it was in the Cumbledge report about the harm that has happened from that. We cannot undo those harms, but what we can do is try and do the best that we can for these women. The GCNC centre has some state-of-the-art scanners that it can actually see in a different way from the scanners that perhaps other specialist services have exactly what is there and what can be done there. There is also that skill of interpreting that information and being able to convey that information. A lot of the feedback that the GCNC service has had is around the number of multidisperate team members. In fact, one of the responses to the survey work that they have done is to make it so that not everybody in that multidisperate team is there in every room, because I think that it could be a bit overwhelming in that. One of the big changes that they have made is about how that information is delivered in a steady way, and that may need to come back and have that information repeated. Pain control, psychological support—we have spoken about that as well, and certainly there is dedicated pharmacy support within the GCNC team as well around that. I just want to add a point to this. The issues of improving confidence in the women in the service—obviously, there are historic issues with this, and we fully understand why many of these women describe communication issues and describe empathy issues and lack of trust, et cetera. One way of improving this is by reassuring them that we are communicating within ourselves, within the multidisperate team well. We know everything about them, and we are communicating this from the local hospital to the national centre well. That is easy when we talk about surgical issues. It is very easy to communicate that this surgery has been done locally and the patient wants to have this surgery done nationally or outside Scotland. What is difficult is the non-surgical treatment. When the patient is referred from locally to nationally, the national centre does not know exactly what sort of non-surgical treatment happened locally. One of the reasons behind this is that we don't communicate to the national centre. We could say, yes, the patient has been referred to the psychologist, but what has actually happened? What was the response to the patient to that? The patient has been referred to the physiotherapist, has actually improved or probably she didn't, because she requires the referral to the national centre in the first place. What I am proposing here is that we have a multidisciplinary team discussion, the local clinician and the team nationally, and we talk about those patients, what did we do exactly? There are things that I can communicate to a clinician colleague that the electronic form will not communicate. We used to have that, and that is in the paper that I circulated to the committee a few days ago. It is a historic paper, it describes practice that is probably a decade ago, but it does show that when we talk to each other, when we are present in the same room, either virtually or whatever, and most of these meetings were done virtually, by the way, before COVID. We were able to communicate well, and we did have the trust of the women, because the women, oh, you have spoken to this person that I am going to see in Glasgow. Yes, I did, and I think that is a good point, and it will also reduce the waiting time, because I can see in the patient leaflet provided by National Service Scotland that there are two steps in the pathway here that could be replaced by an in-person meeting, a virtual meeting, or simply you would invite the local clinician who referred from the local hospital to the national centre to attend this particular part of the mesh MDT nationally that discusses their own patients, so they go there and I would be able to present my own patient to the team, tell the team exactly what sort of treatment she had locally and what her wishes are, and I think that that would, this interface between the secondary care and the national centre would boost the patient confidence, and hopefully that would be reflected in the next survey. I'm interested in just going right back to the beginning, knowing what we know now about mesh complications implanted for stress urinary incontinence, right? So as a nurse who worked in the operating theatre, I participated in anterior and posterior pelvic floor repair operations, but before we even go there, is there work being done to encourage whether it's continuous nurses, physios, midwives to talk about things like pelvic floor exercise as a, okay, that's like it's free, it's free advice? Is that something where we're measuring whether that work is going ahead which actually might mitigate the need for any surgical intervention in the first place? Yes, so that engagement with non-surgical treatment for conditions that are induced by child birth injuries in terms of incontinence and prolapse, the first non-surgical options are the physiotherapy and the continence advice. Physiotherapists and continence nurses are integral part of MDTs in I think almost every health port and the intervention they form has prevented many women from having surgery. So it is those women where these interventions don't work, then they would get discussed by the MDT, which include myself and other surgeons and gynaecologists to discuss the surgical option. But yes, it is there. I'm not sure whether anything at a government level, maybe Terry would be able to help with that, whether this is being done on a larger scale, for example to schools if we talk about pelvic floor education for girls at school even before the reproductive period, that would certainly, if we start this seed at the very beginning, that would be important. At schools, for instance, one of my former colleagues teaches Pilates, but she also does pelvic floor exercises as part of that, to kind of de-stigmatise it as well. But she's even seen young women in schools breaking down these barriers of conversation, so is that work that you would support is to take it right out to the schools, take it to the level before young women start having, well, I suppose, experiences that might lead to urinary incontinence? Yes, absolutely. Yes, there's no doubt about that. Many women who, after childbirth and they come with already damage that has caused incontinence and prolapse, these are the problems that we're talking about and the reason why the mesh was introduced in the first place, when they come in, many of them don't even know what the pelvic floor is and how to contract the pelvic floor, how to engage the pelvic floor, and that's why the physiotherapists spend quite a lot of time with them, educating them. But if this happens from school at the very beginning, then during the reproductive career, at the end of this, if they were unlikely to develop these conditions, then at least they will be able to know what's going on and perhaps to engage better with the physiotherapy service. The other point of improvement would also be postpartum physiotherapy, which would immediately after delivery. The programme at the moment, it's my understanding that it is relatively short period of time and there is a possibility of improving the programme to extend it at a lengthy or a more regular supervised sessions by the physiotherapist for prevention in the future. We're talking about just in the first few weeks after delivery. Mr Torrance, do you want to cover some points on local and national services? Thank you very much, convener. What are the benefits of a national service over a local one in support of women affected by transvaginal mesh? National and commission services are highly specialist services. They are services that it would not be possible to provide in 14 different territorial health boards. That's reflected in that there are nine specialist centres being provided across the entirety of England and one for Scotland. NSD is part of NSS commission's approximately 150 highly specialist services for Scotland. Those are services that are funded through the individual boards, but they all contribute to that national service. They all reflect whereby there needs to be highly specialized service that then can provide competence and confidence in a national service. We would not be able to be having these conversations about the confidence and trust if these services were being tried to be provided from multiple centres that would then only be seeing a few small numbers of cases. Primarily national services are about whereby you would need to concentrate that expertise and attract people into those services to be able to provide that as a national service, but also to convey confidence to those people who are then utilising those services. In the current financial circumstances, is it feasible for bespoke services to be established in every health board or region? I refer back to my previous answer. It would not be possible, nor would it be desirable to try and establish a bespoke service in every single centre. You would not be able to provide that level of number of cases and experience and expertise and confidence if every single centre was trying to provide the same sort of service. We also have to recognise value to the NHS here and value to the women that are undertaking these services. We need to provide highly effective and efficient services, that is part of our responsibility as the NHS, and providing the services that are highly specialised, highly competent in individual centres is a mechanism to achieve that. We would love to be able to provide highly specialised services that are accessible, short distances from home for everybody, but when we are dealing with specialised services, the demographics and geography of Scotland does not provide for us to be able to provide highly specialised services in every centre of Scotland. That is the reality that we all face when we are looking at trying to arrange services. I will make a point on that. In the Petitions Committee, which I was formed by a member of, we did hear evidence from Dr Neto from the shoulders hospital in Ontario in Canada. He made a similar point about the need for centralised services to provide that sufficient scale of experience, a critical mass of expertise. Have you undertaken any international benchmarking about service design and considering how to develop this in Scotland? The service agreement that we have as the national services are under continual review, and we have a regular cycle of review. As has already been mentioned by Dr Kelly, this service in Glasgow was actually the first service in the UK to be set up. Reflecting on what we are talking about, are we following England? In fact, in many respects, what has been done in England is following what has happened in Scotland. We are at a very early stage in terms of that idea of benchmarking. There are the national committees, which have already been mentioned. I think that primarily the mechanism towards that is around credentialing. That is the route that we are all going down. It is going to take time because it is not something that has been done specifically within Scotland. However, there is a commitment from the team within GGNC to that. They have already progressed and applied for that. There is no expectation that all those within GGNC will then qualify for that. Mr Kelly, do you want to make a point? It is just to say that I recognise the point about shoulderies. When the centre was established, the recommendations for establishing the centre were the work or the outcome of short life working groups. They were engaged with all the necessary stakeholders, health boards, patient groups and other clinical groups. The decision was to continue development of the specialist service in Glasgow. As has been noted, a year before the conclusions of the IWMDS report. Anna has mentioned credentialing. It is going to be really important to benchmark clinicians in Scotland against a curriculum and framework that has been published by the College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists working with the College of Surgeons in England with the specialist associations. Also, with the patient reference group, the documents have been out for a wide consultation including public reviews. I encourage people to look at that. The other thing that we will be introducing to you is a registry, not only to look at patients who are having mesh removal surgery but also primary surgery for stress union incompetence and pelvic organ prolapse. All procedures will be captured and that is a UK wide registry. They will allow us to look at our activity and our outcome outcomes that will include patient reports outcomes for all those procedures and will allow benchmarking, comparison, etc. We will hopefully help to further build confidence in the centre of Glasgow but also in the care for patients across Scotland. Dr Ogerda, do you want to make a point? No, thank you. Dr O'Kelly has just made it. Ms Harper, do you want to make a supplementary point? Yes, just a quick point. The convener mentioned the shoulderised approach but the strict criteria for a shoulderised repair like weight loss, no alcohol, ability to exercise. It might be difficult to apply that in the sense of Scotland, for instance, when there might be additional comorbidities that people have that do present, that might need a inguinal hernia repair using mesh. Is that something that we can compare apples with oranges? Again, that is outside my expertise because I am not a general surgeon. I have done only two hernia repairs in my whole life and that was before I specialised as a gynaecologist but I am not qualified enough to give you a full answer to that. However, in general, the shoulderised repair is a non-mesh repair that in shoulderised hospital has a wonderful outcome and they managed to save the vast majority of their patients having to have a permanent mesh device implanted forever that can cause problems in the future. Clearly, the mesh related complication induced by hernia mesh appears to be less than that for gynaecological reasons. There are so many reasons for this. However, the presence of comorbidity or for comparing populations in Scotland to Canada, I do not believe that the presence or any perception of difference in comorbidities should stop a shoulderised-like approach here in Scotland. At least, you start building the native tissue approach and at least you try to allow the surgical technique to evolve our surgeons to improve their skills and be more confident in offering the native tissue non-mesh surgery. There needs to be clinically based criteria, selection criteria, of which patients would benefit best from the shoulderised repair. This evolution, in my view, needs to start as soon as possible. These are clinical decisions on individual clinical patients given consideration to the comorbidity, definitely. I do believe that that needs to be supported by local government and nationally, too. That is my view, but again, I am not an expert in this area, but this is how I see things. I had a hernia repair myself and it was a shoulderised repair, and the two hernia repairs that I have done were also shoulderised repairs. Are there any final burning points that any of the panellists would wish to make before we conclude matters? Mr O'Kelly? I am not sure that this is the environment for discussions about shoulderised repair, but we have had that being well rehearsed previously. One thing that we have not mentioned is the patient's waiting. The patient's waiting in Scotland, the United Kingdom, is a major issue. One of the things that we have not touched on is the possibility of waiting well. The fragrance of waiting well will also fit for surgery. We are also part of waiting for this team here in the Scottish Government. I would advertise and promote these initiatives. There are opportunities for patients to make lifestyle changes in the time that they are coming to surgery to get fit. I think that the long-term health benefits can be very substantial and there is certainly evidence from around the country that would suggest that. Colleagues in Glasgow will know about those programmes, but it probably is something that we should consider and promote. Thank you very much. I would like to thank all of our panellists for your attention and your expertise and your contributions today. We hear your value as parliamentarians, so just to show our appreciation. Thank you very much and good afternoon. We are now going to move into private sessions to take the next items of business.


Zato bilo noga intriguing, poslejo taj povedar na trakuljem, a da gledaj za representacijo. Prvo priprašljamo, ovo je najš inventions. Zanimamo, ovo je najšedar, ovo je najšedar, ovo je najšedar. Ovo je najšedar, ne bo to bolje. I na rejne ich poslpovali jaznevali, ovo je najšedar, ovo je nebogatno nazivne, bomo bolj poslpovali ovo in ovo je...SU, je je nebogatna, ovo je naklavno, in demo, čo je. So a little bit about myself. My name is Alessandro Benedetti. I'm a software engineer, specialized in search. I work as a search consultant, R&D software engineer and director of my own company. So a lot of business related things. I'm a machine computer science. I'm a passionate about apache design and apache solar, and also integrations, such as machine learning integration with search and semantic and natural language processing. And in my spare time, in summer I play beach volleyball and in winter I snowboard. Andrea, my colleague, is a software engineer starting in 1999. Her meets, so usually works remotely and on its own. Passionate about Java and it's a committer of apache QP. It has been a father to all the projects mentioned. So we work at CESA. We are open source enthusiasts. We are based in the UK, in London, but we are geographically redistributed and we mostly work on open source technologies in special apache, lucine and solar. Our focus as late is on leading to rank document similarity and specifically apache, lucine, more like these and related integrations. Search quality evaluation, which we will talk today, and relevance tuning. And it is just a list of our clients. OK, so let's introduce what is search quality, what is search quality evaluation and why it's important. So search quality is important for various stakeholders. So the business would be focused on the final users and possibly the owners of the business. We'll be focused on correctness, robustness of the system, reusability, mountainability and extendability from a cost perspective. While the software engineer and the search specialist are going to be interested in search quality from the point of view, are we actually providing the best results to the users. Is this technology in the best way? Is it testable? Is it reproducible? And specifically why correctness is important. It is important in the development cycle. So when you have your search team, the developers working on a project on different iterations of the project, they want to communicate to the business, to the business layer, the improvements or regressions if they happen. And also be able to show. So it's like is this costly operation that costs you the six months for an entire search team actually produce some value and sometimes just words are not enough and you need to show not the code in this case because they wouldn't care about the code but at least numbers and results. So show yes effectively we improved search quality through these metrics. And this come how you can evaluate search quality. So there are various metrics you can use offline measures which are independent of your search system and are independent of your runtime search system. So they can be calculated offline. They don't need to be related to your production environment, to your running server. And these metrics are like, we already been talking about that for example during the linear to rank talks. So like precision, F measure CG, recall, linear to rank there are a lot of metrics you can use for offline evaluation of your search quality and when you evaluate your search quality you need ratings of course so you need the ground truth you need to know what's good and what's not and then you can calculate the metrics on top of that. And then you have online measures you can actually evaluate your running system so your production environment you can check for example how engaged we provide are they abandoning the search interface are they getting a lot of zero result query so here comes the rated ranking evaluator which is an open source software to help the software engineer both in the development phase and to justify and show the benefits of recent development to the business. So we started showing RRI in London at the Vashi Lucene Solar Meetup in June. At the time it was just me and Andrea and the life of the project was a couple of months so it was a newborn baby. Then at ASTAC the relevance conference by open source connection in London in October we show the improvement of course like a lot happened and first of them in the team in the past we are like a grown based on contributors the RRI is effectively a set of tools so it is a framework composed by different libraries and different possible integrations so this slide may be a little bit confusing but you the focus is you have a library core which is the equivalent of Apache Lucene for Apache Solar and Elasticse and then you have a lot of different components some of them in the roadmap some of them already developed that provide an interaction with the library. So this is a set so just to go back a little bit the different components are going to provide a maven integration so you can run like a maven build to be able to evaluate the search quality of your system and we talk about offline metrics so R&D will allow you to calculate offline metrics on your search system given a set of ratings so this is a set of available metrics is not so important right now to go through them so it is just we implemented a set of them from time to time we will contribute more and of course potentially other contributors can let's introduce the way the the information is modeled in R&D to allow the user to model the ratings in input that will allow the system to know what's relevant and what's not relevant and then will allow the system to produce results that are easy to be navigated so you have an evaluation iteration that will run on a rating set on a specific system that will be characterized by a set of configuration the system can have different corpora so you can imagine you have different collections of data different domains for example within the the corpus you may optionally have different topics for each topic you may have different query groups that produce the same results and each query group can be represented by effectively different queries and you want to calculate on each query and then be able also to navigate what's for the query group the aggregation of the metrics what's for the topic corpus and therefore not everything is of course required you just require the corpus so you want to I mean you need to identify the collection you want to evaluate and the query so you don't need that I mean if the topic is better for you you are going to model the data but if you don't have it, it's fine it's not mandatory so you have an input layer where you model your ratings so effectively you need to build the ground truth you need to identify your potentially topics, query groups query and associate documents to the query with a rating this can be done as we see in learning to rank you can do that explicitly or implicitly that's not the focus of the talk but we assume that for how to work you have a set of ratings then you have the evaluation layer which effectively is RRE with the internal libraries that will be able to take the rating set and then run the queries against your search engine and based on the results coming from the search engine give you back the results so how is it performing according to the ratings then for each iteration you want to generate so whenever you say ok I want to calculate the search quality of my system I really will output the results navigable in a tree-based structure so you can navigate like ok I want to see the results and higher level just I'm interested in the topics I'm interested just in the corpus results or I want to go deeper for example I'm a developer I'm interested in some specific queries that are failing so this is more for an offline use because the slide is quite intense but it just shows you the way of working for RRE so what you can do is so we were talking about the fact that you can evaluate your system so to evaluate your system at the moment what you need to do is you need to reproduce the configuration of the system and RRE is currently compatible with Apache Solar Apache or Elasticsearch and what we'll do we'll spin up an embedded instance of your server with the configuration you provide and use that embedded instance to then calculate the results so a corpus as I said already is going to be a collection so it can be basically an index can be an Elasticsearch collection generally you want to identify the domain and then you can run the quality evaluation on that specific domain the configuration sets is what define your search server so it can be again solar configurations for example or Elasticsearch configuration the index structure the way you model your queries from a simulation perspective and then you have like the possibility of defining query templates so your query can just be a free text search just query terms or potentially they can use like specific boosting additional filtering and this of course is like a various example that can be like they can follow an Elasticsearch syntax they can follow an Apache Solaris syntax the ratings so the ratings you give input effectively from a real perspective are going to be a JSON file that defines the queries define the document and then define how relevant the document is for that specific query so you can specify the gain spare document or you can specify I have for this rating this set of documents and in the evaluation output you're going to have in the rating set so the same tree and you can explore digging down to the tree hierarchy and seeing the various metrics calculated lower level so lift level is going to be per query but you can navigate up to the query group's topics and then corpora there are various ways to see the output you can have like basically an Excel page with all the results according to what you calculated or you can have a dashboard currently that we will see at the demo that show you for the different topics query groups and query the various metrics how they perform in the last iteration and how they compare with previous iterations because of course it's really important to be able to compare in the previous iteration for example we got an improvement with these metrics but we got regression in comparison with much older iteration for example so this is going to be so there are different aspects so it's going to be useful both for the software engineer that effectively needs to debug specific queries and also evaluate how the system is performing and it's also good for the business layer to quickly understand so they may not be interested in the list of documents per query so if they are relevant to they are not but they may be interested that overall the collection is doing well so even in the last print after three weeks of development we got an improvement in precision by this percentage there are various questions of course is an evolving system is still in development is improving slowly and there are various questions like is it possible to persist the evaluation data and then compare them afterwards I don't use Java because it's written in Java it's integrated effectively through Mavin with other platforms so you don't really need Java but potentially if you want to contribute it's written in Java and various other questions that we'll skip for now and we'll go with the demo which is going to be presented by Andrea that will show you a use case of RRE so starting from the book Relevant Search by Dr. Turnbull we will follow some example from the book seeing how you can check the search quality of your search system understand where are the pitfalls approach like with modifications in the configurations and then see how they contribute to the improvement of the system effectively So, good afternoon I'm Andrea Gazzarini the guy you've seen in the previous slide and first of all is my fault for them 2018 I'm the responsible and I will change later and as Alessandro said this is a brief work through for demonstrating I mean how RRE can be used for doing some search evaluation we provided in GitHub in our GitHub repository demo repository so you can have a look you can download you can play with it what is it RRE-enabled project basically there is no Java code RRE is written in Java but you don't need to know Java because we have only a couple of requirements and Java of course but all what you need to do is to run to provide of course all those files or data that Alessandro said and that has nothing to do with Java and you need to run some comments in the moment the RRE as Alessandro said is up there is a core but the runtime container the implementation is basically a maven plugin so you can inject the quality evaluation process in your build process and for this demo we used some examples from relevant search with the data set which is an extract of the TMBD and we are using as like what happens in the book Elastic Search specific version of Elastic Search 632 so the index shapes the schema, the Elastic Search schema and the query shapes are coming from that book and that Elastic Search queries but if you want to start a new project if you want to create a reenable project there is the RRE which explains exactly how to do that we can try now but it's just a matter of the only thing at the moment is our dependencies are not in maven central so you need to configure in your maven settings the Caesar repository or explain it so we can we basically provide as part of the RRE itself a module which is a maven archetype which creates, gets of course some parameters related with the search platform that you want to use solar or elastic search your group ID your artifact ID and this is in demo effect yes this is mid success so at the moment I've created a RRE enable project that can I load in my ID and here just to have refluk this is create you can see that there are under the source ATC folder which is the default but you can change through the archetype several subfolders each folder contains those data that Alessandro explained so the configuration sets that are specific to elastic search the corpora is not the TMB the here but is just a simple and following the same path the rating example and some queries in place the archetype also provides a couple of simple iterations 1.0 and 1.1 with some configuration this is the basic configuration and here in the second iteration you can decide which metrics you want to see you can use the default settings also for folders for for for for for for for for for folders for fields that you want to see in the results and some other the RRI wiki will includes all the available parameters you can tune the evaluation process so on another workspace I cloned the demo repository and here we can see there is more complete example with data from relevant search with some data from relevant search loaded and we have 7 iterations what is an iteration is basically internal external development iteration at the very beginning we would have only one iteration the first 1.0 0.1 whatever you call it and version is composed by index shape I mean the configuration of elastic search, the mappings and here we can see that we won't start with the default configuration empty, the schema's mode decorporized the TMDB dataset and we have the main input file which is the which contains the ratings so for each topics, for each query group for each query we are going to describe what are the relevant documents that we expect in order to execute the evaluation process and get the evaluation measures so if I start RRI it will scan all the available versions which are 7 in this case I'm going to use let's assume that we are at the very beginning so we have only the version 1.0 I can use a filter in it's one of the available maven parameters so we can run the evaluation process using only the version 1.0 on the other side I have the RRI console which is basically an angular web app which listen for evaluation data and it gets automatically refreshed when I run a build process so sorry this is the if I run the evaluation process you can see that here already we run only on one iteration configuration version 1.0 and after I have to the screen is not so in the configuration file I set only three metrics one precision 10 and NDCG at 10 on the left side you can see the RRI domain model so you can see the corpus which is called TMD.Bulk the two topics Space Jam and Star Trek the three query group under those topic and finally the queries basketball with Cartoon Aliens and Patrick Stewart here I can see the values of the computed metrics, the evaluation session has been executed and RRI correctly computed the requested metrics ok here I can see some information it's not really useful until I create a new iteration because in this way in that way sorry I can see which direction my system is going if there are some improvements here I can see that for example the basketball with Cartoon Aliens is not performing so good actually bad because both the three measures are zero so there is another information that the console can show you in this query for each version I can see the top end results red means not relevant blue means relevant so here I can see why we have all those zeros so we won't enter in the details about the differences between the several iterations but let's say that at certain point of time the user created version 1.1 here the difference is that instead of relying on a plain schema mode, guessing mode of elastic searcher the user configured properly a couple of fields with the English analyzer so if I enable also the second version RRI will execute the evaluation version but this time we'll use two versions and we would get some comparison data for each metric we can see the version point 1 and version point version point 0 and version point 1 we could see the metric value at query level and how it is aggregated so I can see that at corpora level I have a loss of 0.5 so something is not going as expected the best ball with cartoon alliance is still not good because I still have all zeros and if I see if I expand the query and result for each query I can see that I improved the number of results because we moved can you see from sorry we moved from more than 1000 to 84 items are still all red so there is some difference they are not the same documents but at bad point because you know you have those 30 so the developer created another iteration let's see version 1.2 and redrunning the configuration the configuration in this case the difference between version 1.1 and 1.2 is in the boost the user gave to the searchable fields in the query not in the index shape so once the build is completed I can see that this time the basketball with cartoon alliance performed good because the precision at 1 is 1 that means that the first result is good the precision at 10 doesn't have a good value but if we have a look at the writing files at the ratings that the user gave for this specific query he configured just one relevant document space gem so from the 1.10 perspective this is the maximum value that we can have because there is only one relevant document and at the same time this is another thing that RRE allows you to do that you can see the effect of the iterations not only horizontally but you can see also the side effect or regressions on the other queries and here you can see that you see some red button somewhere so that means probably we fixed the first query but something went wrong in some other query specifically Star Trek, Patrick Stewart we we see some between version 1.0 and 1.1 that has been a loss because we moved from this is the precision 1, the first column and you can see that in the first iteration we had the top item which was relevant longer there so that's the reason why we lose and in the third iteration another item came back in the first position the same this is the precision 10 the second column we moved from 7 relevant results for version 1.0 and 1.1 to 4 relevant results so it's not so good but you can do this reiteration how much times you want the several iteration doesn't need to be necessarily releases but it can also be experiments so you can do things like this one here with this monitor is not so probably is a little bit messy because here I am enabling all the versions so the result is a little bit just moment for the build but probably you should have a big monitor for dealing with oops for dealing with such data it's interesting because if you want this actually I enabled three metrics but usually you are working metrics by metrics especially if you have a lot of queries especially if you have a lot of versions and in this way you can trace specific query analyze why it is behaving in that way comparing with different version why in the first version was good I did seven iteration and things are not so good so you can do this kind of analysis however you can use also the filtering capability of seven plugin for reduce the number of iterations that you want to consider so let's assume that we are at the end of our story I have seven iteration if I run all the iteration I get the huge console so I could be interesting only in seeing the difference between the last iteration so a couple of months ago we had 1.0 now after a couple of months we have we have seven iteration ok let's see what happened between all those changes and here probably is a little bit small but here you can see that we have a lot of green so green or yellow so that means that our system is stable through the different iterations or there has been some improvement the Star Trek Patrice there is something that is not so good in terms of precision at ten because we moved from seven to four so here there should be something that needs to be checked and probably fixed and doing that I can control my system and I can avoid as much as possible regressions unexpected side effects of changes that I'd like to introduce for example for enhancing some query or improving some query it allows me to have a look at the whole system this is of course a small example because we have three queries so I expect that the production system the file the reading files would contain a lot of queries a lot of that's the reason why we modeled the RRE in that kind of tree because it helps you to divide to classify things in topics in topics groups and so on sometimes like in this example this classification is a little bit complex especially when you have simple systems or you have few queries and that's the reason why a lot of those nodes query groups topics are optional you cannot meet them you can have just a list of queries nothing I think that is more or less there is also this kind of explanation we are working on that we are working in general on this RRE console because here for example a nice addition would be to add some kind of popup that shows the Lucene explain for understanding why that element is there in that position we have a lot of ideas about how to improve the framework and the framework is open source so if you have some feedback, some ideas whatever any feedback is warmly welcome what do you want to talk about? we can go to the future works so thank you Andrea we see now you can use RRE effectively on a demo project so this example was on the last research but that of course is valid for Apache Solar as well so it strictly depends on your system so you can zoom a little bit and move to the latest work so configuring the queries configuring your system so the config set directories we've seen in this example were for last research but you can imagine if you have Apache Solar as a server you will do the similar thing so from the perspective of future works we are working on the integration with Solar of a rank eval API so basically giving the opportunity of integrating Apache Solar directly with RRE to push ratings to Solar and get back directly the ratings for your system then we are working on a Jenkins plugin so this would be quite good to be integrated in your continuous integration and continuous delivery system because you would like to see after a release for example how the system is going so it would be quite good to explore the performance on the system with a quick dashboard directly from your CI plugin so like Apache Jenkins for example or at Russian Bomboof or what matters and one important point we are working on is how you build the input so how you build your rating set so building the rating set is actually the most tedious part because if you do that explicitly we will have the same problem of a learning to rank project so you will need people, you will need experts you will need crowd to do that and they are not going to like to just put lines in a JSON file that's good for RRE to take this input it goes from a machine not very good from a human it's readable but not very writable let's say so there are two possibilities we are working on a moment a judgment collector UI and basically show to the user couple so pair of documents given a query and the user will be able to say which one is good and which one is better actually or implicit collection so you actually get the user interactions that can be clicks, add to cart sales whatever is relevant in your business and then you evaluate from evaluate the distribution of them and you extract automatically the ratings so we have the same consideration that we saw at the learning to rank talk so you will have implicit which is cheaper much bigger in number but noisier while explicit judgments is going to be of course much more precise if you have a good set of experts but much more costly but this is a way you can improve the way currently already works right now you need to provide the jazm and effectively you need to write it so we are going to improve that side and once you collect the data so once you collect your ratings this is actually going to be quite useful because from the data you collect you could actually make an integration and indirect integration with learning to rank and build the training set out of the data you collected and at that point you will be able to evaluate your search and also actually improve your search relevancy and this is just a brief slide about the problems you will have when you move from data from user interactions to a rating set and possibly a training set for learning to rank we don't have the time to explore it but the slides are available so you can take a look on your own and the same would be how you estimate the relevance labels so for example you want to take into consideration the clicks through rates so impression clicks for example or bookmarks or attitude charts, sales and based on that relevance from a scale from 0 to 4 for example and when you build your training set if you want to integrate for example your Vashi solar learning to rank you need also to extract the features you defined to build the training set to a readable way a readable version for solar so you will need actually to automate that part as well and this can be an improvement so you collect the user interaction and if a configuration file for the features definition in solar so this is the summary about RRE so starting from the introduction the description of the framework a quick demo and some of the visual worlds and now it's time for the lessons we have one there so the question is if I have an apache solar instance configured what will happen with RRE will actually eat reindex in memory and have an embedded distance of solar that will be used for evaluation or what else so the answer is at the moment you need to provide the configuration set and effectively RRE will run and spin up in memory so in the memory that is dedicated to RRE an embedded solar instance with that configuration fill the data in the solar instance so effectively it's an embedded one so the index will be on disk depending on the configuration and this is one way we are also working in integrating actually like instead of having to provide the configuration set and then spin up and the distance trigger and existing already instance like a QA for example instance but yeah the quick answer is yes at the moment you are going to embed that instance in memory but the index will go anyway on disk one thing that we probably I don't remember if there is some slide there already has a lot of extension points where you can plug in your one of those extension points is the search platform there is a kind of search platform API which provides an abstract interface of the life cycle of a search platform that RRE expects at the moment we have just two bindings which are the embedded elastic search and the embedded solar but it's very easy and we are working on that to create a remote search platform for integrating RRE with a staging server staging elastic search or a solar does this answer the question so so you mean if you switch the entire search system behind you couldn't but I don't know right now if it's going to work at different systems so they compare it on but I'm just talking loudly because interesting question actually you can't I'm trying to imagine what is the constraint I mean from the code perspective but theoretically maybe it requires some implementation of course but it's not an impossible the question was if you can compare different versions from for example instance of Apache Solar and the following version is actually you completely change your search server and it's elastic search yes please so the question is what if you have like a custom plug in such a query parser in your search instance and you want to provide that as part of the configuration effectively will be code it plays a little bit different between solar elastic search solar the visual machine that is up is just one so basically if you have this kind of need you could have instead of POM packaging like the POM package project packaging you could have Java packaging so you can have also Java code and with your query parser or your addon in the configuration set you are just referencing those classes and they are picked up in elastic search we had to do some change because because the embedded version of elastic search requires if I remember at first or time that you give the list of plugins so and the Maven plugin allows you to configure metrics, fields and plugins so you can have your plugins in the source folder and you can configure them through the Maven thanks a lot for your questions we will have to take offline thanks for your talk thank you


Dear learners, welcome to this video lecture session. I am Dr. Jahnavi Devi, assistant professor, discipline of political science, Krishna Kanta Handik, State of an University, Assam. Today, in this video, I shall discuss one of the very important topics of Indian politics or Indian political system, that is, philosophy of the Indian constitution. Every constitution has a philosophy of its own. Likewise, the constitution of India has a philosophical basis upon which the provisions of the constitution are further developed. The constitution of India begins with the preamble, which reflects the philosophy and ideals of the constitution itself. It further reflects the nature of the Indian state. The preamble of the Indian constitution reads, We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic and to secure to all its citizens, justice, social, economic and political, liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship, equality of status and opportunity, and to promote among them all fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the nation. In our constituent assembly, this 26th day of November, 1949, do hereby adopt, enact and give ourselves this constitution. If we analyze the preamble, then the ideals and philosophy of the Indian constitution become very clear. Now, we shall discuss the philosophy and ideals of the Indian constitution. The very first philosophy inserted in the preamble is popular sovereignty. The preamble of the Indian constitution reflects the principle of popular sovereignty. The preamble of the Indian constitution starts, We, the people of India, adopt, enact and give ourselves this constitution. This indicates that people are the ultimate source of power and authority in India. Government derives all power from the people. In India, the constitution is regarded as the supreme law of the land, but the supreme power of the state is vested upon the people of India. The second important principle of the Indian constitution is sovereignty of India. The preamble of the Indian constitution declares India as a sovereign state. This declaration strongly establishes the fact that India is independent in its internal as well as external matter. It is not under the control of any other foreign country. Another important principle of Indian constitution is socialism. Socialism is one of the core ideals of the Indian polity. The term socialist was not originally there in the constitution of India. It was added to the preamble by the 42nd amendment act in the year 1976. The inclusion of the term socialist reflected one of the prime objects of the Indian society or India is to secure social, economic, political justice among all its people by eradicating exploitation of all forms and ensuring equitable distribution of resources and wealth. It favours national, planned economic development, nationalisation of resources and limited freedom to private business and industries. In other words, socialism basically favours development of the society as a whole. For the realization of the ideal of socialism, in the Indian constitution, there are some directives to the Indian state in the part four of the constitution itself and these are known as the directive principles of state policy. Through these directives, the constitution emphasises for the establishment of a socialistic pattern of the society in India. So by inserting the term socialist, the constitution has not only brought a feeling of equal status among the people but also strengthened the philosophical foundation of the Indian constitution. Secularism is another important ideal of the Indian constitution. The term secularism was incorporated in the Indian constitution by the 42nd amendment act in the year 1976. Though this term was not originally included in the constitution, but right from the time of adoption of the constitution itself, the people of India were given religious freedom. The preamble by declaring India as a secular state clearly reflects that India does not have any state religion or it does not recognise any religion as the official or state religion and treats all religions equally. Moreover, different communities in India have the right to practice their own faith. Secularism is one of the important ideals of the Indian constitution. Then democracy constitutes another important philosophical foundation of Indian state. The preamble of the Indian constitution declares India as a democratic state. In fact, the prime philosophy and ideal of the Indian constitution is to make India a democratic state in the true sense. It advises not only a democratic form of government, but also a democratic society infused with the spirit of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. Accordingly, in India, the government is formed by the elected representatives of people and these representatives remain accountable to the people. In other words, it can be said that the constitution of India has established a parliamentary democracy in India marked by universal adult franchise, periodic election to choose the government, majority rule, rule of law, decentralisation of power, independence of judiciary, etc. The constitution of India also declares India as a republic. The preamble to the Indian constitution also establishes India as a republic. This indicates that the head of the state in India is an elected head who holds power for a definite period of time. In India, the president is indirectly elected by the people for a period of five years. The principle of justice is another important ideal of Indian constitution. The constitution of India seeks to ensure justice in social, economic and political aspects to all its citizens. For ensuring social justice, the constitution of India has made certain special arrangements for the weaker section of the society. It abolished untouchability and provided free education up to a certain standard. Economic justice is ensured through equal wages for equal work, then abolition of all forms of forced labour, abolition of discrimination on the basis of sex, then or any other factor, equitable distribution of resources among all its citizens, etc. In a view to ensure political justice, all citizens of India have an equal sense to participate in the affairs of the state through the system of universal adult franchise. Another important principle of the Indian constitution is liberty. The preamble to the Indian constitution declares liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith, worship as one of the main objectives of the Indian constitution. Accordingly, the constitution of India has provided a number of fundamental rights in part three of the constitution to guarantee these liberties. People of India enjoy freedom of speech, thought and religion without any kind of discrimination. Equality is another principle on which the constitution of India has given emphasis. The preamble to the Indian constitution ensures equality of status and opportunity to the entire people of India. Equality has been guaranteed by the rule of law and all citizens are equal in the eyes of law and all enjoy equal opportunity in the matter of employment in public offices. To make this ideal more real, the constitution of India assures equality to all its citizens under article 14 to 18 of the constitution itself. The constitution of India tries to secure this objective by making illegal all discrimination by the state on the basis of religion, sex, race, caste, class or place of birth and by guaranteeing equality before the law and equal protection of law. Assuming unity and integrity of the nation by assuring fraternity and dignity of the individual is another important object of the Indian constitution. Unity among the citizens of this first country was the first requisite condition for maintaining the independence of the state. For the fulfillment of this ideal of unity and to ensure the integration of the people, the spirit of fraternity or brotherhood must be infused among all the heterogeneous population of India belonging to different race, religion and ethnicity. And this can be achieved only by abolishing all communal, sectional, local, provincial and antisocial feelings. Fraternity can be ensured by generating the feeling of oneness among all the sections of the society composed of so many races, religion, language and cultures. Further, fraternity cannot be assured unless the dignity of each and every citizen is maintained. Therefore, to secure the dignity of each citizen of India, the constitution of India guaranteed equal fundamental rights to every section of the society, which can be enforced in a court of law. The word integrity was added in the preamble by the 42nd Amendment Act to emphasize the fundamental unity of the country against all the forces of communalism, casteism and the like. Another important philosophy of the Indian constitution is to establish India as a welfare state. The preamble to the Indian constitution establishes India as a welfare state. Welfare state basically refers to the state which provides certain free services to the people for bringing common well-being. Accordingly, the constitution of India has included a number of provisions in the form of direct principles of state policy to fulfill its commitment towards the establishment of a welfare state in India. From the above, one can easily comprehend that the constitution seeks to constitute India as a sovereign democratic republic. The constitution of India upholds the democratic principles of freedom, social economic equality and justice and peace and brotherhood among all the people of India with the people as the real sovereign. So it basically emphasizes the concept of popular sovereignty. For the establishment of a just and democratic society, the constitution upholds the ideal of secularism and socialism. The preamble to the Indian constitution thus outlines the ideals, goals and the philosophical basis of the constitution. So from the above discussion, we can say that the constitution of India has emphasized on a number of principles and ideals like sovereignty of the state, popular sovereignty, democracy, republicanism, socialism, secularism, justice, liberty, equality, welfareism, and unity and integrity of the state. All these principles and ideals all together constitute the philosophical foundation of Indian state. And with this concluding remark, I would like to end today's lecture here. Thank you.