king so unless it's 100% you don't get an output and it's customizable so you can click those gears and you can change what the text is. You can change how many fields there are. So that is the output that we generate. Supposedly it's easier to interpret. Really what I wanted to have was a bar graph at the end that just showed you the relative percentages. So the row heights are absolutely proportional to what your percentages are. So that is, well I can't really read it but it's something like 45% of the height of the entire table and as you update your data in the data entry table this will actually adjust in real time. Bar graph is proportional. We automatically remove text if the row is too skinny and these are just a couple of the other outcomes of this tool. So for the nerds in the group here's the information about the tools that we use to develop it. I don't think it's interesting to most people. That was version one that we showed and Kim beat me to the punch by putting a sand key chart up which I really resent but that's something we'd like to do in the next version. We also based on some feedback from users want to highlight what material is reused or what percentage is reused. There's actually a lot of advanced reporting that we could include into the model and I think there's going to be improvements that we can add to the list based on today and tomorrow. And if you want to try it out that's the address and that's all I have. Thank you. Questions? Yes. Yeah, unfunded which is why I'm probably not going to self fund version two because I think that's going to be more complicated. Any questions? I don't have a question but I just have an observation which Andy will understand. I think what this really tells us is the only people who are allowed to work on this type of work are people called Andy. When was it like three months ago? We had this Andy, the two Andes that work in our project and Andres from GIZ and essentially it was the most complicated meeting I've ever tried to chair in my life. So if any of you are not called Andy, don't go near this stuff. Good? Yes. One related question. I can't answer that online. Yeah. Now the projects kind of lacks, it's not a focal point of the foundation at the moment. There's work that's being done on it but it's pump related and electronics related and some dewatering technology being developed. Yes. So what you've done is to play around as well with numbers and see what comes out of it. So that's as well a very useful thing to sort of real time see how does it change if I do this or that. Right. I mean what we've done is somewhat superficial. It's not nearly as complex as what anyone else in this room has done related to SFDs but that's the nature of hobbies I think. Great. Any other questions? No? Thank you very much, Andrew. All right. For our last presenter, Barbara, please. Sorry, it's me again. I really apologise. Oh, how do I do this? Is it that way? That's fine. Okay. So well they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery so thank you very much. I've had a very cheery day. I thought I'd quickly do is tell you a little bit about where our work is now. What we've been doing because a lot of people have said the SFD is this and that and it's quite complicated to sort of answer all those questions so maybe I'll just tell you what I think we're doing and then we can discuss it. And along the way what I want to do is just reflect on a few of the things that we've kind of learned or realised as we go along because I think that's the most interesting thing is like so what do we all do the next time we go around doing this sort of development. As you know there's a promotion initiative. Here are all the people. Many of them are in the room. So do you want to wave SFD promotion initiative people? Yeah, there's quite a few of them around. Okay. So what's an SFD? It is a diagram that shows the pathways from defecation to final fate. But a couple of other things which it is which are very important. One is we have a very powerful mechanism or a very important central mechanism that is using data sources and being very explicit about the basis on which we make assumptions which for us is a very important part of the process. And we also always produce a narrative report on the service delivery context. If any of you have read the original two papers on which all this work is based which were published in Jay Warshdev in 2014 you'll see a very nice and very central part of it is a service delivery assessment that assesses how things work institutionally all the way along the value chain. Because one of the things that we observed was that when people do institutional analysis they tend to be fixated on one end or other of the chain and not think right along it. So what you end up with or what you can see on the website and in the resources there's a sort of there's the idea that you've got the diagram but there's also a set of manuals which are about how you can collect data how you can make estimates from that variable. So there's a whole load of sort of back room stuff which goes into the generation of the data from which we produce the diagram. It's my opinion actually that the diagram although it's very important and powerful how you produce it or what it looks like in the end is not the big question. The really interesting question is what does it actually represent and that's what's really been really interesting for us. So just to say on the service delivery context assessment questions so very much I'm presuming that the IRC initiative drew from this kind of idea that we've essentially got and this is based itself on the World Bank's own service delivery assessment that was used in the country status overview processes which were preparation processes for Africa SAM. But as I say we do that analysis all the way along the value chain which is quite important. Do you have a policy for sanitation? Yes. Do you have a policy for household toilets? Yes. Do you have a policy for emptying of toilets? Oh no. So it's quite helpful to just sort of force yourself to think along that. You know this initiative has been going along for some time. We have 45 or so examples on the website and we're carrying on now doing some more. It's been used in Kampala. Here are some workshop activities going on in Kampala. It's been used by GIZ in Uganda as part of town planning processes so embedded into wider town planning and municipal planning. Here are some people in Moshi in Tanzania and actually Moshi for me is one of the most interesting examples of where a whole bunch of people suddenly said, aha we're not talking about sewerage actually are we, we're talking about on-site sanitation. So for me Moshi is always a very exciting example and the GIZ colleagues who led that process had I think a very positive experience. There's also been work on use of SFDs to inform the Zambia National Sanitation Strategy some work in Uganda lots of work going on in India, I won't bore you on the India because we've talked about India quite a lot and also in Ethiopia we've been working with a collaboration, a network of cities in Ethiopia to do this work but also for them to then get together to start thinking about planning. There's a toolbox and I'm mentioning all of this because it is quite important however you formulate it and I would say perhaps we've over formulated at the moment but essentially we are quite clear that you need to be clear about how you collect the data, you need to be clear about how you engage with stakeholders. I don't think there's anybody in this room who would imagine you just go and make an SFD without allowing the process to be driven from the local level and there's a bunch of guidance notes for the calculation tools which I'll come on to. For me because I'm a nerdy plumber the most interesting part was Part D trying to get the glossary and variable definitions prescribed because what we were trying to do was to set up a framework which we could use anywhere in the world so we really had to think about the universe of possible situations we would find when we asked the question what does sanitation look like in your town and that was quite the challenge let me tell you. So just to say something about the variables and definitions you have to be so careful about what it is that you're describing so here is a septic tank everywhere we go in the world people say oh you know 80% of the people in this town have a septic tank do they or do they have one of those an awful lot of people have one of those some people have one of these quite a lot of other people have this an awful lot of other people have that but it's completely full and in fact what's happening is going straight into the drain as Christine pointed out so understanding and defining what you mean is super super important and just that process again becomes such a powerful part of the experience so we were very boring and we essentially made a whole primer of definitions so if you go to the website you can download an incredibly tedious document that we have spent hours and hours poring over and checking and arguing and you know we're the most nerdy people in the entire universe like tell you now so we have definitions for all sorts of different types of sanitation systems and they're all defined differently now that matters because the one thing we're not doing is measuring actual fluxes in and out of systems and neither are we estimating volumes but we need to describe systems in a way that allows us to make a plausible assumption about fluxes in and out of those systems so and we have a whole load of definitions of terms in order to describe what we're doing what do we mean when we say that there's a centralized sewer system what do we mean when we say black water so essentially we can call each other out and sadly we do we are I'm genuinely telling you our project meetings are unbelievably nerdy but so we do and then what we did was we said let's think about all the possible types of user interfaces that you have and then all the possible places where the effluent and the fecal sludge from those interfaces might go and then we can start to describe what do we mean when we say safe containment which of these systems can plausibly be safely emptied and which of these and then you can go on down the chain but in our view it was extremely important to define all these variables and we have two tables which sort of have a whole universe of possible systems so types of toilets down the left and places where the crap goes along the top and we define this differently for places where there's what we describe as a low risk to groundwater contamination so if there's infiltration we're not bothered and places where we think there's high risk of contamination so again on the website all of this stuff is available there it is and then for every single type of system we have a little diagram that explains how that system relates to the overall shit flow diagram so if you get into a very nerdy techie debate with somebody in your city about how you describe the pit the trains you can actually pull up the little diagram and we can talk about well we are saying that this portion of the effluent or this portion of the fecal sludge is coming into our shit flow diagram in this way using this variable and then you can fath about and change your assumptions we have a set of base assumptions which we use when we have no other data and obviously you can change all your assumptions if you happen to have data but we very rarely do have data at that level of detail so we have a whole bunch of these diagrams and only when you've worked out all of that can you design a calculation tool or at least that's what we felt because we were trying to design a platform that would work for cities all over the world and so we have a tool which has an excel file with a bunch of macros it will be on an online platform fairly soon the brilliant people who aren't plumbers in our team are sorting that out we think about groundwater contamination then we define the sanitation systems that we're dealing with in any given city and then and only then do we start to say well for sanitation systems of this type what's the rate of emptying do we think what rate of emptying is happening what rate of transport what rate of delivery to treatment you end up with a big spreadsheet so this is like the matrix that everybody looks at but it's kind of like the big universal version of the matrix in fact the spreadsheet's quite clever because it potentially has 167 systems or something can anyone remember we have a very large number of potential systems but every time you work in a city you can get it to automatically generate just the spreadsheet you need for that city so it doesn't bother showing you all the systems that you don't have in a city and that will get cleverer and then when you've filled in all your data you fill your percentages and estimates you can put in your name of your city and the population then you click the little button and you get a nice graphic now we don't always get a perfect graphic at the moment and this is the little piece of work that we're still struggling with a bit and wrestling with but you get essentially a graphic in PowerPoint form or PNG form probably in the next round I think the most likely thing is that this will look more like a more like a conventional thank you diagram the problem with this diagram is it's based on the one that we did originally draw by hand for the original WSP study in 2012 and it has these white boxes and they turn out to be the big headache so in the next generation I think the white boxes will disappear little comment on information we're very very clear that you can go to any level of information and I would say what I take from today is that everybody's working somewhere on this curve in terms of accuracy detail and reliability and as long as you know what you're doing with your information that's fantastic it doesn't matter where you are on this curve you just have to be explicit and clear and very soon there will be well there's already a website and you can already ask for help and but what will be possible shortly is that people will be able to engage with the help desk and many of the lovely people in this room for the next couple of years will be at the disposal of cities and towns all over the world to do this work themselves so if people have techie questions or they can't understand the definitions or they want to argue with the definitions one final small thing I want to say is that we will make a few changes to our underlying definitions and I think one of the things that we probably will end up doing is separately defining the solids flows and the liquid flows from septic tanks and this comes into the whole question of wastewater so we can handle wastewater and we can handle fecal sludge and at the moment we can move a fraction of wastewater from the septic tanks into the wastewater flows but conceptually that's quite tricky because supernatant from a septic tank is not wastewater well it's a type of wastewater but it's a very specific type of wastewater so that's a bit of technical work that we're just doing at the moment that's it I'm done sorry I went over I apologize open for questions yes please thank you very much Barbara for this very clear presentations and for the good quality of the ongoing work of the SFD promotion initiative so I think just a feeling following your presentation but all the discussion we have the afternoon we clearly see that it's very useful and powerful tools for assessment for advocacy for sensitization very important for that maybe one point we also clearly understand that it's useful tools also for planification for implementations but maybe we don't enough insist on the fact that it is useful but not alone and probably in your work you have to develop you have clearly to highlight the facts that all the work when we work in planning we have to also consider all the other social economical aspect the link with the other your band services and the link with all the other city planning tools so I think we have clearly to work all together on this question because we have useful tools but if we let it like that some people could understand that it's by itself it is enough it's sufficient and work only with it so we have clearly to have another tools to explain clearly it's useful tool but we have also to take into account the more wide aspect of your band development absolutely I couldn't agree more it's in the manuals it's written in the text but I agree with you I think somehow communicating that more clearly and the SFD is we usually say it's primarily a sort of first order analysis but yes I agree somehow communicating that more clearly would be great we're trying our lovely colleagues at Susanna we're doing any more questions yes please okay okay then perfect I just want to shut this and then could I please call the speakers the presenters who are here up on stage and we can have an open lively discussion you can only come up if you're called Andy or Barbara basically that's the rule no that's not true I didn't turn in my second that won't surprise me I know Ingborg's second name is not Andrew I know that all right Rebecca had one do you want to open the discussion and then maybe it was a contribution really which picked up actually on a couple of the presentations which was triggered by your question about can SFDs help in monitoring future scenarios for the city and it also links in what you've just said Christoph it's a question that we've had going around I think within the SFD promotion initiative group but as WEDEC we've just had one of our master's students look at this following up on one of the city reports we did in Kamasi and Ghana where there was very good commitment from the municipality about what does this mean not just now but for looking at future implications of investment planning linked to World Bank investments and through WUSSA and other partners and that's also been taken from the municipal waste management department manager who's moved to Accra to look at it in Accra as well and look at modelling future scenarios and see how that changes the SFD which may just be based on population growth but it may be population growth with changes in service levels through the different stages of the service chain and is enough being done to address the problem and where are you going to reach critical points and projecting forward for maybe 10 or 15 years and it also linked in with what you were showing on your your homemade diagram before the Sankuom which is what we found is when you're looking at variation over time sometimes you lose the implications of that through the service chain SFD and so what the students done Lara she's done a kind of summary at the end to show what does this look like in terms of managed or unmanaged safely managed unsafely managed and then comparing those across time and it was an issue because she was saying trying to simplify what the SFD shows you and sometimes you lose some of the implications so we're realizing that it's not an end of the line process we're trying to use the SFD for yet another purpose and yet again of course the big question is what are your assumptions where do you get the data from what do people know so all those issues come into play so we're hoping that that will be available to share at some level and at some point so watch this space but yeah just a contribution thank you hi Christine Moe and Marie University so I've been thinking about these presentations and it's wonderful to see how this is taken off but I can tell you from our Sanipath work now and I'll talk more about it tomorrow in nine different communities one thing that we see over and over again is that the produce is highly contaminated by shit and if you're using the SFD for advocacy you're really going to get people's attention if you show that the shit is getting into the food supply because when we showed that data in a craw that really got people's attention because the food supply moves all over the city and that can be a big motivator to do something about the shit so I want to put in a plea I mean I know that there's some arrows that show reuse in agriculture but I would say it's really important to be explicit that poor sanitation is leading to contaminated food and we talk about wash, water and sanitation and hygiene but we're always neglecting to talk about the food and I just think that that's a critical problem that has been neglected so that's my pitch and see if future versions can make that really explicit I think it would be fun to actually toggle between this I'm not sure how that works I think it would be fun if we set it up so that you can toggle between showing branches of influence so you could say show me how it affects the water supply show me how affects the food supply and there's multiple things we could do that although sorry I'm just going to chip in and say I would I think I've got a mic yes but also sometimes no because I mean water supply is a really good example that I think very often when you have these conversations and you talk about diarrheal disease there's always an assumption that you have a water supply problem if you start with that assumption you may be right or you may be wrong so I would only say I think you're right but I think one of the sort of powerful things that we were really trying to sort of think through at the beginning was let's work out where the big quantum of shit is because there is a point I feel I mean for advocacy yes you then have to sort of convert that into the sort of how is that influencing health but there is a point where I feel like I'm a big fan of John Snow and I think we kind of established quite a long time ago that shit around the knees of your children is a bad thing so in a way one of the things about the SF I didn't know well exactly not that John Snow, no no no he wasn't really as useful but my point is I think sometimes just trying to get the attention of people by saying look there's all this crap that's just being lifted out of pit latrines or septic tanks and dumped into the drains it's important so yes let's have the toggles and all of that stuff but let's make sure we do the kind of shocking shit picture first before you do the toggle because I think if you get too sophisticated the kind of shockiness of it goes away I don't know if that makes sense Christine it does maybe also in addition to that because what you were saying in the limited experience so far for the cases we did already for reuse it was like kind of a shock for people to use like human waste even when it is treated so imagine that it's everywhere untreated so yeah quick comment we looked at your manual and with all your acronyms and all those A, A, C1 whatever seemed like rocket science and really I mean complex on the other hand when we have a converted local authority or a government that knows that they want to do something for example just this week the government of India decides that every city that they are supporting under their smart cities or other program will have an FSM plan and the team that working in India was challenged to develop a quick and dirty method that will inform the government of India as to how much each city would require more a ballpark figure etc and so after a lot of consultations among 3-4 institutions including CAC and others there's a simple format that's now it's plugged in and we just use information that is available and it generates so while it is necessary to go up your curve but so I find that even at the middle or upper end of the curve there are some different uses and I think you don't necessarily have to go the whole hog of developing the diagram maybe a simple one but what is it that the user is looking for? Indonesia, your Furman I forget the name he's looking for how much do I invest he's not looking at the shape flow diagram so how does your model generate those numbers? Just one thing I did want to say on that though and again I have to be a bit cautious here because I'm an engineer but I also think that there's a question we have to ask ourselves and I was thinking about it very much when you were talking about your modeling and you're talking about the tools that you use and I was just like yeah yeah yeah that's right okay and then I realized that's the tribe of people from whom I originate and you speak my language but I think we also have to think about, reflect on the fact that the shape flow diagram is the most monumentally simple thing and I have to say that I've been working in the sector for 30 years Roland's been working in the sector for twice as long as me I'm going to take a hazard let's say many thousands of years and he's also an engineer and actually I'm very confident that both of us have been making shape flow diagrams all of our professional lives you ask an engineer to design a sanitation system of course they do this, they don't call it a shape flow diagram it doesn't look like this, it doesn't have that curve or this thing you can't design a sanitation solution without understanding this stuff similarly sanitation is simple but complex so one of the things that I've been reflecting a lot on in the course of this work is what it reveals really quite woefully is the very very big capacity gap in urban sanitation on the basic skill side I have this conversation about septic tanks for example and I saw you all going oh yes that's right absolutely but you go to cities and you have that conversation everyone's like what, what are you talking about, who knew so I think one of the things that it really reveals for me is the really urgent need to sort of build up capacity I think India's gone long ahead compared to many places I think Mira's right there are pockets and there are problems but there's huge progress but in a lot of places the capacity is so weak that you are forced back on these rather more sort of mechanical tight ways of doing it just to try and build up the understanding that's helpful but I feel that quite strongly maybe Anna you can compliment some of you spend your Friday evenings and beyond that and the whole afternoon there was this excitement as well about the thing we'll put it on the website on the SFD portal we want to bring it together we want to make it available to tell the stories there might different uses for different purposes it not always has to be as standardised as we are doing it but it's as well useful to have a standardised version but my question to you is what is it making with you this day this afternoon? Where's your vision where to go from or how you want it to happen what you want to happen just a sentence on that just to get a feeling from left to right no I've talked enough gone yeah thanks for mentioning the issue of capacity building it's extremely important and I think it's also a good application of all this what we are doing in terms of visualisation or modelling and so on if the people you want to give capacity building to if they can play themselves with the visualisation or with the model if you want to call it that way if they can play with it test different options it's often like a computer game what happens if and that helps a lot in system understanding and that then helps a lot in the discussions and we experience it in Nima and I'm sure you experienced it in many other places and talking about engineers and other disciplines what I found quite interesting that the person in our project Nima who was playing most with the model who really got excited and trying out different options and so on was not an engineer but a social scientist and she was excellent and she put the right questions at the right moment so it was really a nice experience these guys are still being visionary please so I think it would be really fun to work on tools one integrated survey tools so everybody that presented today I think has good ideas that could all be integrated into a set of tools survey tools, verification tools data analysis tools presentation tools all of it and I think it actually should be a web based application or form of application and I think we already agree that we move away from the model but make it so there's standard tools in a convenient location for people to access and make those tools extensible so someone identifies a new feature that they want they can just put a request in and we can add that feature cool can you both I have this question that's what I said wait I'm telling you wait I think it's not so much about the tools and I agree with what Dinesh was saying if it's the SFD tool actually that doesn't really matter what matters is to get in discussion with the local government but that's happening what I hear now this afternoon and I think that's more and more that it's we're really going now beyond toilets and I think that's the big thing talking about toilets the whole sanitation system service chain but also like this whole link with planning, with budget, with regulation so I think that's the great thing of what I heard already today I think that's really starting now and I think also within the sanitation sector we're starting to be a bit more collaborative it looks like oh I'm not sure you don't think so are you suggesting me what I thought before I think the sanitation sector is an extremely conservative sector am I still online you make your point Cecilia and I'm going to come back on this point thank you Ingeborg for reminding that we are online and I'd like to thank people who are watching us we had pics of 20 people 25 people watching the meeting today which is quite interesting a lot of people tweeting as well my question is to you Ingeborg you just mentioned about collaboration and I saw that you were working on Agra I don't know about the timing but we our project partners in India CSC also prepared an SFD for Agra and I just want to know if you had a look at it or and my question is if the results differ from the SFD that you produced or how did it differ and what could be the points of this difference I'm not sure if I dare to say if there were any difference yet because we came across some calculation difficulties so overall it's quite okay I think we had even a worse scenario than what came out of that SFD diagram due to the assumptions due to the data that we really have to check because some of the issues what you were saying this whole septic tank issue which is not septic tank but then we do calculate it as wastewater and so there are some issues around that so I don't really dare to say that right now but we hope to figure that out in the next two weeks I have one comment from Ram and then you and John I just wanted to say I've been involved a lot in this sort of global monitoring stuff and how this all fits in and I think the SHIP load diagrams are an excellent idea and I think the key to it is the uptake and I think that there's a need for different levels of complexity of tools because this is a bit of push and pull and I've found from working with the countries that you know you introduce the idea but if it's too complex people step back so there's going to need to be a lot of work on packaging it in the right way because at the end of the day it's not just about us it's about governments institutionalizing this and taking it on board and making it their own and adapting it as they see fit so I think there's a need for the range of tools, the range of concepts and I think that it will find its place very nicely in the overall monitoring of the water goal and well we just need to keep at it but I think it's a major step forward I just wanted to chip in on this variations and coordination the reason why I was pulling a face was actually that I was going to tell a little story earlier because some of you know my husband and he's a great one for reading a book and then telling you about it for the next nine months or nine years and he recently read a book about innovation in industry and of course one of the things that is true is that we actually ought to, we could look at this as a sort of evolutionary process that we had an interesting idea we started off with some basic principles which were sort of codified in the papers that were published and whatever and now lots of people are having a go and at a certain moment at some time in the future we will be able to see which of these things work and which are useful and which are important so I would actually see it as a really positive thing for different things going on with this idea because at the same and if you think about resource mapping of fluxes and Sankey diagrams, there are a thousand versions, a thousand ways of doing it and that's okay actually so in a way I see this as a very positive sort of spreading out of the idea okay, great. We have heard about data gaps that are being filled visualization capacity development visualization and engagement of stakeholders so another barrier is then actually access to financing in many cases cities, when we engage city stakeholders they don't necessarily have the finances available so you have to go to national governments so my question is related to what kind of experience do you have with SFD's engagement of stakeholders and then actually getting to mobilize the financing the finance that is necessary to improve the situation and the second question would be is there any guidance in terms of the stakeholder engagement on how do I select key stakeholders? So the answer to the second question is yes we have a manual on stakeholder engagement the answer to your first question which you can all go and look at and we can talk about it's a very important point on the financial side yes you're absolutely right and one of the things that we have tried to do but we're not always successful is this tool is never going to solve the financing gap so one of the things that has tended to happen is that we've used it in a lot of places but many of those places are places that we've gone to specifically because there is a funding opportunity arising and we want that funding to be used well so for example just to I'm going to gesticulate at Martin but I don't want to embarrass him so I want to make sure he knows that I'm gesticulating at him the World Bank are putting together a TAN's project in Ethiopia at the moment and so we've worked with five cities in Ethiopia which means there are five cities in that cluster of 20 or so I think who are kind of in the position to actually have quite a sophisticated conversation about no please don't just give us an activated sludge treatment plan actually these are our issues so I think it's a little bit sort of give and take but I would caution against expecting an SFD to sort of do more than it can do that would be my only thing but your point is extremely well taken I'm sure you would say the same in your I think it what helps a lot now in this whole public finance debate and I think in the next week there will be sessions on that with this whole taxes transfers on how to get public financing money but then this is no but this is a very good tool or way to use that in your advocacy so I think that's what's happening I think also when it comes to finances it's a very important first step that's a local institution for example local water company or whoever and fully understand the system and see the need of having to do something to improve the situation and for this step I think the SFD or something whatever can be very useful I mean and it's our experience and it was very eye opening for them to see also different feedback loops in the system and once they got set it's also easier for them to try to convince donor agencies to provide in the end it should come from the local institutions not from asking would like to do some project and whoever I think John John Sauer from PSI wanted to comment on my disruptive second Ingeberg's statement about non-coordination and in fact I agree with you Barbara what you're saying but I think and my reflection was more on when it comes to the implementation side of when we're trying to act out on doing something about what we find in the SFDs or what we just know is the reality as it is I think that and that's maybe the question I have is how do we sort of track now moving into the what are we going to do about all this this mess that we're finding or that we're finally visualizing that's true yes you would next I guess my point was to some extent she raised last week there was a meeting in Delhi and on sanitation financing and at the end of the whole day we started talking whole day we were talking of technology this that and then suddenly this last session on financing and my comment was that this is what as planners we do we do all the plans and then at the end we start oh where are we going to get the funds from and this is something that we and that's why earlier also I don't know but looking at technology without looking at financing and I don't mean World Bank is going to finance that is not looking at financing at all but World Bank can be quite irrelevant in many countries so the point is that we need to think about how we are going to finance this and then plan accordingly also and this is something that we are not doing we are focusing too much on technology at the expense of looking at what I would call a more holistic manner so we need to start looking at technology options also from the perspective of what is finance able to do that is something that we need to really build into so I understand that everybody is saying I am an engineer and I want to do this but I think there is something beyond looking at okay so I hope you know I am not that kind of engineer and I don't think these guys are either but I do want to just say one quick I mean first of all just to reiterate what Kim said since he is not up here but to point out that if you start at the downstream end and you work out what we are trying to do with the resources that helps which often doesn't that's just one piece of the puzzle the other thing that I would say though which I think is elephant in the room and is not a problem that we can solve is urban sanitation is expensive there is no magic way around that it's a whole load of wet hazardous shit and you have to move it around and you have to treat it so I also feel sometimes I don't think this is true in India but in some places I feel like people are looking for some sort of miraculous I don't know what it is but it's like we can do this with no money but we will know so the first step is do you want to do it and I mean obviously there are horses to courses but the interesting thing is the only real action that's been happening in urban sanitation in Africa for years and years is people building activated such treatment plants and sewer networks which have massive capital costs and massive operational costs but if you do this kind of work the whole point that is the way it's being talked up and looked at what is currently the situation and what are the what level of safe sanitation that you are achieving but what are the costs of different options for achieving that that is something to me that is the main thing that needs to come out of it and it's not I didn't hear anybody or most of the people not discuss that I can bring home to you we talked to KFW the German bank and said that we like it because it shows the situation and if you now invest money you can see how you invest money and how much does it cost so an overall idea because it shows you where are the needs and then you can see if I do sewers for everybody and treatment system how much will it cost and if I go a different path how much will it cost so it gives the back backbone for calculations as well of course I think Roland was very keen to I'm sorry the mic has got its own legs now we start with the lady first and then Roland and I would like to close this with maybe two more comments to comment that I think this would be really interesting if we could see like how if you use this in social media for the people from the city themselves to see that actually how they get this back into their home or into their drinking water I think nobody would like to see this and this might create more problem to the main stakeholder or not to the people on authorities and a lot of pressure that they could go forward to other more like more decisions which are toward the people you know because the people won't like to hear this that they are drinking their own shit you know I think this is really interesting thank you Astrid was first please and then Roland and I'll close after that I just wanted to say that we shouldn't be too hard to ourselves because I do think that the SFD does create ownership for the key stakeholders and that is important and secondly it is part of a participatory planning process so those are my final comments thank you yeah well I don't have to add too much actually I mean but just underlining again the financing issue of course Barbara sanitation is extremely expensive but not to do anything is probably more expensive and finally finally we have some studies who show this and I'm extremely grateful that this has been done unfortunately only in the last few years what I would like to encourage is also talking to the people who are financing you know I was so you know we have been talking so long and have been advocating sanitation because of health reasons we were talking to health people health ministers it didn't fly at the end it started flying when you talk to finance ministers which are the strong ministers which decide so my plea would be talk to the people who are financing ask them what they need and they come back to make it as simple as possible but as only as complicated as it's needed today I was listening and I think there is a danger that we there will be a gap between the scientific community I feel very close my heart but the ones who because this is very simple to make it as simple as possible but not too simple that the results are wrong I think that's the big challenge of the whole thing thank you thanks Roland thanks a lot Roland for those words of wisdom thank you very much dear speakers thank you I'm sure you have had lots of questions and comments but we'll soon end with a glass of wine and you can grab one of the speakers and we want to speak to alright to close this session I would like to invite Martin Campbell and Anna to wrap this up in a nice nut shell I think I'm wired up am I wired is that good thing I want to wrap it around that's fine I'm not going to dance around like Barbara I was asked by Arnie and the organisers to say a few words from the perspective of the World Bank as to the genesis of this world and what it's currently being how it's currently being used within the bank so it's important to say that this work started some four years ago Peter Hawkins and Isabel Blackett who most of you know or should know or will know did a scoping position paper on urban pollution and they were struggling with how do we get this large complexity that we've been talking about today how do we get the message across and there was a meeting some four years ago and it was chaired by the WSP then global manager Jaiso and Barbara was involved in that discussion and Andy Peel and Barbara were contracted to help make this case and simplify it and that is where the SFD was born from their work and from a lot of collaboration which we're seeing and hearing about today as well I think it's important to talk about the collaboration we undertook they did a couple of papers that Barbara made reference to in 2014 in 2012 we did a 12 cities study that Barbara and Andy also worked on for us and the SFDs were really fleshed out under that study and that morphed into a more recent study a deeper dive in five cities that WEDEC Rebecca's been working on it and OPM were contracted by WSP and from that we've just come up with our little toolkit so this is going to be launched now it's online frequency management service diagnostic and decision support tools I'll be talking a bit more about that tomorrow if you're interested then I don't have to carry them back we just brought them all away from Washington so it would be great if you can take a few but what are SFDs doing in the World Bank and in WSP today what the World Bank does you are just making reference to all this we finance things and a typical World Bank project can take anywhere between it can easily take two years to prepare and five to ten years to implement and it's not the bank that implements it it's the government and it's a complicated process there are a lot of there are social environmental fiduciary technical all sorts of things that need to be in line for you to be able to spend the money and your typical project is anywhere from 50 to 500 million dollars so that's what we do and we've done that traditionally we've been doing that for 60, 70 years and it's traditionally in the sanitation sector has focused on sewerage and wastewater treatment plants and still does in a lot of places these have done have brought this issue of where is the problem really to the attention of people within the bank and through that to our counterparts so we have our first project in the bank that has an SFD as an annex of our project appraisal document in Lusaka that's the first one we have but we use it I'm not making a presentation but we made a presentation to the minister of water in Tanzania in Dar in March and the second slide was that so the project before we had that meeting with the minister in March was about doing there's 10% of the population are covered by a sewer network like we find everywhere in the centralised richer part of town and the bank project is going to do two more basins which will take it up to a mighty 30% after this discussion and we had to influence this but we influenced within the bank and the bank team and with our counterparts in the government we then agreed with them in March that we would look at the other 70% because of this and the fecal sludge management and the service delivery chain and we've got other examples of this in Benning in Ethiopia that we do now we've only got an onsite sanitation project it's a smaller country in Haiti and in Lima we're looking at these things as well so that's the beauty of it you can influence a minister in a one hour meeting it's an advocacy tool I think we've been saying that as well but what it doesn't do it doesn't design interventions there's a lot of hard work that needs to be done in designing an intervention and for us from the things I've just told you it's easier to design a wastewater treatment plant and a sewer network because we sort of know how to do that and we know that FSM and the full service chain is actually much more complicated with so many different players and informality and the private public goods issue of why aren't we subsidizing septic tanks if we're subsidizing sewers and household connections it's complicated and there's a lot of design that needs to go into that to make it happen so I think it's been really powerful already within the bank we have a water week as well our water week was in April and we got our management very excited about onsite sanitation so it is important because you can make the case with the diagram but it has its limitations which we've been talking about and this trade-off that I made reference to earlier how much does it cost you to prepare it depends on what your objective is and who your audience is that you want to influence so it can be a quick and dirty thing but I like the evolution of it the different evolutions that we've heard of today as well depending on where you're going if you're doing this in Mexico or Brazil where I've worked a lot sorry there have been so many today but the carbon footprint one Astrid's one that we heard today and I've worked a lot with utilities as an example I really like the Kimman's resource one so the development is great but this reliable credible data issue and how you and the trade-off of how much time you spend to do it vis-a-vis what your objective is is very important I really like Barbara's diagrams and the nerdiness and I think you don't all have to use it but if you need that to tell that story again what she just showed there that's what you need to show your minister as well sometimes because he doesn't get it or she doesn't get it and you've got to show them that like you have to show them the SFD so two final points one I don't know whether we're getting into the strategic sanitation conundrum of all these different tools out there and is anyone actually using them people seem to be using them but there's a big trade-off discussion here there's a discussion here about different tools and different ways of experimenting and I don't know maybe the a thousand flowers blooms is a good thing for now but how much is what Barbara just put up there is it you know is it is it compatible with what we're saying here does that matter I don't know a final, yeah lots of money a lot of money is being spent on sanitation, urban sanitation anyway and it's being misspent often DACA has just come to us they want to do a billion dollars for what D. Wasser does in DACA yeah it's a pipe dream literally and metaphorically it's a pipe dream and it's not going to happen and they're not looking at the 8 million that are never going to get us aren't going to get us to for the next 50 years but we have to change that dialogue and finally I think what we need to change and we can use this and we intend to we need to change consultants minds as well and we need to work with consultants to show them this because and those consultants they could be consultants from the south or consultants from the north we need to show them that they need to get away from the standardised off the shelf sewerage and wastewater treatment plant and they've got to start thinking I mean good sensible engineering should be doing all these things that we're talking about here and some of us have been trying to do it for 30 years and this helps us influence there is a consulting firm working in DACA now who shall not be named who will not look at anything but sewers and shaking them to say we've got to look at this other issue as well so there's an advocacy role that we have to play with the consultants as well thanks thanks Martin maybe if I'm getting it right this document points to the SFD portal if it comes to SFDs as this is sort of one it does there's a World Bank I read it on the airplane so we are a smaller part in that picture and the context description tries to at least do the minimum context description to avoid larger mistakes by being excited about the diagram thanks Martin to putting it into the broader picture what I'll add is maybe we are again preaching to the converted but years ago we were talking about we need the systems approach and it was so naturally in all the presentations Roland you brought it to us with a compendium pictures from the compendium I think that helps really to change the global discourse towards a system approach and that's what makes me really excited yes we saw many excited people and we'll please help us to bring all this together on the SFD portal in a meaningful way and approaches get are well described and are found and contribute to the bigger cause to change the discourse around sanitation having said that Prit hasn't disclosed that he's heading the Susanna Working Group on Cities as a chair thank you chair for chairing this meeting thanks thanks to the viewers on live stream thanks to the world who joined here thank you for being with us thanks to SEI who made this again available this great venue and place and helped getting everything done, thank you SEI as always in Susanna meetings there's something outside that you don't have to run away immediately thanks to all the presenters thanks for the discussion and have a nice evening thanks


Alpha thalassemia is a genetic condition caused by a lack of alpha-globin genes on chromosome 16. This leads to a decrease in the production of alpha-globin chains, resulting in a low level of hemoglobin anemia. There are several different types of alpha-thalassemia, ranging from mild to severe forms. The most severe form is HBH disease, where there is a complete absence of alpha-globin chains. Other forms include alpha-thalassemia trait, where only one copy of the gene is missing, and silent alpha-thalassemia, where two copies of the gene are missing, but the individual does not show any symptoms. In addition, compound heterozygous carriers of alpha-thalassemia can also develop anemia if they are exposed to certain environmental factors such as malaria. This article was authored by Hicks Douglas R. and Harteveld Cornelis L.


Hobby every EFL teacher needs to try when teaching English abroad, capture the world with photography. Most of us now have phones that take decent photos. As well as the day-to-day snapshots that we take for memories and social media, you can think about printing off some photos and making flashcards or pictures for the classroom. Students would certainly appreciate pictures of things they recognize, such as crowded markets. Thanks so much for watching. We are ITTT, the leading provider for TEFL and TESOL training courses. If you liked this video, please subscribe by clicking that button down here and click on any of the videos here on the left for more interesting teaching tips for getting certified to teach English abroad and online.


On the ground, presented by theCUBE. Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're on the ground in downtown San Francisco at the Blockchain Conference San Francisco at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center, and we're really excited for our next guest, Joy Shen, Director of Emerging Technology in Partnerships and Investments for Thomson Reuters. Welcome. It's good to be here. Thanks, Jeff. So you led a panel with all the biggest names in the room. You had Intel up there, IBM, Microsoft, unfortunately wasn't able to make it, travel, weather, whatever. So, pretty interesting. Those are big names at a very little conference. I think IBM's actually one of the sponsors. What does that signal to you as you keep an eye on emerging technology? I think it just signals that the larger companies learned that they have to keep pace with the external emerging tech innovation and that they could play a key role in building out the technology infrastructure that is still fairly nascent today, especially in blockchain. So there is ground to be gained and opportunities to be had. And a lot of these companies like Intel and IBM and Microsoft have enough technical expertise as well as the resources to be able to accelerate the efforts. It looks like in kind of a typical Intel fashion too, that they're kind of jumping into the depths of the infrastructure. And I think John from IBM talked about, there's the application of the platform and then there's the fabric and really trying to get into open sourcing the fabric to really enable the technology to grow much faster. Yeah, I think if you look at kind of how the ecosystem is playing out, right? You have the startups kind of focused on the application side and the user side. And the large tech companies, Intel and IBM talk about the fabric. You start at the networking and then you go into security and you have the business logic is very much aligned with how the large enterprise tech companies talk to their large clients, right? They view the stack from better level where Intel is at to drive efficiency and scale and then all the way to building out that infrastructure to the application side where you have the rigorous and scalable business logic where I think a lot of these large tech companies are trying to play a bet that they are gonna be the leader in that eventually. So we cover a ton of tech conferences. It wasn't that long ago that Hadoop was an unknown entity. Nobody really knew what the funny elephant was and now there's a lot going on in Spark on the big data side. From your point of view looking across a lot of technologies, where is a blockchain now relative to some of these other ones? It was still really early days. Do you think it's really good and start to run? And what should we start looking for as indications of kind of mainstream adoption? It's very early. I think, but the difference this time is if you think about kind of cloud, right? Cloud or big data, you started with kind of the technology companies leading the chart. Articulate what is the technology value? What's the business value? Educating the financial services firms or the other industries, the business adopters. This time is different. The business adopters, the financial services firms, the governments, the insurance companies are now the advertising. They're all looking at it themselves. So, technology wise is still very nascent. I think once you see, in my mind, more of a, for example, like R3 or other concern where they actually articulate what is one use case that has been scaled, right? Across multiple stakeholders and be able to articulate use case and how it's going to make money or provide much better service that can be adopted either by their business clients or end users. I think that's where you're going to see that. I think the other signal is, for example, the Linux Foundation, the Hyperledger. I mean, you mentioned Hadoop, right? You see Hadoop, you see Spark. It's kind of following the same pattern. So once you see kind of that accelerated adoption curve where the developers are really getting onto, for example, Hyperledger, then you will see more contribution, more commits, and build more scalable applications on top of it. Right now, it's kind of everybody trying to kind of race to the top, right? But it's interesting, because you have the open source instrument, the Linux, which is the Hyperledger project, which John from IBM talked about really trying to get into the infrastructure. And then you've got the R3 consortium. So you have both consortium and open source projects, both kind of driving innovation, both kind of driving standards at the bottom layer to really enable more applications on top. I mean, I think that's healthy, right? And that's in contrast to some of the other technology we've seen, where it was purely driven, bottoms up from the technology company, going to their clients and say, here is kind of the technology solution we're offering. And here are the use cases that we think could be credible and value add to you. This is kind of both bottoms up and top down in some ways, right? Where you know, horizontally kind of think from the industry push, where R3 is a closed consortium with 40 plus banks, they set up their own private environment to really trying to collaborate to see what is the true potential of some of these use cases by actually doing it. And then they also invite technology companies that come in and really see the business applications very early on, or kind of the business discussions very early on that. And then you have the Linux Foundation really pushing much more rigorous standards around technology platform. So it's actually very healthy in balance. And I think this is something that we didn't see with mobile cloud and some other things where it's kind of the technology companies talking about mobile first, right? Cloud first, and then the banks and other organizations in the industry start to realize we have to get on it. Right. And even the finance companies really trying to disintermediate their own inefficiencies by starting to take a deeper dive at blockchain or whether they should implement it or not for some of these particular types of transactions or applications that might be a better solution. Yeah, and there are a lot of articles written now at the War Economic Forum, right? The one key topic is the next industrial revolution propelled by technology. So I think it's an indication of the banks and other industries are realizing that the business models will change whether or not you're like in the next five to 10 years and by observing some of the things, for example, you know, Uber is doing Air and BB that they are disrupting the other industries. It's coming because the technology advances there, right? You have a more mature API economy. You have a developer ecosystem. You have more robust DevOps kind of systems that allow applications to be built much faster. So you kind of see that demarcation on the blockchain side forming as well where you have startups focused on applications. You have companies focused on blockchain as a service and then you have the infrastructure players. So the stack is becoming more and more clear and you know, any company, I think compared to last year you see more early stage companies now realizing that they have to know where they're playing in that stack versus saying, you know, I'm building a blockchain solution. Right, right. And what's the role of Bitcoin? Was Bitcoin a necessary application to get this whole thing underway? Does Bitcoin begin to fade in the distance or does Bitcoin just become one of many applications that are leveraging the underlying blockchain technology? I think one of the panel's kind of comment. I think Bitcoin is an application on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. So it's a manifestation of what an application could be built on top of blockchain, right? Bitcoin is kind of a transfer of asset, transfer of value. You can extend that to other applications. So it is important in the sense that it helped really to allow people to see the potential power and the potential blockchain. And some of the learnings from the Bitcoin community and how Bitcoin as an application is facilitating transfer value could be extended to some of the other newer thinkings. So biggest surprise from the day that you saw today, either on your panel or one of the other presentations? I think there are a lot of attendees from Asia and you actually see a startup from China pitching. I think it's kind of continued interest now, not necessarily just in the US or in London where you see the financial centers and activities are, but the idea of how blockchain could be an interesting relevant technology for different industries, for governments to solve problems now extending beyond some of the first markets that are picking this up, right? Again, US and Europe now extending to Singapore, into China and other areas. Awesome, so last question, what other kind of cool emerging things are you keeping an eye on? Because you sit in a great seat, you got to keep an eye on all kinds of things. You know, not necessarily anything that's kind of truly new, but in a lot of the areas where it's advertising technology, mobile, as well as cloud, whether it's container technology or others, you kind of see that next wave of new innovation that's coming that will further optimize some of the existing solutions out there. So we're closely watching all those areas in addition to blockchain, which is of course much more nascent. All right, we'll keep an eye on you and we'll see what you're keeping an eye on. Thank you so much, Jeff, it's good to be here. Absolutely, thanks for stopping by. I'm Jeff Frick, we are Downtown San Francisco at the Blockchain Conference San Francisco at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. I am Paranjai Guha Thakurtha. On Thursday, the 8th of October, the Mumbai Police registered a criminal case against a group of persons for allegedly manipulating and acting in a fraudulent manner to change television rating points. And three television channels have been named. This is, this include Republic television headed by Arunapur Swami, Bok Sinema Thath Marathi. So to discuss the implications of what has happened in Mumbai and larger issues relating to whether television rating points or television audience measurements can be manipulated, can be rigged, can be tampered with, the corruption in the system. I am very happy to welcome a veteran from the media industry. I'm happy to welcome Chintamani Rao. He's seen television audience measurement in all its aspects over the decades. He was one of the founders of the BARC, that's the Broadcast Audience Research Council, one of its early chairpersons. He's represented the BARC before the Information and Broadcasting Ministry and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India served on the transparency panel of TAM as it was called television audience measurement has been in the profession in the media business for 40 years so worked with advertising agency, media companies and television broadcasters. Thank you so much Chintamani for giving us your time. What do you make of this whole episode? We have the Mumbai Police Commissioner Parambir Singh saying, we've arrested two former employees of Hansar Research Group, an agency engaged by the BARC and we found that they were bribing households to manipulate television ratings that they were paying people who were not English speaking to watch republic television in English that some of them were being paid between 500 rupees and 600 rupees and this is a scandal that involves the Indian Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code and you have fraud, manipulation etc etc Mr. Goswami and Republic Television has said that the Mumbai Police Chief is acting against them for it's a vendetta of sorts because of the television channels coverage of the Sushant Singh Rajput case as well as other cases and that these allegations are false and motivated. What do you make out of this entire episode Chintamani? I am not going to go into which channels and what Ornab said and I don't know who is culpable and who is not and who is guilty and who is not.  Oh my God they've discovered this, next thing they'll discover that there are people actually cheap people they will discover there are murders, they will discover all kinds of things they've said that the police just started discovering the media everybody in the media is so utterly shocked by the idea that people are manipulating ratings I am amused by that, I am highly amused but what we are doing all this time for the fastest sleep? That's number one Number two is why does this concern the police? This is the reason why I ask the Mumbai Police Chief again I am not on anybody's side ok let's be very clear about that the Mumbai Police Chief is shocked that people are being paid and it's under the Indian penal code excuse me when I was in the TAM transparency panel we took huge amount of trouble hauling up channels who were actually what you call panel tampering when you mess about with the panel when you mess about with the panel homes we caught channels that were engaging in panel tampering we hauled up several of them we stopped their ratings in some cases and let me tell you the channels that we hauled up included channels of some major broadcasting networks ok there are not some Mickey Mouse little standalone channels somewhere would you like to name some of them? no no no not at all the proceedings of the TAM transparency panel even if TAM is not in the business anymore the proceedings are confidential to remain confidential as I am concerned at that time one of the things that we were constrained by let me tell you this is why I am also amused and bemused one of the constraints that we had was we were on our own because there was apparently no law governing corporate corruption in fact according to the consultation paper the 2018 consultation paper of the telecom regulatory authority of India it pointed out that there was no special law to check tampering of ratings but do you know if there is no special law then you use the existing laws that includes the Indian penal code and the criminal procedure code but when we tried to get the legal law authorities into the app they weren't interested because there was no law governing corporate corruption it has become such a huge national media cause that someone is tampering with ratings why does it matter it matters to broadcasters it matters to advertisers whose money it is why are the police to head up about it? one minute it also matters to the viewers it also matters because you are also manipulating what people get to watch hello hello hello hello please explain to me why am I getting that a fact that the channel do people watch a channel because it has high ratings or does it have high ratings because people watch it which is the cause which is the effect this tells me you tell me what people seem to think is that high ratings that means people will watch it no no no ratings are a measure of viewership when people watch a channel the channel gets higher viewership higher ratings ratings is not like 3 star, 4 star, 5 star movie ratings fuck like that high ratings this movie has got 4 star ratings from the reviewers more people watch it Chintamani let me stop you and make a suggestion now these numbers you can correct me if my numbers are wrong there are an estimated some would say 200 million 20 crore households in India with television sets I understand that many of them or almost all of them have either linked to a local cable operator or they have a direct to home service or some of them have what is called hits head end in the sky but to actually ascertain the viewing habits of 200 million 20 crore households you are using a very small number of what you now call barometers what we earlier called people meters and some years ago it was a smaller number now I don't know what is the exact number some people say they are 30,000 some people say they are 40,000 some people say they are 44,000 this is a minuscule proportion of the total number of households who watch television and they are skewed heavily in favour or in particular geographical areas particular social and economic categories and that is why it is easily prone to manipulation you just a very small number of households and you skew the ratings that's the complaint your views this whole business of the sample size has been an issue for forever now the RAI has mandated certain increases in sample size there must be 50,000 by storm so 100,000 they have laid out in fact in I think March of this year they said they are looking at an increase by December this year how during the lockdown they expect an increase only the RAI has been explained but anyway that a part please understand that every research agency in the world would love to have a huge sample who is going to pay for it when the RAI says increase the sample to 50,000, 100,000 pay on what basis does it have a scientific basis to say so no there are no basis there are just numbers the RAI is putting out in the hat but let us accept those numbers for a moment 20,000 is a number 50,000 is a number who will pay for it will the RAI also mandate that the broadcaster should pay for it or is that somebody else's problem we make the rules with somebody else's problem to how they have to be implemented is that how it works so please understand that neither time at that time or part now is resistant to having a larger sample there is no issue with the huge sample one minute somebody has to pay one minute the broadcast or audience research council bark its members include the Indian Society of Advertisers the Indian Broadcaster's Federation and the triple A of I Advertising Agencies Association of India they have a monopoly earlier it was STAM Television Audience Measurement that was a private firm with AC Nielsen, Kantar and others now you have these are so it's not just a small sum it's how the sample is structured how many are there in the rural areas where people watch television using batteries of cars and how well is that sample I should say stratified especially in a country which is as diverse as ours so many languages I mean our society is arguably one of the least homogeneous societies in the world as a country so the point I go back to the point given the size of the sample let's assume that there are not enough people to pay for it but it is very very easily prone to rigging and manipulation because you need to tamper with just a few high households therefore okay so what's the solution one is in the right and the other is come down on rigging and manipulation increase the sample okay tell me who will pay for it if broadcasters are willing to pay for it and if subscribers that is broadcasters and media agencies are willing to pay for it and that's mainly broadcasters by the way typically 80 to 85% of the revenue of a rating agency comes from broadcasters okay if broadcasters are willing to pay for it there is absolutely no earthly reason why Bach or any other rating provider why would they is there any logical reason that we can think of why a market research which is what Bach is a market research agency why a market research agency would Bach had increasing the sample if the client is willing to pay for it I can't I have been around in this business for a while I can't think of any reason number two come down and panel tampering is easy to say of course it will come down on it who is tampering with it broadcasters right now hold on you hit the nail on the head you are here bribing people bribery is an offence or not it is if you are telling a person I am going to give you X amount of money I am giving you a television set and you are supposed to do this and you are supposed to do that you could argue that this is a criminal offence second point is that considering the fact that given the size of the sample it is easily prone to rigging and manipulation because you have to really tamper with just a few households and these allegations are not today but for several years now why oh I have been there as being on the time transparency panel I have dealt with that issue I have dealt with panel tampering I have seen how little it takes I have seen how little it takes I know that but certainly at that time we were entirely on our own tam were entirely on their own in fixing this should we have competition among rating agencies or should there be always a monopony earlier it was tam now it is marked for enjoy for enjoy okay please be patient with me while I explain this this keeps coming up but let me tell you in the day we had two rating agencies was tam and those in tam okay until tam acquired and tam and they became one so there were two agencies tam and those in tam tam was Indian national time ministry it was so ridiculous some agencies used tam some used in tam some clients wanted tam some clients wanted in tam we use the word currency the word currency leads to a skewed wrong thinking because currencies are exchangeable you can change the rules into rupees there is a rate of exchange right there is no rate of exchange between tam and in tam you can't you are arguing that this is a natural monopoly one second some used tam some used in tam I present to tam there is nothing wrong with that except that nowhere in the world nowhere in the world two rating systems exist for a very good reason subsequently we had a map came up a map in those tam some subscribe to tam some subscribe to tam app you use whichever one suited your purpose one eminent news channel which are shan's name at this moment when they found they were going down I have written about it down in tam number they switched to emap when they found they were going down in emap number they switched to something else altogether of their own invention how does it work if we are so concerned let me stop you here you are saying that this is like a natural monopoly am I correct you can call it monopoly there is for a market to operate sensibly it can operate sensibly only if there is a single rating system alright now let's move ahead if you have the impaneled homes their names being disclosed they are not supposed to be disclosed the number of people in that home they are supposed to have separate gadgets and each time each different member the father has one gadget the son has another gadget the grandfather has another one whatever it is do you or do you not agree that the way the whole system works it is highly prone to corrupt practices whether it be republic television being allegedly getting high ratings thanks to some Chennai household Rajat Sharma's India TV who worked with Rajat Sharma complaining that TV 9 Bharat Warcha is complaining about it whether it's Pranar Roy NDTV saying that the former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said how that whole A.C. Indian's and Kantar system had been compromised they went all the way after the US and the jurisdiction or let's go back to the government the government of India information broadcasting ministry saying you are under reporting the audience of the Urdarshan now are you trying to tell me that this system is not in one huge mess as a result of which the viewer of television channel is more often than not bombarded with a lot of trash please explain to me the connection between the rating system and the viewer being bombarded with trash the link is like this that you are you have an incentive to cater to certain segments of the audience who want a particular kind of thing your viewer is not a citizen first she is a consumer first that's point number one secondly you are not following the norms you are rigging there is corruption in the system you are disclosing names of all the impalant bits at the end of every week one second please one second when you say you are disclosing names who is disclosing names more than once these names have been leaked out who is that you who is disclosing names even the Mumbai police say that these Hansa research group persons they got to know they knew which were the households which were empaneled and wet and wet and bright then they are so is it utterly shocking utterly shocking that some field worker down the line was open to bright wow is that terrible what a terrible country we never knew this happens in India some field worker down the line is open to bright wow are you saying this is no problem there is a problem why we are aghast at the idea some down the line some low level field worker was susceptible to bright oh god this is terrible stuff this happens in India we didn't know that what then how would you define the problem of television ratings and the impact of television ratings you are the big boss sitting on it do you know should I take the real problem the real problem the real problem the real problem is the same as as with all self-regulation in this country at a seminar a few years ago David Levy of the Reuters Institute made a very telling comment which didn't go down very well with the audience he said the effectiveness of self-regulation is a function first of all of culture and his point was that if we in India keep complaining about self-regulation doesn't work but it works other parts of the world so perhaps we should be looking at ourselves why we can't make it work those self-regulation works in this country we are fundamentally incapable of self-regulation what's the way forward are you trying to say that the way the system works the way the television rating system works that at the end of each week you get a certain set of numbers and the studies that have been shown including the one by Ernest and Yang and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry that the total size of the television industry in India is supposed to be somewhere in the region of about 78,000 crores, 78,700 crores that's the last figure that came through and I suppose a fairly large proportion of this amount is really advertising money that's spent by advertisers so what's the way forward what are the flaws in the system and I accept we are not able to self-regulate ourselves what is the way forward if self-regulation is cannot be properly implemented then there bound to be for whatever reason statutory regulation including the kind of action that the Mumbai Police Chief has taken I can't tell you this is the solution okay but I just wish that when and I say this is somebody who's been there somebody who's tried to do something about it I do wish at that time when we went to the police in various parts of the country when we tried to invoke these things we got no support at all we were shoved away some rubbish about some TV and all that that's what happened to us time and again I just wish they were away for when these things happen but they have to be taken seriously we get away with all sorts of things in this country because we get away with them okay so are you tacitly supporting the Arunabh Goswami viewpoint which says that Mumbai Police I don't know how many tens of thousands of fake accounts were created to trash the Mumbai Police's investigation into the Sushant Singh Rajput case and this is I mean the moment I said at the outset I am not going to talk about any particular channel what they did, what they didn't do okay I don't know whether Arunabh Goswami is right or wrong how am I supposed to know I am not investigating the matter I will just see and read what I see and read in the media you are reading the same newspapers you are watching the same televisions you and I and those who are watching us talk up my last question to you is there a systemic problem if so can you spell it out what is the systemic problem how is it having an impact on what is produced for audiences and what needs to be done again if you really want to diagnose the ailment the real deep down as Joval Noah Harari said if you are not paying for the content you are the product what a historical reason let's not get into how and why it happened because we are not paying for content because we don't pay for content the media depend entirely on advertising the only revenue really is advertising even the subscription revenue in broadcasting they don't get even subscription revenue because the way the system is set up the way the system is the distribution system is entirely crooked broadcasters do not get subscription revenue at best it may subsidize the cost of placement what you call the carriage fee yes okay now here is because here is somebody who owns a pipe and which charges you for putting stuff into the pipe and charges the other guy for taking stuff out of the pipe his pipe is of no use without the content but he should be paying for the content as the two elsewhere in the world but here they charge for the content and then they charge the customer for accessing the content what comes to make no money except advertising if you were to remember a New Yorker article in which by Ken Owletta in which Vinit Jain was Vinit Jain said to Ken Owletta we are in the advertising business if 90% of the revenue comes from advertising guess what business you are in can afford him I give him credit for being up front with it instead of pretending to be serving some very large national purpose and asking for all kinds of concessions because we are so wonderfully so important as long as people don't pay for content okay you made that advertising as long as they are advertising they have to get the eyeballs and they will do what it takes I thought that would be the last question I would ask you but I would never the less want to ask you one other question this has been happening over the years and especially after the pandemic these processes have got accelerated monetizing content on the internet you know we can talk about that we can have a separate discussion on that some other time but the short point is the whole revenue model of the traditional media includes television has gone completely broke so where do you see the whole ratings system going from here and when I say ratings I don't just mean television ratings I mean ratings in terms of what people watch what people read what people hear and ways of measurement and we already know the giant digital monopolies the way they work so let these be your concluding remarks if I had a straight forward even if not short even if a long but straight forward answer to that question how do you fix this I have been making a lot of money off it okay I'm afraid it will take broadcasters starting with broadcasters broadcasters advertisers and perhaps some form of institutional support like a regulator to sit down at a table with the citizens of purpose and without the intention of pointing fingers and pointing forth only with the citizens of purpose of the issue it will take that to come out anywhere from this okay thank you so much for speaking to me and on behalf of the viewers of New Slate let me thank you once again in trying to understand the whole so-called TRP scandal which seems to have attracted the attention of large numbers of people after what the Mumbai police did on the Thursday the 8th of October keep watching New Slate