Okay, well, thanks a lot. It's a pleasure to present in this forum. I'm going to talk about COVID and labor markets in Latin America. And most of what I'm going to talk about today is based on a joint project with my co-author Gustavo Leyva from Banco de Mexico, and he's a project sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank. So, as we all know, the COVID pandemic and all the related confinement policies have acted as an unprecedented shock to labor markets in several countries. And I'm going to address two questions today. One is, how were labor markets in Latin America affected? This is going to be a very descriptive, data-oriented part of the presentation. I'm going to start with evidence from Mexico. Mexico, this is a country that we are most familiar with. And then we are going to stand it to other Latin American countries. And in particular, I'm going to focus on the role of the participation in the labor force and the informality margins. This is because these two margins have proved to be quite important in emerging economies in terms of understanding business cycle fluctuations for the labor market. And I have a previous work with Gustavo Leyva in which we exploit exactly these margins. I'm going to compare also what has happened in this recession in Latin America with past recessions to give you an idea of how different this recession is in terms of labor market outcomes. And in the interest of time, I'm not going to go very deeply inside the last bullet, but I'm going to mention some heterogeneity of these effects inside the labor force, for instance, by gender, by age, by sector. And the second part of the presentation is going to be about the model. We are going to use a structural model of the economy to try to decompose what are the main shocks affecting this economy. And as I said, a more detailed presentation of all these results are in the paper that you can see at the bottom. So let me start by talking about Mexico. In this picture and the one that I'm going to follow, the yellow bars, like this one, these yellow bars, represent the change of key indicators. Sorry, I think I went one too. So these yellow bars represent the change of some labor market indicators during the COVID pandemic, starting in 2020 Q2 and up to the end of 2020. And the red bars that you will see at the side represent an alternative recession. In the case of Mexico, we're talking about the 2008, 2009 great recession just to see how different this recession is. So the first thing that you see is a plunge in employment, not surprising. But what is surprising is the magnitude. The size of the fall in employment in Mexico was completely unprecedented compared to past recessions. Again, the recovery has been much faster as well. In terms of the two margins that I was talking about, unemployment versus labor force participation. In the past, it used to be a combination of people living the labor force of increasing inactivity and an increase in unemployment. In this case, it is mostly all about living the labor force. So these people that lose their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic, most of them ended up living the labor force rather than staying unemployed. Unemployment is a very non-cyclical, non-informative margin in countries like Mexico. Labor force participations tend to be more cyclical and have more explaining powers in terms of the fall in employment. Now, about informality, here you see a huge qualitative difference between this recession and the previous ones. And this is the behavior of the informality rate. It used to be the case in past recessions that informality rate acted counter cyclically. What I mean is that when we had a recession, the informality rate tended to increase. And this is not so much because there is a reallocation of formal workers to informal sector. Actually both formal and informal employment tend to decrease, but informal employment was sort of a cushion that was buffering the fall in total employment and as a result, informality rate increased. But here in this recession, the opposite happened. What we had is a big decline in informal employment that accounts for most of the decline in employment in Mexico. And as a result, formal employment also fell, but to comparable levels from the past. And as a result, we got a big drop in the informality rate, again, recovering quite fastly by the end of 2020. We also have, since we have access to micro data, we can construct gross labor flows. And here I'm just summarizing in terms of job creation and job destruction for Mexico. Here is everything aggregated, formal and informal. And the point that I wanted to make here is that in the past, the drops in employment were resolved both of a lack of job creation and some job destruction, especially at the end. But here it's clear that the recession started or the plunge in employment started basically as a massive job destruction that we haven't observed in the past. What is interesting though is that job creation seems to be now playing a role in terms of the recovery of employment by the end of 2020. In the paper, I'm going to mention this just briefly in the interest of time, but in the paper we have a very detailed discussion of what I'm going to show in this slide. We find that there is a big role for two non-conventional margins at the beginning of the pandemic. These two margins were negligible in past recessions. One is called temporary layoffs. Those are people that in the household service report to be not employed, not receiving wages. However, they expect to come back to their old jobs relatively quickly. So this margin increased a lot again at the beginning of the pandemic and faded away by the end of 2020. The mirror of that so this could indicate that the drop in employment that we observe is maybe not so bad in the sense that most of these layoffs were just temporary. But there is also another margin in the in the surveys that we look at, which is called absent employees. Option employees are people that report to be employed. They receive some compensation, but they are not currently working. They're at home. And this category also increased a lot at the beginning of the pandemic and faded away by the end of 2020. And that might indicate that actually the drop in employment is larger than what the employment rate indicates. Something that is interesting is that this margin of temporary layoff is more important in the informal sector, while in the formal sector we see more of these type of absent employees. So this is one thing that we document in the paper. Another thing that we document in the paper in detail, and I'm not going to be able to talk too much about that now, is about the different differential impact of the pandemic on different groups. So as one might expect, in terms of the drop in employment that was larger for women, for younger workers, and also in some contact intensive sectors as services. However, what I want to stress is that the fall in the informality rate that I reported at the beginning in the aggregate is not driven by a composition effect only. I mean, it is true that women, younger workers, and services are groups in which the informality is higher. However, the drop in the overall informality can be seen in all sectors. It can be seen in manufacturing, in agriculture. It can be seen among men and among older workers as well. Here we extend some of these results to older a set of five Latin American countries, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru. Very briefly, we confirm the same changes in labor markets that I just reported for Mexico for this wider, bigger set of Latin American countries, the large drop in employment, large declines in participation rate, declines also in informality rate with one exception. The only exception here is Peru, which is the country with the largest informality rate, and it's the only country in the sample in which the informality rate actually increased during the pandemic. So about the second half of the presentation, I'm going to talk about what are the shocks that have affected the these economies and can explain the behavior of these labor market indicators that I have just discussed. For this, of course, I need a structural model in order to filter those shocks. The model is based on a previous work with Gustavo, this is a paper that is already published in the Journal of International Economics. I'm just going to mention very briefly, I'm not going to show you any equations, there is no time for that, but it's a model of a small open economy subject to technology interest rate shocks. It does have some of the labor market margins that I have mentioned like endogenous labor force participation, formal and informal sectors, matching friction that give rise to unemployment. And this model is calibrated to Mexican data before the pandemics. And then for the pandemic itself, we extend them all with two new shocks, a labor supply shock, and a sector specific productivity shock to the informal sector that are meant to represent in a reduced form the impact of COVID on this economy, COVID and the confinement policies arising from it. So we use the model to recover the shocks that rationalize the behavior of output, employment, informality, also the foreign interest rate. And then what I'm going to show you here, and this is the last slide, I'm going to show you what are the contributions of the shocks to the pandemic recession, in particular to the slump in 2020 Q2, and compare it to the 2008-2009 Great Recession for Mexico. And as we can see in this pandemic recession, the two new shocks, that is the labor supply shocks and the shock to the informal sector, which are key to account for the drop in employment and informality rate, play a huge and massively important role in terms of all the variables including output. While in the Great Recession, the traditional shocks, that is technology and interest rate shocks, were driving most of the action in terms of both output and the labor market. So in that sense, and just to conclude, this pandemic recession is different from previous downturns, not only in terms of size, but in terms also of what is the behavior of the informal sector. It is, we have identified some shocks that might affect the economy, but still we need to do more work in terms of validating and rationalizing these shocks through things that we actually observe happen during the pandemics. And that will give us a safer ground to start talking about policy. It seems that policy that incentivizes recovery should focus on formal job creation, but how to target this particular margin is a very interesting question that we might talk more about. Let me stop sharing and thanks a lot for your time. Hi, I'll try to share my screen now. Great. Can you see the presentation? Yes, we can. Perfect. Thanks. Thank you so much for this opportunity to present our project, The Impacts of Ingressive Solidarium, to confront the COVID-19 crisis in Colombia. This work is joint work from a very impressive team from the IDD, DNP, and La Universidad de los Arios. The twin health and economic crises of the pandemic led to two public policy challenges. First, governments needed to rapidly expand the coverage of transfers to new households. And second, governments needed to make disbursements in a way that would not contribute to the spread of the coronavirus. So we study Ingressive Solidario, the flagship emergency transfer program in Colombia. Ingressive Solidario was designed to address both of these policy challenges. It expanded the coverage of the social safety net. It provides transfers to households that are vulnerable, but previously not poor, and they were not recipients of other social programs. The government also collaborated with financial institutions to bank beneficiaries, delivering transfers digitally to simplified savings accounts could reduce the risk of contagion. I find this context particularly interesting for two primary reasons. First, there's relatively little evidence on the impacts of cash transfers from programs that are designed and implemented as emergency programs. And this is relevant for designing new programs to confront future crises and designing more flexible social safety nets. Second, our study is composed of vulnerable, but previously middle class households. Middle income households are especially vulnerable to labor market shocks. Almost all of their income is earned through the labor market, but they don't have enough wealth to build sufficient resilience. In contrast, almost a quarter of low income households income comes from social programs, which is not vulnerable to labor market shocks. The Ingressive Solidario program covers over 3 million Colombian households. Households must meet several requirements for eligibility to highlight two of them. The Ingressive Solidario program includes households that are not covered by any other social program and are informal workers. Among households that meet the requirements, eligibility is determined by SISPEN score. The SISPEN score approximates per capita household income relative to the departmental poverty line. The program consists of monthly transfers starting in April 2020. Each transfer is 160,000 Colombian pesos, or about 125 US dollars at PPP. Using data from 2019, the monthly transfer represents about 17% of the median income for households in poverty. A key feature of this program is that the government collaborated with mobile phone operators and financial institutions to bank previously unbanked beneficiaries. We conducted a nationwide telephone survey in November and December 2020. We prioritized surveying households closest to the cut-off for program eligibility. Our sample contains a little over 3,500 households, about equally split between eligible and ineligible households. Our response rate to the survey was about 25% and it was equal in both eligible and ineligible households. This table shows descriptive statistics for our sample. I'll highlight just a few key rows. Relative to February 2020 income, 38% of households lost income in June 2020 and the average income drop was 11%. 30% of households were skipping meals and around half of households were eating less meat and vegetables. 26% of households lost a job and 35% of households experienced a business closure. We use a standard regression discontinuity design at the household level and we evaluate the impact of the program by comparing eligible and ineligible households around the cut-off of suspense score that determines eligibility. In our sample, eligible households have suspense scores just below to the left of the cut-off and ineligible households have suspense scores just to the right or just above the cut-off. This means that our sample is a subgroup of households that have higher pre-pandemic income than the average program beneficiary. However, our evaluation is informative in two important dimensions. First, the eligible households in our sample have higher pre-pandemic income than the average beneficiary so we could expect higher average impacts of the program. Second, the evaluation delivers a critical policy parameter. This is the impact of expanding or contracting eligibility for the program at the margin. We estimate an intention to treat effect. This means that we estimate the effect of being eligible for the program and not necessarily receiving the program transfers, although I'll show in the next slide that take-up and compliance is very high. Compliance is very high and we see a discontinuous jump in receiving the program transfers at the eligibility cut-off. 87% of eligible households in our sample receive ingressive solidario and similarly non-compliance is extremely low. This means that in practice being eligible for the program is nearly the same as receiving the transfers. The validity of our RD design requires that households cannot perfectly manipulate their suspense score meaning that they cannot definitively decide whether to fall on the left or the right side of the cut-off. We don't expect manipulation in this context because the data was collected on the data to determine suspense score was collected months before the pandemic began or the program was announced and also the determination of the cut-off scores were centralized and not publicly announced. But this figure shows that the distribution of the density of households around the cut-off of program eligibility is there's no jump at the cut-off. So the red bars represent our survey data and the blue bars represent administrative data or the universe. And we don't see any abrupt changes in the density around the threshold implying that there's no evidence of manipulation in the suspense scores. We look at outcomes in six main categories of household well-being. Income, labor markets, consumption and spending, education, domestic violence and mental health and financial inclusion. This figure shows that precisely at the eligibility cut-off there's a discontinuity in monthly income per capita in September and June 2020. Eligible households report greater income in both months. This effect is driven by an increase in the probability of reporting a positive non-zero income which emphasizes the severity of the income shock that many households faced. There are two competing channels through which transfers could have impacted labor market outcomes. First the transfer may have helped households adapt their businesses to the realities of operating during the pandemic. Conversely, the transfers may have allowed households to withdraw from the labor market and decrease the risk of exposure to COVID-19. We find no impacts on labor market outcomes such as formal or informal employment or hours worked. This suggests that the program did not create disincentives to engage in the formal labor market or informal labor market. Overall, we don't find significant effects on food consumption or expenditure or on a food security index but we also look at heterogeneity by labor market shock. Specifically, we calculate the percentage of workers in the household who lost their livelihood. The panel on the left shows the effect among households in the bottom two-thirds of this distribution and here we don't find any significant effects on food consumption per capita. The panel on the right shows this effect among households in the top one-third of this distribution. In this case, we find a discontinuous increase in food consumption per capita indicating that the program was able to attenuate the adverse effects of job losses. Generally, we don't find significant effects on aggregate monthly non-food expenditure but we also look at categories of non-food spending by looking at both the intense of and extensive margins. Some expenses like rent or basic utilities are fixed so the decision is more whether or not to make a payment than how much to pay. We find an increase in the probability of health and cleaning expenditures and on education expenditure. We also find an increase in per capita education expenditures. The higher expenditures on education could have increased the productivity of study time. Here we show that it actually also increased study time. In column two, you can see that the program increased the probability that children complete at least four hours or about half a day of school work by 11 percentage points. It also increased the amount of time studying by almost half an hour. We do not find significant effects on other educational outcomes. Next, we look at self-reported domestic violence and stress outcomes. But despite the abrupt changes in income and circumstance during the pandemic, we don't find any significant effects in this area. As I briefly mentioned before, the Ingressive Solidario program included a collaborative public-private effort to bank previously unbanked beneficiaries. The program encouraged households to receive transfers digitally through simplified savings accounts that could be opened through mobile phones. The panel on the left shows a 14 percentage point increase in the probability of opening an account in 2020 and this represents 57 percent relative to ineligible households. The panel on the right shows that eligible households were 7.7 percentage points more likely to make a digital financial transaction. This represents an increase around 100 percent relative to ineligible households. We also found an increase in using digital platforms to check account balances and to send and receive transfers to other households. But we find no effects of savings in digital accounts. To summarize our main results, we found that the program had positive effects on several measures of household well-being, such as income, food consumption among households that suffered severe labor market shocks, spending on health and education, and education, and financial inclusion. Although many of the impacts are modest, the impacts in health, education, and especially financial inclusion could have important implications in the longer term. Thank you. Thank you very much, Brigitte. Let's move on directly to the next one. So, Nicholas, and then we can take questions at the end. Thanks. All right. So, let me share. Do you all see the presentation? Yes. Yeah, good. All right. So, I'll start. Thank you very much for having me here. This is a joint paper with Thiago Cavalcanti and Damian D'Amato. Let me start with what I think is a fact, which is that populism has been rising globally in the last 20, 25 years, according at least to the most reasonable measures in economics and political science, the number of countries under left or right-wing populism is now probably the maximum, you know, because you're in the last 100 or 120 years. Now, the goal of this paper is not to define, and it's not even to discuss, what are the characteristics of populist governments, but there's one characteristic that seems to be, I mean, one feature of populist governments that seem to be quite, quite widespread, at least among modern populists, which is their anti-elit, anti-scientific rhetoric in the way that communicates with the population. And again, this is something that both right-wing and left-wing populists tend to share.   So, you know, right-wing left-wing populist, this idea of anti-elit rhetoric seems to be very widespread. So the question that we try to answer in this paper is very specific what we try to show or what we try to test if this anti-scientific rhetoric has any meaningful impact on socioeconomic variables that we typically care about. In this case, it's going to be related to public health. And more specifically, what I'm going to show you is what we found in very specific but I think very interesting context, which is the context of Brazil in the beginning, the first week of this pandemic. And the idea of the paper is basically to show that when the president of Brazil Bolsonaro publicly and emphatically challenged the scientific recommendations of, well, of the experts and even of his own ministry of health, as a consequence, that triggered a behavioral change among his followers that started to break isolation rules and started to go out and so on and so forth. So that's basically the idea of the paper. Now there's obviously an empirical challenge, which is that if we want to show that there's a causal impact of Bolsonaro's words and actions on people's behavior, then we need to identify the most salient, the most controversial salient speeches because it's not the case that he one day changed his speech. It's more like a continuum. So it's important to identify those events that are particularly a problem. And to do this, we do it in the most, I think, kind of systematic way that we come, which is basically by analyzing front pages of newspapers. So we took all the front pages of the main newspapers in Brazil that cover probably 90 something percent of the market share. For every day, we identify in the front pages the news that were referring to Bolsonaro speaking against isolation or undervaluing the threats of the disease and so on. Then we measured the proportion of these news out of the total size of the front page of each newspaper and then we created an index averaging them out. So for example, this is 18 percent and this is probably 20 percent. So with this, we can create a measure, which is this one that you observe over here, which is basically an index that goes from 0 to 100 percent. So in this case, the maximum coverage was 20 something percent and the minimum was 0 percent. And as you can see, there are two events that are particularly prominent, March 15 and March 25, which are actually these two events that you observe here in this event. It was in the middle of the first days of the pandemic. He joined a protest, touched people took selfies, even against the recommendation of his sound health minister. And this is March 25, in which he made a public announcement.  Now these two events just for a business, if instead of taking a look to regular media, you take a look to the popularity of these news in social media, the picture is very similar. This is using Twitter indexes, Twitter indexes and retweets. Again, the two most prominent events are very clear, same when we use likes and same when we use Google search. So it's very clear that there are two events that were particularly prominent in which Bolsonaro publicly and emphatically dismissed the or undervalued the threat of this disease. And the idea is to show that after these two events, there was a significant change in the behavior of Bolsonaro support. Okay. In terms of data, we use quite a lot of data sets. I'm going to describe the three most important ones, social distancing, we measure it, we take it off shell, it's built by a company, a company in Brazil that tracks cell phones. They basically created this index that is the social distancing index, which is the proportion of mobile phone devices that remain at home in a given day. Okay, so they do it at the municipality day level. And they trap more than 60 million mobile phones. Okay, so this is going to be our main outcome. We also analyze economic variables in particular consumer spending. So we got access to daily data, again, at the municipality day level of the biggest public private bank in Brazil, which happens to be the biggest private bank in Latin America. We got all the online and in-person transactions. So we're going to use that to show that the effects are not only in terms of mobility, but also in terms of spending. And then to measure support, we are going to use the Bolshero Bolsonaro at the municipality level in the lectures, the presidential lectures of 2018. Okay. The practical strategy is quite simple. We basically estimate the dynamic difference in the different model in which the treatment is going to be government support at the municipality level, which is the Bolshero for Bolsonaro. And then we are going to interact the treatment of the municipality, which each period of effect, which in this case are days. We are going to control for day fix effects, municipality fix effects on state times day fix effects, because we need some variability within state. And we are going to basically these try to test if there are pre-trans and post-treatment effects. And let me show you just a few results. This is the main result, the baseline result. The outcome here is social distancing that goes from zero to 100, and the mean is 30%. Again, the treatment is Bolshero. So this is one percentage, one percentage point increase in Bolsonaro has this effect in terms of a social distancing index. These are the two events. This is zero is March 14, and this is March 25. There are no parties and divide pre-treatment. So basically social distancing was not significantly different before the important events. And then there's a clear sudden drop on the first event and then another sudden drop in the second event. This is robust to many specifications and I'm not going to talk about that. That's on the paper, but this is quite a robust result. In terms of the magnitude, this is one. So increase one percentage point, the vote for Bolsonaro, and this has an effect of 0.1 percentage points in terms of social distancing. Considering that, for example, if you take a state in the south or one in the north, the difference could be up to, I don't know, 30%, 40% in terms of support for Bolsonaro. So that would mean that the effect, the difference in social distancing would be like 3 percentage points out of a mean of 30% is quite a sensible effect. What happens in terms of economic activity? If you believe me that there was an effect in social mobility, then we should see some kind of mirroring effect in terms of activity. And this is exactly what we find. So no pre-treatment effects. And then there's a sudden increase in the average amount of in-person expenditures. We exclude pharmacy because we want to be sure that we are not capturing essential trips. And this again, big effect after the main event, which persists after the second event. So people are moving more and people are spending more money in person. Now, we try to analyze a little bit of, I mean, what could be happening in terms of mechanism? I'm going to show you just two results. Then we do a couple of additional things, but I think these are the most important ones. It seems to be the case that media is particularly important in Brazil to kind of propagate these type of messages and in particular social media. So we actually analyze the effect, the potential effect, and this is just the evidence of the differential effect between municipalities where media penetration is very high and municipalities where media penetration is not very high. And we do this with traditional media. We also do it with social media. So for traditional media, we're going to divide municipalities between municipalities where there's at least one local TV broadcaster and municipalities where there's no TV broadcasters. And for social media, we did the following. We livestreamed tweets in the whole country every 20 minutes for a week approximately. And then we located every tweet in Brazil so we can have a measure of the intensity of Twitter, the Twitter usage in each municipality in Brazil. So we're going to divide the sample between above median and below median in the intensity of use of Twitter in Brazil. So this is what happens with Twitter. Municipalities with high usage of Twitter are those that are driving the fact completely. There's no effect among municipalities with no usage or low usage of social media. Okay. And something very similar happened when we used to be broadcasting. So municipalities with a TV broadcaster are driving the entire effect. And municipalities with no TV broadcasting are not really showing any effect. Okay. Then again, in the paper, we show quite a few robustness checks, but these are these are the main results. So just to conclude, it seems like an obvious conclusion. But nevertheless, I think it's important. This anti-scientific rhetoric is not free. It's costly. It can have important effects in terms of public health and it can trigger undesirable behaviors. And this is basically because leadership matters and not, I mean, it not only matters in terms of intensive regulations. Actually, leaders' words and actions can have a significant effect on people's behavior. Okay. So that's it. Thank you very much. Thank you, Nicolas. That was very interesting. Do we have any questions? There is one question in the Q&A. I think Carlos already answered this, but let's read it so everyone can hear. This is from Robert Duval to Carlos. Does the model allow for separate labor disutility shocks by sector as to capture that some informal workers prefer flexible schedules as to tend to housework? These workers would presumably to exit the labor force and informal sector. Oh, did I skip something? Exit the labor force and the informal sector as a result of COVID. I already answered in the chat, but just for everybody, the model only has a common labor supply shock. However, it does have informal specific labor demand shock via productivity. And one thing that I was mentioning is if we really want to discipline labor supply and labor demand shocks as in any supply and demand framework, we need to look at prices. We need to look at wages in this case. So that's something that we are adding now to the new version of the paper in order to discipline how much of that is really people choosing to leave the labor force or it's just that labor demand is not there in both sectors. But it's an extension that we are currently working on. Thank you, Carlos. If anyone else has a question, you can click on the audio or video or the Q&A if you want to type it. Otherwise, we are coming to the end. So apologies for there not being a proper chair for this session. But thank you very much to all the speakers. It's very interesting. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot, Lina. Thank you so much. You were an excellent moderator, so don't worry. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Nicolas and Bridget. It was great to hear your talk as well. Likewise. Thank you so much.


Hello and welcome to NewsClick. As early as 2018, the Chennai-based NGO Aropor Iyakam raised the Tamil Nadu's coal scan, which was to the tune of 6,000 crores and more. And recently, since the release of the Hindenburg papers, the issue has once again made news. The papers said that the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence revealed there was a huge over-evaluation of coal by the Adhani group to the extent of 50% to 100%. So in this context, the Aropor Iyakam has once again asked the DMK-led government to look into the matter and to ensure that its electoral promise is met and to investigate the previous regime's financial scans. To speak on the matter, we have with us Mr. Jayaram Venkatesh, the founder of Aropor Iyakam. Hello, sir. Thank you so much for joining us. Sir, can you begin by telling us why did the AI-ADMK-led Tamil Nadu government purchase the overpriced coal to the Adhani group since 2012? Tamil Nadu's electricity board, called Panjek coal, procured these coal. These are primarily imported coal from Indonesia. And as we know, the Tamil Nadu runs several thermal power plants in North Chennai, May 2nd and so on. So for these plants, at least 40-50% of the coal that is used are imported coal. And to import these coal, what happened was that there seems to have been a very clear collusion between the government and certain private contractors. What has happened is that, in fact, CAG has very clearly pinpointed about the way in which the tender conditions have been framed to make sure just a handful of three or four people can participate in it. And using that, they have done a lot of manipulation over time. So what has happened is that for even for a tender where the tender value is just 100 crores or 150 crores, they have asked for turnover condition of almost 1000 crores. So this ensured that a lot of medium level players are ruled out of the competition and only a selected bunch of people like Adhani, Chettinad Logistics, Knowledge Systems. There are these three or four companies, MSTC. These are three or four companies which are able to participate. Now that created the platform for the collusion very easily. Since they had to manage only with a very handful of people who can alone participate. So what has happened is that the coal that was imported, now the Tanget Co very clearly knows that the Indonesia government every month releases a market price of how much, what is the price of coal. So if they had just compared, they very well know that what is the market price and what is the quotation that these people are giving. Between 2012 to 2016 alone, 2.44 crores of metal in tons of coal was imported. And out of this 50, almost 49 percent, close 50 percent was given to Adhani alone. And what we found is that in all these tenders, it was, if you look at the average, it was somewhere around 20 dollars more than the market rate per metric ton. So we had compared tender wise. There were some tenders which were 10 to 15 dollars, but many of the tenders were 15 to 20 dollars more than the market rate. And there was another comparison with that we had made as well, which is with Tamil Nadu New Spring Paper Limiter, which also purchases coal, imported coal, which also purchases the same quality of coal that Tanget Co is purchasing, which is 6000 kilo calorie, there is a moisture level that is defined, there is a sulfur level, there are different these things. And it is almost the same. In fact, if you have to say TNPL is slightly higher quality maybe, that's what we can say. So therefore TNPL, in spite of the very similar quality, had purchased coal almost 20 dollars less than Tanget Co at the same point of time. We had compared in 2014, we had compared in 2015. In fact, if you look at the days, they were just a two-day or three-day gap between the purchase of these people. So it was very clear that the O-invoicing has happened. And as you rightly pointed out, the DRI has clearly found as well that there is a 50 to 100 percent O-invoicing. They have mentioned Tanget Co. They have mentioned Adani groups and some of these other groups that has participated as well. So this has created a huge loss in this place, a huge burden on the exchequer. To the tune of it, you can calculate if it is 20 dollar per metric ton for 2.44 crore metric ton, how much this would be. So we had calculated that and there is a second type of loss that has happened, which is on the quality of coal. So on the quality of coal, CAG has found out, they had checked one-third of the consignments. In one-third of the consignments, customs had also checked for the quality of the coal. In their quality certificate, they had mentioned it as 4000 to anywhere between 4000 to less than 6000 kilocalories for different consignments. Whereas for the same consignment, Tanget Co happened as 6000 kilocalories. So therefore, they calculate the difference in quality for the same consignment, which means Tanget Co's quality certificate seems to have been fudged, seems to have been faked in terms of the quality. And therefore, they calculated a loss of 800 crores on one-third of the consignment alone, which was checked randomly. So therefore, if you look at the entire set of consignment, it is estimated close to 2400 crores. So if you put together the pricing loss as well as the quality loss, put together it comes to 666 crores. And therefore, this entire amount of loss that has happened, we have documented very clearly, we have attached all the evidence, we have got all the documents through the Right to Information Act, the purchase orders of the TNPL, the purchase orders of the Tanget Co. And the public information, Indonesian market price has been public information, so we have got that. So we have then submitted all of this to the CBI, to the direct rate of vigilance and anti-corruption in 2018. But until now, there has been no action that has been taken in terms of investigating the Adani or others or the Tanget Co officials who have been involved in this. Why did the previous government make such a big scam? Did they have some gains out of it? In fact, we have, when we inquired with various, some of these scams, they come out, primarily because there are honest officials within the government, they know what is happening within the government. So what we heard is that there was a very clear cut pollution between public servants and the corporates that were supplying the code. And there were a lot of gains that were made by some of these public servants through these number one. Number two, we must understand that all these payments were made not just within the country, many of them have been made outside the country. For example, the Adani group which participated was Adani Global PT Limited, which was in Singapore. So the payment was made to Singapore. And now we are seeing in the Himmberg and other reports that these over-evaluated diamond trading, a lot of these scams have happened. And it raises a very important question that when there are so much of shell companies that have been floated outside the country, whether these gains that were made illegally from our electricity boards have been part outside through these various shell companies and then whether it has been brought back into the Adani public enterprises and other. So number one, all these people have made plenty of gains, plenty of gains that are illegal in nature. Not only that, you must understand that the Tamil Nadu electricity board is suffering from a heavy loss of 1.5 lakh crores. And recently the Tamil Nadu electricity board had increased the tariff, placed these losses on the public. So therefore, it is the public that are directly suffering because of these scams. And the action, in fact, no action has been taken so far primarily because there are these heavy-bite public servants, the senior level public servants such as even IAS officers who seem to have been involved in this scam. So therefore, the government is not willing to agree. We have also included the name of the then minister, Natham Vishwanathan. We have provided some of the details. We heard that there is a large cricket stadium that has been built in Natham, which is through his very close friend. And we had placed these evidences as well to the DVSE and said, you must probe the link of where money came for an engineering college to build a cricket stadium of almost 100 crores. So therefore, all these have been provided for them to inquire. But so far, very little has happened with respect to the inquiry. Even CDI has not even initiated anything so far. The directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption has also, the previous government, when they were there, they tried to hush up and close it immediately. And the current government, even after several requests, they did not pursue the complaint so far. So only recently, after all this has come out, we are hearing they may take it up, but we still don't have any confirmation. You already mentioned about the loss that the electricity board is going through, and as well as the increase in tariffs. Is there anything else you would like to mention as an impact of this scam? A scam as large as this? See, what we have to understand is that in Tamil Nadu alone, we are talking about a 6000 crore loss. And this has not happened just in Tamil Nadu. It has happened throughout the country in various electricity boards. The same order sovereignty has been followed in various places. So therefore, the total quantum of loss, for example, whatever DRRI with respect to pricing alone, they estimate it as somewhere around 28000 crores or so is what we heard. So therefore, and if you look at the quality, the quality, in terms of quality, whatever loss has happened, I think this is going to be somewhere around 50,000 crores throughout the country, if you include pricing and quality. So this means a lot of electricity boards in the country, which are public sector enterprises are made to suffer through these scams. And it may take many, many years for these public sector companies to even get back. Now there is talk of privatized electricity because they are not able to do a good job. Just imagine that these electricity boards, the money from these electricity boards are taken to many of these private corporates illegally for just doing corruption and so on. And tomorrow if these private people enter the electricity and if they are going to supply, what will happen? The tariffs will keep on increasing is what can happen. There was a wonderful opportunity for the electricity boards over the last few years. We must understand that, for example, in Tamil Nadu, in 2013-14, our demand of electricity was 14,000 crores. Even today, the demand hasn't increased much. So over the last 19 years, if you look at the demand of electricity, the demand has not increased. If you look at the supply of electricity, supply of electricity that is available, you will be able to see that the price of coal decreased between 2020-2016 significantly. And the rate was on the lower side for many years. Only in the recent last two years, it has increased tremendously. If you look at the rate at which private thermal power plants are produced and gave electricity, in the market, it was 2.5 rupees. So the cost of power became cheaper. The solar power has become cheaper. So there is a lot of supply at a cheaper rate over the last few years. On the demand side, your demand hasn't increased much. So this is a wonderful opportunity for most of the electricity boards to get their electricity boards from negative or loss to break even stage. But unfortunately, the reverse has happened, which is they have gone into lakhs of crores of losses like Tanjipur. So which means the only reason this has happened is because of many of these corruption that has been happening in these electricity boards. So therefore, they have to now focus on getting back these money from these big corporates that has looted the public's money. And only that way, we can make sure that the lost money can be used for at least meeting out some of the losses of these electricity boards. Otherwise, the tariff will keep on increasing and the public has to face the heat continuously. Coming back to Tamil Nadu, why exactly is the DMK government hesitant to inquire into the alleged scam because it happened between 2012 and 2016 when the ADMK was a ruling party. So and you have been appealing repeatedly. Why is that, what is the response you're getting from the DMK government? There is a stark silence that we are seeing from the DMK government. They are not, in fact, the electricity minister of Sindhil Balaji has not even spoken a word about Adhan or other people with respect to these coal import scams and other things. Our chief minister hasn't spoken about it with respect to the Tamil Nadu's coal import scam. In fact, in 2018, he gave a statement that CBI must investigate it. But after he came to power, he has the power to order an investigation into the coal scam, but he hasn't done that as well. So what we are seeing is that this seems to be twofold. Number one, they also want to safeguard many of the senior officials who are part of the current system as well, who were part of the scam at that point of time, who are part of the system where they want to save them. So therefore, there is a senior level bureaucratic lobby that is preventing the investigation as well. Number two, Tamil Nadu governments, even until today, some of these people are still participating in the tenders of Tamil Nadu electricity board like Adhani and other people. They have signed an MOU with them on other projects and so on. So they don't want to actually take action on Adhani or other people in terms of FIR and charge sheet them and so on. This seems to be the case. So therefore, their entire opposition with respect to this whole thing seems to be only on the political side, wherein they are demanding JPC at the central level. They are saying that the joint parliamentary committee is needed to probe the Hindenburg research and other things. But on the other side, when they directly have power in their hand to register FIR, the investigated charge, she prosecuted all the offenders who have looted the public money into the tune of thousands of gross, they are refusing to do. So this double standard is what we have been questioning the DMK government of. We want them to at least see the investigation in criminal law investigation can start only after registration of it. And therefore, they have not been even willing to start it. And another thing is Mr. Sindal Balaji in August 2021 came up with a finding saying that 2.38 lakh tons of coal is missing from these power plants, from our power plants and that they are going to order an inquiry into this whole thing. Now they have gone completely silent on that inquiry report as well because what we are hearing is that this lost coal with this missing coal is primarily because of the imported coal that had come and this loss seems to have happened between the time of transit from the ship to the power plant. So for which the same private contractors will be held liable. And therefore, after understanding this, Mr. Sindal Balaji seems to have gone silent. The reason he said they have sent to Vigilance and Vigilance will do it and so on. Now what happened to your own department inquiry? You inquired it, you have to tell the people. In fact, he questioned the previous Minister Pankamani saying that if he had actually done an inquiry as he says, why was the coal lost? What is the reason for the missing coal? What action has been taken on people who did that and all that? Now the same questions Mr. Sindal Balaji has to answer because what happened to his inquiry report, what happened to, what are the who are the officials he has suspended or dismissed in the last one and a half years to department action and can he, why is the Vigilance and anti-corruption, if they have actually sent it to Vigilance and anti-corruption for doing investigation? Why has the Vigilance and anti-corruption not even registered an FIR on the missing coal aspect? Because there are two issues. One is the transit coal is being lost for which also the private contractors will be liable. Number two, when lower quality coal comes in, you have to add more of it in order to generate the same amount of electricity. So you have to generate one megawatt, you have to use more quantity of 4500 kilocalories instead of the 6000 kilocalories. So they had on record said that all these are 6000 kilocalories. So therefore, if they add more than what is required for 6000 kilocalories, then questions will come tomorrow why the efficiency of the plant is so low when you are putting in 6000 kilocalories. Therefore, to avoid it, they had put more of the 4500 kilocalories into the plant, but they have accounted only for whatever quantity is required for 6000 kilocalories. So this difference will be here. Yes, also the reason for the missing coal and the second reason is there is a lot of moisture that is added during the transit and therefore, that is another reason. They spray these coal with a lot of water before it enters the plant and using that they have added the weight. And once it enters the next day, the weight will be lost. So this is another methodology that seems to have been used. So these are things that we hear from people inside the Tangeco who have said that how this missing, what is the reason for this missing coal. Now, Mr. Sindhil Balaji has to say whatever now I am saying may be true, may not be true because we do not have evidences to say that this is what has happened in terms of the missing coal. But these are the things that we hear from inside. So Mr. Sindhil Balaji should tell the public whether Jaira Magadishan is lying on this, what is the truth behind the missing coal then. So he has to come out and say open, he has to say who are the officials he has prosecuted, who are the contractors he has blacklisted on this. No blacklisting has happened, no suspension has happened, no FIR has happened. This shows the political will of the DMK to take action on corruption. I really hope that in the coming days that they will really look into the coal scam because the share quantity of the value that we are talking about is really big and it's a huge loss. So we really hope in the coming days investigation will happen in this matter. So thank you sir, thanks a lot for joining us and giving us such in-depth details and what exactly has likely been happening like you said that we cannot say exactly what happened but likely been happening in this. So with respect to the 6000 crore scam it is very clear with the evidences, with respect to the missing coal they have to come out. In fact part of the missing coal is because of the imported coal quality losses what we hear. And therefore they have to come out with very clear inquiry report saying that how exactly it happened. Thank you sir, thanks a lot for joining us. Thank you.


Hi, good morning. I'm Kay Chatman. I'm the executive director of the humanitarian open street map team And I'm excited to do the first I believe the first LCA humanitarian open-source mini-comp This was actually an idea five or six years ago. Someone asked me if I wanted to come to Australia and participate in a open humanitarian open-source mini-comp, but I Wasn't involved in the LCA community at the time and Australia then seemed really far away So this is my third time at LCA and I'm excited to bring together a Great group of speakers today to talk about their individual projects that use open-source software specifically for humanitarian related purposes I Wanted to do a quick little hand survey of the room to get so that we'd all get an idea of where people's backgrounds are from And the first is just a simple question of how many people Participate in a h-foss project or have supported software that's used for humanitarian purposes So you have a couple Who's Implemented software and what would be considered low or middle income countries some people call them develop developing countries The global south which is a bit weird since we're in New Zealand That sort of world of there's not a good politically correct term for it Okay And who's supported software being used actively to respond to a crisis? So a lot of experience sort of in that room. Okay good to know where people are coming from I guess the other side is who's here because they're introduced interested in the world of H-foss and Don't know too much about it Okay, great. I'm gonna start off and give a presentation about a specific project that the humanitarian open-street map team works on and following me The awkward the orders a little awkward But Chris Daley is gonna actually give an introduction to humanitarian response so outside of open-source software because there's a bureaucratic structure and Method and cycle the way that works and I think it's good to have an idea about it because when I became involved in H-foss, I actually didn't know anything about it myself So first I'm first I'm gonna talk about the missing maps project and to not get too far ahead of myself So as I said, I'm the executive director of the humanitarian open-street map team We use open-source and open data to help communities in vulnerable areas better respond and prepare for crisis and I actually gave a keynote last year at LCA about our Overall mission and project. This is a very specific project that we just launched in November of this year to go back to 1864 to talk about why Maps today are important. So this is John Snow. He was a physician in London He was the first person to use maps to do In the field of medical geography and up in the ugeology and so what he did is there was a color outbreak And at the time people believed that cholera came from bad air Not from the water and he had a suspicion that it was actually coming from a specific water pump on Broad Street in London This is his map and simply what he did is he mapped the pumps and the cholera cases And you could see that they're clustered as one specific pump He actually did this mapping after the fact But prior to this he was convincing enough to the local council to convince them to move remove the pump handle Off of the pump and the cholera outbreak subsided rather quickly But to really show that it was in fact that he created this map picture the road information that he stick in the cases and the pumps on top of If you don't have that basic information You can't make them up at all You can have those dots, but they would mean nothing So believe it or not This is still very much a problem There's plenty of countries and localities where there's blank spots. That's for a variety of reasons from Sometimes The data does exist, but it's not really accessible. Maybe only the government has it Maybe only one department in the government has it and they don't share it with the other departments Or maybe it's just not up to date. Maybe there's commercial data available, but it's cost prohibitive Or maybe there isn't because It's not a economic view. Does it economically viable place to map for commercial reasons? So in comes the missing maps project So our goal is in the next two years to help map 20 million of those vulnerable people in the world And the reason for this is by having that basic map information Very much as John Snow did we can map things like cholera cases Ebola also disasters Such as tycoon high on the Philippines There was quick and hey Have the basic geographic information allows you to just simply make better decisions You can imagine you're trying to route from point A to point B You could use a map and a routing algorithm to find the most effective way or you could just drive down the road with a truck and hope You can make it. So what's been really exciting For us the humanitarian open-street map team is this is the first time we've really formally partnered with large humanitarian Organizations, and this is really what the difference is we've been Creating maps that have been used in response since 2009 our community originally would just come together and take Open data satellite information and you can imagine with satellite pictures trace over it to pull out roads and buildings and things like that but Maybe people would use it and often they did because it would be the best source of base information But we weren't formally pre-mapping areas really and so by working with the American and British Red Cross And also doctors without borders UK. We're working together in places to pre-map I said before it's really about putting them worlds vulnerable people in a map, but this is this isn't People in the sense of watching us walk around. This is that base map data that I've been talking about really important is our core ethics and You'll hear about the core ethics of humanitarian response as well in the next talk So for us what's really important is open Open as an open source open collaboration and open data being respectful and being respectful really means being respectful of local communities and Also local access so often what the issue is is data has been created But local people have no access to it and that can really mean things like Needing to provide technology and training so people can access it and sometimes it's honestly printing. We do a lot of printing for example in 2012 Hot worked with partners to map Jakarta for flood preparedness. There's 267 urban villages in Jakarta We printed a poster map for every single one of those villages Later that year when there was flooding we went back people were using those printed maps because there's not typically computers in the local government Office is there so it's really thinking about how we can work with the local communities to Help them create the maps, but also then use them not just taking data So we're doing this as a three-step process One of the big parts of it is we're gathering remote volunteers to trace satellite information And this is done both people from the comfort of their own homes as well as in Events there's monthly events in Washington, T.C. In London at the moment. We're hoping to have at others There's one in Portland, Oregon on Saturday and What this does is essentially it's vectorizing the satellite information so that there's actual Data sets of roads and buildings and what that means is you can then attach other information to it so Then when we go and actually you step to mapping this community volunteers We can print maps and have people write Road names Details about buildings and that sort of information and then put that back into open street map so that there's detailed Information a detailed database of an area and then third is simply Use so international non-government organizations governments local groups Local communities are able to actually plan in case of disaster and also respond This is just simply a picture of one of our mapping parties I like to point out one thing that I've also noticed a bit in this room as well is Open street map is not very gender diverse, but the missing maps project. We Are getting there's a ton of minorities and women and groups that we don't normally see in our project and And it's been really exciting and I think some of it is just we've been a little more newbie Friendly and some of that is just having really great people from The American Red Cross the British Red Cross and MSF involved who are coming at it from a fresh Fresh set of eyes so MSF UK provides a halftime Communication specialist so he's come to open street map from only a communications background And so it's really allowed us to approach things in a different way so after those groups Digitized that information It's then printed on the paper maps and data is collected in those communities so these are individuals from the use University of Lubumbashi and the Democratic Republic of Congo and They're using a software called field papers And so field papers is a website where you can print an atlas of maps They have a QR marker on them and then other Markers and what that allows you to do is you just take the map treat it like a regular map and write on it but you can take a picture of it and upload it and then it's already referenced geographically to the other information so Imagine you have your field paper here and your open street map data. You can view them together to transcribe your notes and then here is a Team from the Red Cross using open street map data in high-end After type in high-end in the Philippines so they're using it both as printed maps and on tablets and They're using it to plan the response. They also did a preliminary test of using open street map data as part of their damage assessment which Essentially we ask volunteers to rate damage based on the satellite information it proved not to work all that well But we're looking at ways that we can improve that Because one of the big things with a lot of the open-street map tools It wasn't built with this in mind at all It was built to create a free map of the entire world So there's aspects that are used in traditional Geographic information systems that are missing a really simple one for example is if you're looking at a satellite picture And you turn it it looks different So if you're trying to imagine your perspective of mapping of the buildings damaged or not Just turning 90 degrees makes it a little easier, but none of the open-street map software does that So it's a simple example of things we'd like to improve to be able to Better do this to sort of work. This is I wanted to get into the software of what we use primarily web applications so at the core of the missing maps project and Actually all of hot disaster response right at related work is what we call the open-street map tasking manager and What this does is you highlight an area it divides it into squares, and then you can ask people to take a square So essentially a check-in check out to say hey, I'm working on this square and The reason for this is originally when people originally started doing mapping five years ago The way you helped is you had to just go find a blank spot this way we can track coverage Volunteers can ask the questions we can give them new day sources of satellite data those sorts of things and This is a web editor. This is just on the front of open-street map.org So if you went to open-street map had had an account signed in you'd get this editor, which is known as ID and So a lot of people use ID Because you don't need to download any software or do anything else you can do this from the property your own home So that essentially you start in the tasking manager you select an area And then it'll open it here and you can begin mapping and then once again after it's digitized out in the field. This is a Staff from Doctors Without Borders UK working once again from students from the University of Lobo Mbashi to collect information there so Hopefully some of you are interested in getting involved. So I wanted to highlight some of those ways as well The simplest way is to map Um Donations are always great as well, and you can also sign up sign up to our mailing lists follow hot website Twitter and There's different ways to join in we'll be launching as well a field roster for Missings maps field field deployment in the next week And what that is it's you can sign up to go with these organizations to help do the field mapping Definitely, we'll need people with experience When we first start doing this, but we're looking at ways we can train people and get people involved as well We have done training before in the past Internships and volunteerships We're an experienced person an experienced person work together to get those skills a lot of the people who volunteer and also contract for hot come from either a humanitarian GIS background or a tech background and then have gained Field experience through hot myself for example, I was a web developer and got involved in 2010 and Started going with an experienced humanitarian worker to work on these sorts of projects Hosting mapping parties is great. So as I mentioned we have in-person events. We have a lot of great Documentation now This is a little tabletop tent that you can put at tables At your map with on so people can follow us through the instructions and then behind it is instructions So we love people that want to organize these sorts of events You don't need a lot of experience and we can support you and get you started in that as well For example the map with on in Portland that happened on Saturday We're supporting an intern through the GNOME outreach program for women and so she was not involved in open-street map at all until about a month month and a half ago and Organized a map with on and some of the other open-street map community community in the area that normally map their homes and The areas in Portland joined in to help her as I said, there's still a lot of blank spots on the map One of the things we're working on our where are the unmapped people? How do you know that? so that we know what areas to focus on and We're hope we're hoping you know, there's eventually a day where there aren't those unmapped people So if any of this sounds interesting come talk to me at any time We'd love to have more Volunteers and if we all work together Everyone hopefully in this room is used to the open-source ethos of collaboration and it's no different in mapping We can really make a difference So thank you very much


99% of narcissists can't answer this question. There is one question that most narcissists cannot answer. It is a question that they despise. And you should be very cautious when you ask them this because it will cause a narcissistic injury which will be followed by narcissistic rage. The question is, what do you bring to the table? When you ask the narcissist this question, it will make them very upset. They will mock you. They will insult you. They will ask, what do you bring to the table?  Even though it may be why they targeted you in the first place. Narcissists really have nothing to bring to the table which is why they focus so much on their physical appearance. Because they know that's the only thing that's going to attract you. Because other than that, they know they're just empty vessels. But the target often brings a lot to the table. They're the ones who are spending all of their time, money and resources. They're the ones who have the most to lose in the relationship. The person who cares the least in the relationship has the most power. And when you've invested nothing into it, you don't have to worry because you have nothing to lose. If they're worried about anything, it's that they might lose the conveniences that you are providing to them. Not that they're going to lose anything that they've invested in you. Because they have nothing to bring to the table which is why they expect you to put in all of the work.  They expect you to entertain them because they already know that you're the prize. They already know you have a lot to give. They have to act like they're the prize but their mentality is that what they're bringing to the table is themselves. They expect you to see it as a privilege to be around them even if they don't have anything that will benefit your life in any way. In their minds they are the table and you're supposed to provide things for them. If anything, all these narcissists have to bring to you are problems and headaches. They will confuse you. They will make you question yourself.  All they do is take which is why they focus so heavily on superficial things because that's designed to attract you so that they can put themselves in position to get what they want from you. So when it comes down to it all they're really good at is taking and using. They're consumers but they have nothing to bring to you which is why when you ask a narcissist what do they bring to the table? They will get triggered because they don't want to bring anything valuable to your life. They just want to take from you. When you ask a narcissist what do they bring to the table? They will get very angry or upset. They will mock and insult you. They will be sarcastic. They're not going to say that they could be supportive or understanding or that they can help you with your work. They're not going to say anything like that. They're going to be confused that you even asked the question because they're only there to take from you. They're not going to benefit your life in any way. They're only going to hold you back because they don't know how to cooperate with you. They only know how to compete against you. Narcissists think that they don't need to bring anything to the table because in their minds they're the price. In their minds they're very valuable even though they have nothing of value to offer you but they are not the price. The person who is the price is the one who has the most to lose. The person who brings the most to the table but the narcissist doesn't want you to see that. They will get angry and frustrated when you ask this question because they don't want you to see your value. They want to pull the wall over your eyes so that they don't have to do anything for you. They just want to sit back and let you do all of the work. They don't want to bring any personality. They don't want to be adventurous. They couldn't be that even if they wanted to because these are qualities that they have never worked on. They wouldn't know where to start. Because their entire lives they've only been focused on superficial things. They've only been focused on their false image which is not going to benefit you in any way. It may look good but it's not practical.  It's only going to set you back. It's only going to keep you stuck while you have everything you need to propel yourself forward. You have everything you need to take the narcissist to the next level but they don't want you to see that. Because how you see yourself affects how you see them and how you see them affects how they see themselves and they want to see themselves as valuable and important. Which is why when you ask them this question it will make them mad because it brings them back to reality. It brings them back to the truth that they buried within which is that they really have no value because they never took the time to work on the qualities and traits that are valuable. Instead they focused on superficial things and it's too late for them to start now because for them to do that they would have to accept that they're nothing. They would have to accept that they have no value and that's just something no narcissist is going to do because their only motivation for doing that would be to support you when a narcissist is only concerned with their own feelings and needs they're not going to choose their source of supply over their false self which is why they will be like this until the day they die they're never going to change they're never going to improve the only thing they can do is simulate value by manipulating your emotions when you ask the narcissist what do they bring to the table it will cause a narcissistic injury which will be followed by narcissistic rage because they see that you know your value they see that their game is not going to work on you because you're not validating their false self you're not supporting the illusion their craft of manipulation may have worked for them with other people but they realise that it's not going to work with you they have to be supportive they have to cooperate with you they have to put in the work to provide an equal exchange of value which makes them mad because they don't want to be there to help you they don't want to be supportive they want to be above you they want you to serve them without expecting anything in return they want to be in control which is why they don't want you to see your worth they don't want you to know what you bring to the table but if you ask them they're just going to shame you they're going to target your self-esteem because they want to put the focus on you they don't want to accept that they have nothing to bring to the table but they know that at some point you're going to come to that conclusion they know that at some point you're going to realise they're no good for you anyway so they're just looking for short-term relationships where they get you to provide conveniences to them and pay for things because they know that it isn't going to last they know that they have nothing of value to bring to you they know that you would be better off without them so before they even get involved with you they've already rejected themselves because they know they're not good enough a narcissist cannot remain around a strong, confident person for long periods of time they have to break you down they have to make you doubt yourself that's the only way they can remain around you because only then can they feel like they're in control only then can they feel like they have a purpose which is why they inevitably end up with people who are weak a doormat an emotional punching bag someone they can treat however they like while they use their appearance to manipulate you to keep you locked in their control and they expect you to not want anything more which is why narcissists go from relationship to relationship because most people do want more but narcissists don't know how to keep a person happy all they can do is play games but after some time you get tired of playing the game and then they have to move on they go from relationship to relationship while they're always playing the victim when it's really because they don't possess the required qualities and skills to maintain a relationship to have something long term they're always on social media they're always on dating apps they're always mad at the opposite sex when really they just look themselves because they don't know how to be good relationship partners because they're only focused on what they can get they're not even concerned about what you want they never even take the time to ask you what you want in a relationship partner and if you ever confront them on this they will get mad because they don't care about what you want from them all they care about is showing up and getting what they want from you and if you're going somewhere in life you're difficult for them to control which is why they often downgrade and end up with someone who's stuck someone who isn't going anywhere in life because that type of person is easier for them to control if that person had any direction in life they would be asking the same question they would be asking them what do they bring to the table which is why narcissists want people who are weak people who they can break down and lock under their control someone who has no boundaries someone who has no standards someone who will accept anything a person who doesn't respect themselves a person who doesn't know who they are a person who doesn't love themselves because if you love and respect yourself and you have direction in life you will ask them this question thank you for watching I hope this video resonates with you please like, comment, share and subscribe if you would like to donate my PayPal link is in the video description coaching inquiries you can email me at coaching.naxiver.uk thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon