Well, the social, economic, rights and accountability project, CERAP has gone to court to seek for an order of mandamus to direct and compel the Senate President, Ghoswila Kwebio, and Speaker of the House of Reps, Tajidin, Abbas to review and reduce the 40 billion Naira budgeted for 465 SUVs and bulletproof cars for their members. Well, CERAP has just joined us and their Deputy Director, Mr. Kolawale Oluwadare, is our guest. Good morning to you, Mr. Kolawale. Good morning. So give us details of this case. Thank you very much. These are the opportunity turned out to be one of another public interest litigation that CERAP has to undertake because the order advocacy over Charles had failed. And so before we go to court, we've written to the National Assembly, particularly the leadership of the both houses of the National Assembly. When the news broke of what we would not have been turned, the palliative funds have been paid to the National Assembly and some of the palliative are 70 billion, which of course denied. And the plan of the National Assembly to budget another 40 billion left to buy vehicles for themselves. So people have turned it into something, so people have turned it into bulletproof cars. But whatever that is, the amount of money spent on what is rather not important in the scheme of things is the basis of going to court for CERAP. And because that has failed, we are going to court to enforce the right of Nigerians in this instance, which is why it is public interest litigation. To compare the leadership of National Assembly and engage the National Assembly as a whole to do the right thing. But what is the basis, the legal basis of this within the context of the laws? Can we say this budgetary allocation, this proposed spending, fits into the realities of economic realities that this time, can we say that the actions of all the members of the National Assembly in leadership and we say it conforms to the oath of office they have taken to use power and to for the better interest and the welfare of Nigerians. Can we also say that these actions, it doesn't conflict with the code of conduct in the constitution. That says that their personal interest must not conflict with their study duties to members of their constituents. And that is why we remain caught. Asking the court in this instance to rule the framework of the Nigerian public and to prevent the spending, particularly to this time, we need to understand that this came by way of supplementary appropriation in the present and before the National Assembly last month. And so for the court to propel members of National Assembly, you reject that proposed spending that is the supplementary appropriation with a pass by the way that's become an act and they can always refocus and repeal it and amend it to ensure that these more funds are redirected to all the critical areas in Nigeria, particularly to the health sector and medication, particularly to take care of the growing up of school children which as of this year extends to 20 million children. That is why we are caught. Well some Nigerians will say that if you even want to go push this to reflect the economic situation in the country, you would have outrightly said to them, you know what, don't even buy any of these vehicles at all. Channel all the money to solving the problems that you just highlighted. What do they need the vehicles for? Why don't they use their own money? That's part of the facts that we've used to support our case before the court. And we notice this as Nigerians too, that this is a precedent for them. This happens every legislative side. And then it brings the question which I think even spans beyond the four corners of the country. For Nigerians to ask its critical question, what happened to the cars that were bought by the previous National Assembly and the ones before that, way back to 1999? How were these cars procured? What are the basis of the use of this case? Was the procurement act for load, was there cost-benefit analysis, and what is the benefit of these cars in the lightest scheme of things, are those that have the anormic abilities and then reflect on socioeconomic problems of the average Nigerian? And that is what we've seen happen time and time again. Which is why these kinds of discussions, which of course is outside the purview of the law in the courtroom, means that every Nigerian was being interested, and not only of conversations, but of textiles, to old members, public officers in response, particularly in this instance, members of the National Assembly, who must represent all their constituents within Nigeria. These questions need to be asked. Why are you purchasing these vehicles? What happened to the previous vehicles? Then what is this made necessary, particularly given the high cost of living, the high rate of unemployment, occasioned by the number of subsidy and non-associated events that we've seen in the past few months of this administration? So it is not only the good advocacy in this instance, it is advocacy that it directed Nigerian citizens themselves as part of that democratic process towards those in political office, whether they elected or appointed to account. The Senate president said something, it was funny to me, but I don't understand the workings of the National Assembly or government people, as we put it. He said that when they came, the Tent Assembly came, they didn't have tools to work with. There were no computers, he mentioned computers, and I was wondering why they would have to change computers every cycle. And then he said, as senators, to do their oversight functions, they cannot use KK to do their oversight functions. Those were his words. We cannot use KK to do, KK and APEP to do our oversight functions. So I don't know how that struck you, even aside from the fact that you are having a case with them, but I don't know how that struck you, that computers will have to be changed after every cycle, and then they cannot use KK. Are you giving them alternatives in this, your suit, or you're just saying, stop it, and then do something else? First and foremost, of course, I am an interior, a universe country, and so that means that issues like these, whether I am a legal practitioner or not, or whether we're going to cut through to enforce the right of the Nigerians at all, the basis of that actually itself is interest of the Nigerians, and of course, mine is part of that. And so it is rather worrisome. And again, but it's not totally unexpected. He will follow the trend of things since 1999, that are various mechanisms that have been put in place to ensure that these transverses and accountability have been floated time over time, and the impunity just makes it that people do not get points for it. But these again raised critical questions, which really one need not be technical in knowing the aspects of covenants or how the workings of the nation as they need to ask these simple questions. Who purchased the computers? Which computers did the previous national assembly use? Who purchased those computers? Do they belong to those individuals? Or are they, as it were, the belongings of the national assembly? And so what happened to the previous computers, or whatever tools that the law makers require to do their job? And then what are the steps been taken to ensure that, if asked, and I strongly suspect that individuals, the previous members of the national assembly had committed acts of malfeasance in not being able to account for these things, they are protocol. Those are the pertinent questions we should ask. And again, this leads to another, that is the budgetary allocations of the national assembly itself. Even the role of the national assembly as their statutory role and powers over the appropriation bill brought to them before them by the assembly taking it. The national assembly also has some appropriated to it, and so raises the question, who will police the national assembly's instance? Do they have that powers, as it were, to, with that prejudice, in fairness and equity, to refute their project and make sure that it is fair and negative in these circumstances? And it's against the backdrop of knowing that late last year, when the appropriation bill was being considered, the national assembly increased its own statutory allocation, bringing it up to $220 billion there. Questions set up at these pertinent questions at that time, and this has led us to where we are presently. So, all in all, it is the failure of those transparency and accountability mechanisms that creates rooms and avenues for these kind of things, where members of the national assembly, community members, we say, they do not have computers. But those were there before, because you used a lot of those, including computers, and those questions must be asked, which again leads to the usual, the Auditor General of the Federation for instance, who audits at federal government parameters. And he has reported time after time about billions of years of implementation and not being accounted for. Perhaps this is one of those instances where computers were brought, tools were brought to make sure the national assembly is able to function enough, they cannot be found. And then, the use of the money we are spending to buy an understanding of the tools for this national assembly again, which they might not be able to account for at the end of the period. And then we keep doing that. It brings in the call of governments unnecessarily. And there are aspects of corruption in this instance, IDSA. And in response to what you said about whether we give them or give them alternatives in the future. Yes, we have developed that value of a letter that we've written to the national assembly, and even in the suit as well. We have suggested that the UNICEF is displaying an active party government, holding government accountable, and doing what we call advisory opinions to public offices. That these funds should be channeled to two critical areas. We have mentioned health and education, particularly education, giving the rising number out of part of school children. And what that means for us as a nation is sort of growing the security and even the economy of Nigeria. And that is what we put national assembly really has the interest of engineers at that. It's very simple. They cut that same power in state as it were to fund primary school education. So it is not a matter of lack of legal framework. The U-Bett has provided clearly that not less than 1% of the funds will be allocated to fund primary school education across Nigeria. But what we see year after year is that the minimum threshold is what is allocated, one on set. Whereas the loss is not less than 1%. It means it can't be more. And that is what the national assembly is doing. At least this $110 million will go in long term. Even if it is allocated to U-Bett for instance to ensure also that states provide their catapult funding as the law provides that these out of school children can reduce practically and then defend the same in the short term and then in the long term. And that's one of the options we're giving them for the cost. And I would struggle to see how the cost will not side with the Nigerian people in this instance, growing what the growing number of out of school children potential Nigeria, both in the short term and in the long run. On the figure presently stands at $20 million and is still growing. All right. As you're looking at all of these trying to reduce the cost of governance, especially as it concerns the national assembly and reducing their budget by 110 billion Naira. Have you also looked at the fact that just not long before this 10th assembly was inaugurated, the FCDA disclosed to us that 19 billion Naira has been spent to renovate the two chambers of the national assembly. These facts, when one considers the totality of these facts, both those are public domain and the ones that come to life continuously. But it doesn't stand to reason. It defies the logic itself. And don't forget, Serap is a court challenging the allocation of more than 30 billion Naira to renovate the national assembly. That was three years ago. And the matter is still pending in court. And so we're talking of another 19 billion Naira that you mentioned. Who oversees the allocation and the expenditure of these forms that goes back to the discussion with that earlier about the needs to make the national assembly transparent and accountable in the process of allocation of funds then subsequently expenditure. If we have missed the opportunity to ensure that the national assembly is attentive at the process of allocation of funds, that is when the approbation fee is being considered, then it might be to hold them responsible at the point of expenditure. But it doesn't mean it is not to be moved because the procurement act itself of course is binding on the national assembly as a public institution creates rigid and strict guidelines as to how funds are disposed and spent by all public institutions including the national assembly. But in this instance, national assembly got over 200 billion 20 and three points. In the 20 and two approbations passed about a week and he increased it to get to that amount. And now there is also a supplementary approbation in which they are looking to examine as spaghetti whatever that means 40 billion to procure vehicles and we do not even have the knowledge of the fact of how much was allocated to national assembly in the supplementary approbation act. Mind people, mind you. And so that again speaks to the issue of this holiday token and the allowance that came to light just last week. Where are those funds coming from? Who are looking at this fund to the national assembly? See, we have become the budget as it were. It is the matter of law. It gives it some sort of legality but that doesn't make it legal because even the approbation can't be repealed and reviewed which is why we have supplementary approbation. Which case, which engineers must compel them to do in this instance to review the approbation presently the purchase as it were and make sure that the cost of governance including the conditions of national assembly and other areas including the precedence is reduced drastically. And we are looking at to where they are needed the most. And I'd like to give you another short instance of where these fundings could be the retention, the health center. The National Health Act is very clear these provisions that section of the provides that not less than 1% will be allocated to the National Health Act and the National Health Act provides clearly how those funds are meant to be spent 50 percent, 20 percent and most of those spending goes to primary health care including record and expenditure for doctors in the villages and in those remote areas. What the government has done over time including in 2020 at the height of COVID is just to obey the year minimum just 1%. Why not 5% why not 50% keeping the nature of the deployment conditions of wired facilities both at the primary the secondary and even the tertiary health health institutions that again shows that the National Assembly and I guess even the executive does not understand the importance of these critical sectors and the welfare of their kids. It would appear and all facts are about this and it's public institutions in this instance the National Assembly appears to faithful themselves look at themselves better than the engineers just created against the order of office they took and the code of order of public officers that is in construction and binding of all of them as public offices. All right, before you go let me ask you the last time you were here you we talked about the victory you got from the court asking this administration to give account of how their batchal loot recovered have been spent so far. Have they responded? Unfortunately we have not gotten any kind of formal response from the the government that is from the office of the president the president himself it is unfortunate that orders of courts will be disobeyed with impunity and and the and the student demerits of citizens of Nigeria it is unfortunate but it is not surprising when one when you look at the president that means sometimes in this country where the rule of law is really not a dire thing orders of courts are nearly obeyed but the ISCOP it starts from the IS office in the lamp the office of the president but when they are political judgments that affect the right of either political political parties or individual politicians of course they get obeyed at the speed of light and that doesn't help democracy at all democracy goes beyond politics going to the polls including everything that needs to cast in a ballot and those who subsequently get elected and so on in the public office it's just one part of the democratic process governance itself is an act of democracy and that governance has several principles including the rule of the principle of rule of law separation of powers and all that and disobeying an order of courts really think anyone needs to be educated on this at least not those in public office it's not the president to know that orders of court will be obeyed because of him because of the citizens but because of the collective welfare of the endurance to ensure that instability there is structure and that is what the rule of law in this is and that is what it brings unfortunately so Mr. Kala Wale Mr. Kala Wale my last question to you because of time is what confidence do you have with these cases that you are taking to court and the ones you have in court we believe in the judicial and I've often said this that as lawyers and as a legal advocacy organization you believe in the rule of law even if those in public office solve it do not believe in the rule of law upon which they even wrote to power we believe in the rule of law and we believe in the judicial and we believe in the judicial process which is why we do what we do going to court as a right they're granted by the constitution section 6 of the constitution to ventilate our group and to sign a case of siding with the Nigerians on many occasions spread that this syrup as more than that in Georgia against the freedom of public execution that are yet to be obeyed and so we believe in the court we do what is right by it again we do it in this instance because they've done so many times before and because it is just what the law says the law is clear in this sense so we believe that and we believe that ultimately we will get a job okay I hope prayers have been sent to your inbox and you can take your inbox okay thank you for the talking thank you so much well it's Kola Wallyalua Dari Serab's deputy director has joined us to give us details of the case they've taken to court against the senate president and the speaker of the House of Raps thank you so much for your time this morning thank you very much you're still watching the breakfast it's time for us to take a little break and come back with our second heart topic stay with us


Hello Columbia, it's Mayor Steve Benjamin. First off, let me thank each and every one of you that has helped us reduce the spread of COVID-19 in the Midlands. From the very beginning, Columbia has led efforts to flatten the curve by putting in place critical public health measures, including a stay-at-home order and a mass ordinance. In fact, according to the Department of Health and Environmental Control, cities and counties that have enacted mass ordinances have seen a 46% greater drop in COVID-19 cases in the areas without them. But that being said, we cannot stop here. We must continue to fight this virus together and one way to do this is to keep getting ourselves tested. I'm thankful for all the critical work being done by DHEC, MUSC, Prisma, and all of our community partners that have assisted us in testing efforts. To get more information on testing locations around the city and what you can do to prevent the spread of COVID-19, please visit covid19.columbiasc.gov. Again, that's covid19.columbiasc.gov. Another way to combat this virus is to inform our younger generations about the dangers of COVID-19 and how they can help us fight this virus. I've been closely working with local colleges and universities including the University of South Carolina to put orders in place to help prevent high-risk situations before they occur. Students, please do your part and avoid hosting or attending large public gatherings, including house parties and bars. We're encouraging universities to take all violations of city and state executive orders very seriously. Student housing facilities and rental landlords also can help do their part. We're asking student housing facilities to please shut down their swimming pools until city swimming pools reopen and keep enforcing social distancing measures. Rental landlords also need to be held accountable to make sure their renters are adhering to social distancing protocols in the interest of community health. That is why city council proposed a rental property mandate that would penalize landlords from dangerous gatherings helping their property. We understand this is a very important time for our young adults. We want all of our students to enjoy their college experiences. We must continue to make short sacrifices for the long-term benefits of everyone in the city of Columbia. Please hold your peers and our community accountable by reporting any violations to<PHONE_NUMBER>. Again, all this is necessary to protect all of us, you, your peers and our community's health as we continue to fight the spread of COVID-19. So step up and mask up Columbia. We'll all get through this together. Thank you.


Aw, what's up everybody? Once again, it's Brain Man Sean and we're back with another episode of Culture Shock where we talk music, business, and pop culture from a different perspective, because you know, it's all the same, but not really. And the topic for the day is pop eyes and how they use rapper's marketing strategies, troll marketing to go viral, move these chicken sandwiches off the shelves. And we know troll marketing has been a huge interest over the last few years because of how so many people have leveraged it. So by the end of this video, we're really gonna touch on not only how pop eyes leveraged troll marketing successfully, but also how to use it possibly for your own company or as an artist and the difference between using it to drive product consumption and actual sales, using it for PR, and using it for branding. So how did we get here? Well, it all started on August 12th, 2019 when Popeye seemingly came out of nowhere and dropped a chicken sandwich, right? Years being one of the top chicken chains, but they didn't have chicken sandwiches. And when they did this, it really didn't have that much upward though. That wasn't that much conversation around it. However, a few weeks later on August 19th of 2019, Chick-fil-A made a post.  Just talking about their original chicken sandwich, not even mentioning Popeyes, but Popeyes responds, y'all good? And that set an uproar amongst all types of communities on Twitter, quick Twitter got a hold of it, where you start to have all types of memes created. Y'all are familiar with internet culture. People start doing meme comparisons of Chick-fil-A and Popeyes, especially a lot of them around customer service, where you have someone in customer service saying my pleasure because they're Chick-fil-A and then someone on the other end just saying, I bet at Popeyes. And so many other iterations and examples of that. And then Chick-fil-A and Popeyes started to continue to fulfill this themselves. For example, one Popeyes actually posted on their sign, FYI, people need to eat on Sundays, right? Which Chick-fil-A later responded to with one location saying FYI, we don't run out of chicken sandwiches, which leads us back to why we're here. Wall Street Journal reported that a chicken supply that was intended to last three months, ran out in just two weeks. Popeyes went far more viral than they themselves expected. So first to even understand how Popeyes was able to have such a strong impact with their troll campaign, we actually have to acknowledge the fact that Chick-fil-A has built a lot of brand equity as a restaurant over the last, I don't know, however many years, right? Since they've been a company, but not only that, they have a specific brand equity in the chicken sandwich space. They have this whole chicken sandwich game monopolized. So when we wanna think about conflict and trolling, then we have to remember that specificity really allows for stronger impact in the first place. So there's a difference between going against something general, like an overall restaurant or an overall industry or something that could be abstract versus going against something very specific, like not only Chick-fil-A, an entire brand, but a specific thing that they have at that company, it's one thing to say I'm against rappers or hip-hop, and it's another thing to say, my name is 50 Cent and I'm going against Ja Rule. There's the equivalent right there, because people are able to visualize in it, they are able to participate and they're able to actively judge in a way that they wouldn't have been able to before. And we'll get deeper into that later, but that specificity, that specific product that people were able to judge against had a huge impact on people's ability to create certain memes, ideas, and other content that was inspired around it. This specificity allows you to drive consumption to that specific thing. As a matter of fact, another good example is Blue Face the Rapper, how so many people were actually talking about the fact that he was rapping off beat and it started to become a meme in itself and it started to become a whole thing that people talked about, but when you consider the fact that to make fun of Blue Face being off beat, you have to go hear his music, that type of trolling meme led directly back to his music or product being consumed in the same way that to judge whether Popeyes was better than Chick-fil-A led back to people having to consume the product to actually judge for themselves, right? It even creates a little bit of curiosity first for them to have to go judge afterwards. Now, a different example would be more of a PR thing where it creates a lot of energy, you get a lot of names, people talk about you, but it doesn't necessarily drive sales directly. Now, Wendy's is the perfect representation of this. As a matter of fact, they're essentially the OG when it comes to trolling as a fast food restaurant train. For example, you can look at this one tweet where someone said, Wendy's, can you find me the nearest McDonald's? And Wendy's responds with a picture of a trashcan, right? That's simple, but they also had so much attitude and sarcasm when they responded to customers, other people that were coming at them, people were asking to be roasted by Wendy's literally and Wendy's even literally dropped a mixtape where they were doing diss tracks of Burger King, McDonald's and other types of restaurant. When I say mixtape, I mean actually making songs and rapping on a mixtape, songs on a mixtape. I'll put a link to that in the description for those of you guys who are interested in actually checking that out. But the thing to consider about this is once again, it's just Wendy's as a whole where people are attracted to the personality, people would literally start following Wendy's just so they could see their responses and started to interact with their social media. So it is keeping the brand top of mind so it isn't directly pushing people to go consume a specific product. However, of course, once again, it's keeping them top of mind so maybe they'll be more likely to try Wendy's and some people were actually attracted to the personality that they saw aligned to the point where they said, yo, this makes me want to try Wendy's. So there is that indirect benefit. So the music equivalent of using trolling just to get awareness, general awareness, stay top of mind and not directly lead people to consuming product but still making it more likely that people might consume your product would actually be Takashi69, right? He created Beats and came at a lot of people for a lot of different reasons if you go back throughout that history, but a lot of times for the most part, actually, it was not drawn towards a specific song. So it didn't lead you directly, it just made you want to follow him to see what he was up to and what he was going to do as an artist in the same way Wendy's was the equivalent of that artist, right? We're interested in that restaurant and their personality, not necessarily a specific product but of course your consumption of the product might be a byproduct of your consumption of the brand overall. All right, so so far we've discussed using troll marketing to drive brand and product consumption and then secondly we use troll marketing for PR purposes. But now let's get to number three which is the impact and how to use troll marketing for branding purposes. And to start this off, let's watch this old Apple commercial. Hello, I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC. You know, we use a lot of the same kinds of programs. Yeah, like Microsoft Office. But we retain a lot of what makes us us. You should see what this guy can do with a spreadsheet. It's insane. Shucks. Yeah, and he knows that I'm better at life stuff like music, pictures, movies, stuff like that. Whoa, what exactly do you mean by better? By better, I mean, making a website or photo book is easy for me and for you, it's not. Oh, that kind of better. Yeah. I was thinking of the other kind. What other kind? All right, so this is an example of how you can use troll marketing or troll branding I guess to define the actual value system, the personality and culture that you want to attract with this trolling. Because just supposing your brand against another brand is the perfect opportunity to show whose side you're on and better yet, give other people an opportunity to pick a side, right? You can show that culture in a different way. And as a matter of fact, a lot of people did this in the Chick-fil-A versus Popeyes argument. You saw a lot of people show Chick-fil-A as the more clean cut side and Popeyes as the more culturally cool or the really black culture brand in a lot of ways, whether it was them showing somebody with glasses on one end and somebody with a durag on the other. Popeyes versus Kirk Franklin, Jesus versus Beyonce and so many other popular representations of culture that gave people an opportunity to pick which side that they want to be on. Which side do they identify with? So again, when you troll, it can be the perfect opportunity to show your brand values. You can show the type of customer that you want to attract in a very clear way visually in a way that they already resonate with personally because of the type of things that they consume in other types of culture. Even when you look at the movie Bring It On that somebody used for a meme and they show the two cheerleading squads and obviously those two cheerleading squads very vividly represented two different types of people and what they liked. So now with those three things in mind in terms of how you can leverage trolling, it's up to you to decide how you would want to apply it. Are you using it for PR right now? Are you using it for product consumption? Or are you using it for branding purposes? Of course, a lot of those other two would become indirect in how people start to leverage it or you can push one at a time throughout an entire process but understand a lot of these things might start to happen once the trolling happens. And when I say throughout the process, I want to be clear that you can actually start by using it as PR and getting the name out there and then later start to control some type of juxtaposition that happens in terms of branding purposes or later roll out a specific product. Now that you created this PR awareness and now start to push and do memes and do trolling that does directly line up with a specific consumption of a specific product. All these things can be used as an overall campaign over time. So don't think you have to focus on one or the other. They will naturally happen in some ways but you also can control it because of course my whole thing is never leave virally to change. So never leave any of these marketing outcomes that you want for yourself to change especially if you have the opportunity to control them. And that's it for this episode of Culture Shock. Now, this is technically the first episode, right? There's been a few other that I recorded in this series but this is the first time I'm actually giving it a name.  If you like it, you might as well share it and please, please, please really do share this thing so we can know if people like it make sure y'all put the comments, all that good stuff and of course, if you're not subscribed you know what to do, hit that subscribe button.


So, what is the complex figures in my lesson plan or in what? In lesson plan. How to write the figures? So, that is it is like you creating a so, this is a web page that you are creating right. So, the when you create the web page, you are allowed a specific editor. So, this is a specific editor, where you can do the typical things like adding a table, putting a figure, putting a link, anything that you want. So, it is like you have a image on your computer right. So, I just put this one here. So, this is a web page you are creating right. So, typically you many of them need to know html. Now, you do not need to know html, just plain word kind of specific editing. So, you just go and add an image. Now, this will no no tags, it is just pure specific editing. Cut and paste also will work if you are working in a that is cut and pasting is controlled by your browser. So, if your browser allows cut and paste, then it will do it. Sundar, I have just a small question. How do you manage the logistics? Because now you have some window of 1 hour 2 hours for the assignment to be finished. And you keep this infrastructure in the lab or somewhere where students go login and do the job or how is it? Because in IAD you have a big infrastructure you can do, but in smaller colleges how do they do? They keep a lab for that specific for this. Right. So, the way we have is we have tried both the modes. One is have a lab where you have 30 40 computers and then call the students in batches. If you have more the more number of students call them in batches and anywhere you if you provided you have a good large question bank, it does not matter of this you have question bank of same difficulty. So, then you call the students in batches and finish it off or if you trust the students I mean which is difficult, if you trust the students you can ask them to do it from anywhere they want. Right, but typically what you do is in that case you keep a really large question bank. So, that knows two students get the same question, they work out from they do this you give a very strict time frame. You give a limited if you have if you need one hour to solve, if you quiz this one hour you give questions which will take one and half hours, but you set up a large question bank and let the students attempt from anywhere they want. So, each student will be busy with his solving for his own rather than helping other student. So, in that case we can have. No, see. Because anywhere in the mean. No, anywhere. So, I conducted by the students took it from their hostels. So, my question is is the student required to register for every course or he is registered for a set of courses. So, that has an administrator you can control. So, the way it is done in IIT is there is an academic section where the student actually register for a course. So, we have one database that database directly ported to the Moodle database. So, a student registers there which goes to the standard academic records which also gets transferred here. That is one thing as a teacher if it is a small number of a small group you can easily ask your teaching assistant your yourself can look at the list of students and enroll it that is one level or you can give in the class you give a password which is known only to the students. And when the students see a list of courses offered in your college students goes there only the students who know the password can do it. So, there are different ways that you can implement that. I also wanted to know if a student is registered for some set of courses for example, subjects may be. Then how he can search for a specific topic as regards to content of that particular subject. Of the particular subject. So, how to search for a topic? Is it keyword based search that takes place in Google etcetera or. No, the thing is it cannot what did you say is it a queue yeah you can use keyword based search, but what I am trying to say is if you are here a course means a subject. So, once you are to the course page once you are in the course page there are some things that you can search the search capability of this is not. So, very advanced only thing that you can search here is this forums. So, there is a discussion forum you type a keyword. So, those things will be those are easily searchable, but sometimes you will have scanned pdrs pdf files scanning of that searching of those is not possible. Let me come back to this what is the purpose of this model the purpose of this model is to guide a student participating student through the subject. If a student ever has to search something there is something wrong with the student. What what should student be searching student should be following the course point by point day by day day by day every week things are uploaded. Did you discuss the files thing for example, there are files where you typically upload all files in the files thing in which you make different folders. So, I will show you after he finishes let's say my course further. Frankly this is not a general internet web page where people are searching anything blindly. They are following a course. No, no, so the student suppose a quiz is given a quiz will never be given on something arbitrary that quiz will be related to a topic which was discussed for that topic there will be a material where the material is to be found is known you get my point. So, therefore in fact student should never be required to search anything he should be able to hear she should be able to go directly to whatever is relevant study that and use that. Like for example, in this my notes course notes are here in this topic and following the course notes I have quizzes. So, it is quite straight forward that they just need to see I will tell you where the student may have to search suppose there are hundred posts by people that's all because within those posts you can make a search within those posts as he showed you can make a search. So wherever there are text inputs will people will be able to make a search but even the posts are not arbitrarily organized there are threads. So, for example, a particular topic is started by someone on that thread there could be multiple posts is exactly like any web based threads. So, you will be guided in a almost a hierarchical fashion while using the word. Yes sir, my question actually came from from the beginning of this lecture that because Moodle is open source there are very large number of people using it no, no, no, no. Moodle as a software is being used by large number of people but Moodle configured to be used for a course is being used only by those course students and the teachers. So, there is no notion of searching all courses on Moodle and things like the courses are not open source. The administrator has made it public. See this course can be private to the students of the course or it can be public. Public to so if you have this course open to public obviously your Google search engine will come and search and you will get it in text. But otherwise. Otherwise it is typically closed. That's right. The course is not open source. The Moodle as the management software is open source. So, when you use that software in JSITS for example, nobody else need to access it. My own Moodle cannot be accessed by people other than those who are registered for the course but I am using the same Moodle. I just want to ask you like the if I what do all this exercise for my subject. I will save it as a what at some kind of a dot whatever we the extension is there and then I will give it to as a web page to the all the students. No, no, no. You do not creating any file separately. You are creating a file within this. You do not have a separate editor at all. It is a editor provided by the Moodle software. And you say I want to create a web page. It will give you an interface to create a web page. The way it stores is not your botheration. You are simply seeing a specific editor. That is all. If you know HTML it is just added advantage but you forget that you know HTML. Let me explain. You are just seeing a specific editor and it is just saved as such. You do not know what extension it is saved, what it has done. You do not know. You do not need to know. Let me clarify further. There is no notion of you creating something and then separately posting it in Moodle. You create everything in Moodle except for the documents which you have created independently. Whatever format you have those documents you can upload to Moodle. Like you created a document. When you upload Moodle stores it internally in its own database. So you are not bothered about where it is stored or whatever. Once you install Moodle Moodle will take care of all storage. So even the web page that he mentioned you do not create that web page separately. You have a utility to write something which will appear as a web page internally to that particular subject for which you are the editor. And if the student want to give or appear for a quiz they have to just configure that Moodle. No they do not configure anything. The teacher configures one Moodle. On that Moodle people will see the quizzes. All students will see the quiz. The student takes the quiz means what he actually says I want to appear for this quiz. The quiz comes before him. He gives his answer. The answers get loaded. Students do not configure anything. Even teachers do not configure anything. In IIT Bombay for example there is a central administration that you will see tomorrow when you see the installation. Not tomorrow day after tomorrow. So that particular thing is configured for the whole institute. Now over and above that if individual teachers wish to set certain parameters. Like he is an extensive advanced user. So he has set so many other parameters which are useful to him. I am let's say an intermediate user. I am actually. So I do not fiddle around with parameters which are set as default. I am happy with that. I will show you my own site for my course which I use. I have not done any installation. I have not done any configuration. The moment I become a teacher for the course the data goes from the academic office to an independent interface which has been set up by the institute administration of the institute information system. So we have like LDAP setup for the whole institute. Now I have an LDAP user ID and password. So the moment my user ID is there when my name goes into that moodle as a teacher for the course CS634 for example. Automatically a course is created. Automatically my entry is made as a teacher. And once that entry is made I am now responsible for managing that subject within the moodle. I am not concerned how the moodle is running how it is storing whatever. But you people at the respective remote centers will be concerned with that as well. You will have to set up the moodle for these 35 teachers who will come. And each one of those 35 teachers when they go back to their colleges will have to set up the moodle. What we are suggesting is while we may do all of this with respect to just one subject that we are teaching. The moodle is such a powerful weapon that other teachers in your colleges and their colleges also can use it effectively. That is the purpose. Just to add to that point see the way a student would see this whole thing is when you switch a role to a student. This is how the student will see. So student sees there is a quiz on statics. This is that this quiz has closed you cannot attempt it now. But otherwise this is what the student will see. He cannot configure or do anything with the setup. He just see that there is some notes posted he will read the notes. Another will say that I want to see the post a new discussion question. I post it or if I want to participate in the quiz I participate. So there is nothing configuring for the student as such. And what will be the course setup by you? I cannot see it from outside remote remote areas. Unless you are a student in the course or unless I say that the course is visible to everybody. So for example there is a provision by guest login. So IIT courses if you are a student in an IIT course and if you are configured our elder properly you can access that course from wherever you are. But if you are not a student you will not be able to access. See just like when you run a course in your own college it is meant for only those 30 students isn't it? You don't want 3 crore students to figure out what you are doing. Not necessary. If you wish you can make that course public. But be ready to ensure that your infrastructure can take lakhs of hits.  So that is all a matter of choice for the teacher and for the local administrators. Let me put it this way. You have an academic office in your institute. Yes. That academic office handles usually the conduct of exams, definition of syllabus as per the senate resolution etc. Moodle is an academic office created individually for each subject is the notion. Does your academic office work for rest of the world? No. Academic office works for your institute. If there are 2 institutions which are working collaboratively like 20 institutions in a university. The university academic office will work for all 20 institutions. We are trying to create a distributed Moodle in the country like that as an extension. What Professor Sundar is describing is the Moodle in IIT Bombay and how it is being used.  How you can exploit Moodle to administer that subject very well. That's it. So you are administering that subject for those 50 students. Nothing else. That is the purpose. But we have to communicate in our administrative department or academic department like that that this kind of activity is done in IIT Bombay and we can adopt that for our course. You don't have to describe anything to the academic department. You teach a course. What do you tell your academic department? You tell them only the marks that they final get, isn't it? What else do you do? Nothing. But what tutorials you are giving? Let's say sample information you are giving. What is your schedule of weekly teaching? Does your academic office concern ever with that? Those trained marks are specially forward for all these internal activities are there. So if I go for this method and others are also always taking the help of this one. That will be more easy for students and how to manage all this. How the internal marks will be given. We can have that sources. I appreciate that. But please understand that you are looking at it from the administration of the evaluation marks. The purpose of Moodle is far more. The purpose of Moodle is actually keep all the exchangeable information. All the useful information at one place in an organized fashion for the course. That is the main purpose. Evaluation is a side activity important for the students. But that is not the most important part of the course. The purpose of the course is that students learn what is there. And you can see for example the best example he gave is I can set a quiz. Where I can say people can attempt multiple times. Sir this is for my subject. But it should be for each and every subject. But that other teacher better be subject. I just communicate how the things work.  There is another set of series which I will be giving you DVD. We conducted a five day workshop on effective teaching of engineering courses. An ex colleague of mine from the department who had developed this course. She came and many people participated in that. You might want to do that. But I just don't see anything specific about Moodle. For example as I mentioned the open course project in MIT and the development in Michigan and other places. They are using Sakai. Sakai is another sort of collaborative information management tool like this. The point is in today's time we have to use such tools to be more effective. And particularly when... It is really very effective but I think so if in case we have to post certain things. And if in case the student have to post certain things and quiz has to be handled. I think so it will be more effective if in case the student as well as the faculty. If in case on Saturdays or Sundays they are able to handle the things from home also. From? From their home. Not necessarily you don't have to come to the college. Yeah. So it is a web based. It is a web based. You have access to web. What you said was you have to install the Moodle. You have to install the Moodle in your institute on the server. So this Moodle is installed on IIT server. It is centrally administered. I access this Moodle from my home within IIT. I access it from San Francisco as well. The excess control is a different issue. Whether you want to give free access across internet where security is not guaranteed. That is why what we use is an LDAP excess control. Which is going to be discussed separately I think the institution and so on.  Otherwise you can impact the beauties. The whole thing is web based. You don't require anything other than a browser to access this. That's it. So browser based. I want to know about the configuration of Moodle. Does it have minus killer Postgres as the pattern? And whether can we integrate it into this? All in good time. Tomorrow when we discuss the installation and implementation they will answer. But yes you are right. We have integrated with our LDAP data. My question is if you need to set this up in some university. We have our own management system. So that's fine. But in smaller universities what would be the hardware requirements? So would it be expensive to set up Moodle? For example do you need a large server? That's the question. You see it depends upon what is the total number of users that you want to manage on that Moodle. So if for example you are using it for one course and let's say there are 100 students. One teacher and four teaching assistants. An ordinary PC connected to your local area network will be more than adequate. You can distribute it because we cannot expect the smaller universities to have say centralized servers. You will be surprised what smaller colleges have today. Okay. Yes you will be surprised. Hardware is cheap. Just to give you an instance when the first Gigabyte disk was purchased in IIT Bombay in my department. I was heading the department then. The cost had just reportedly come down from 3.4 lakh rupees to 2.7 lakh rupees. One Gigabyte hard disk. I had to appoint a committee of three professors. A purchase committee. Do the whole diligence of procurement and so on. Many years later when my son was studying his engineering. One day he announced that from Lamington Road I got a 40 GB disk. No committee. Okay. So things are different today. The important problem is you will recall what Professor Sundar said initially. There are some other excellent learning management tools also which are costed products. And the costed products in terms of software licenses, the number of user licenses become actually more cost. Today a very decent entry level server with adequate memory, very good power, multiple core things etc. etc. does not cost more than 40,000 rupees. All that you need to do is put it on your network and you have huge amount of space. You can sleep in that disk. Okay. So the constraints that we had 10 years ago do not exist in terms of hardware. The constraints usually exist in terms of software licensing and expertise to use that software. What we are saying is Moodle is open source. Moodle can also be connected to a back end oracle if you want. Any JDBC, ODBC compliant. But recall the question that was asked and the answer that was given. You can configure either MySQL or PostgreSQL. Both are open source. There are absolutely zero license cost in installing and using Moodle and the associated pieces of software that you. Even if you want to put a network control for access. LDAP has implementations from the cheapest to the costliest. But the cheapest that we use is the normal LDAP lightweight directory that we get along with any Linux distribution. And what we want to happen is that during this workshop now and subsequently when you conduct the workshop in July. This message should go. That is why all the distribution that we have is all open source distribution. You carry it with you. Take it. By all means continue to use any other piece of software that you have in other places. This is absolutely no problem. But as far as this effort is concerned that is what we are planning. So I want to ask about whatever answers students are given. Can teachers see that after they have submitted the answers? Yes. So of course you would. It is stored in the back end. One is direct I can show you. See one is in this case in the quizzes the answers are what this is the. So Gaurav has made two attempts. One attempt here and another attempt here. So I just go and click on this best attempt. I can see what answer he has written. So 28.7 he has got correct. This is automatically evaluated. I can see what answers he has written. This is for automatic evaluation. Other thing is where student actually submits a web page. Submits a normal written page. You are also able to see that either as an attachment or as a page. And you can just below that there is a box for evaluation. So you see it on the top. Evaluate at the bottom. So do it one by one. The evaluation will be non-automatic. I mean students will submit their handwritten page. Handwritten as in written replies, long answers etcetera. Which your TAs can evaluate. And they can allocate marks. He is an advanced user. So he sets up quizzes which are automatically correct. Remember the efforts that he put in to become an advanced user. He is now reaping the harvest of saving all his time in doing the Golagiri of evaluation. Like some students already have some kind of management information system in place. Which are based on some kind of backing. If the backing is very primitive like say file based and like that. Can it be integrated easily or there will be lot of labor involved. Just installing Apache, MySQL is very straight what comes default in most of the system. So it is not at all a difficult thing. You are saying whether you can integrate your own back end with this. My suggestion is do not even attempt it. It is not worth it. It will involve lot of labor in just entering the data. No, do not enter any data. You set this model up as a separate environment and use it for your course. The only data that you have to enter is roll number and names of the people. And usually you will have a file upload facility that you can integrate. So treat this as an independent standalone thing. At best what you can do is you can collect a soft copy of final query report. Which you can take a print out sign and send it to academic. So what kind of database you are talking about the student database? The problem is when the institute already has its own management information system. Wherein we are supposed to do some web best things for our own course. And then if the switching to model has to take place, then it is a big thing. Absolutely no, I think we should continue to use your system if you are comfortable with it. But 99 to 1, if you will explain the advantages of this, the institute may agree to switch over to using it. I have not seen any homegrown academic administrative system for the courses and contents. I am not talking about the academic administration. That is the subject courses. There cannot be anything that is better than this. It is very difficult for anybody to have developed such thing on their own. So here you can see the courses that I am teaching. Let us take this CS64 intermain system course. So I have for example a large number of, if you look at participants here. There are some whatever 139 participants and their details here. You can see users may want to upload their pictures. And in fact you should encourage, given the webcams, you should encourage them so that you can recognize people. I find it very difficult with 139 students class. And I do not know what will happen to me when next year I teach 850 students in Convocation Hall. It will be mad house. What I wanted to show you was not this but says something like look at the files. So you are asking about the contents and so on. So for example a person who is not extraordinarily well versed with Moodle. This is my set of teaching assistants who help me. They will usually organize things like this. So if you look at tutorials for example, in this there are files. Usually we use either the open office or PDF. But you could have a doc file here. People could download this or see this. The point is PDF means because every browser has a PDF plugin. So you can automatically see PDF files easily. That is the reason. Otherwise you could use anything that you wanted. We have lecture slides. These are all PPT files. People can download them, use them. We first used to keep ODT files. Then people did not have access to open office as easily. So we started keeping PPT files. This is absolutely no problem. Whatever document you want to upload. But the point is you should generally categorize them like this. So quizzes and assignments. So you can see there are assignments. They are quizzes. We subsequently insert their answers. In my course they are usually discussed. And they are distributed in hard copies. I do not know why my students have not uploaded the answers also. But generally they do that. Now what I wanted to say is that without going into too many details you can use this model installation in the most simplistic form. And still believe me your teaching will become more effective. Try to look at it from a student's perspective. A student gets to know what is going to be the schedule next week. If you go back to the weekly schedule for example. Once I upload my lecture slides all I do is I attach those lecture slides here. So for example what is going to be the schedule this week? What is going to be the lecture slides for this session? Please understand one thing. The fact of life is that in most of the smaller places because teachers are inundated with work. They do not have ordinarily time to plan things in advance. There are many places where teachers have to just rush to take a course. And my humble submission is let us use this opportunity to modify our own self discipline. To say that no matter what if I am going to teach a course and if that course is going to be 14 weeks. In this summer I will plan for those 14 weeks. I will modify my slides at the last moment. But I shall not go to a class unless my slides are uploaded on the side ahead of time. Even if I do not use slides and I do not have a projector I will actually make those slides and upload them for people to be able to glance them later. I may be using chalkboard. So these are variety of things. The dream project that I am talking about is not merely conducting an ISD workshop for thousand teachers. It is actually to change ourselves so drastically that we do a huge quality improvement in the effectiveness of teaching learning process. So now here is the, I will just mention two things. He has shown you online quizzes. How do you conduct a online quiz when you are conducting a class? So I mentioned the use of clicker. I will be designing and actually making thousand prototypes and trying them in my course here in Convocation Hall. Where I show a quiz and I give 30 seconds for students to answer and their response is collected directly from that system. I want such system to be designed in a distributed fashion so that if possible for this July course itself I will send across some 40 odd devices to each one of your colleges with a collecting station and some distributed software which you can put on the serverment for this particular course. So if I am giving a lecture and I shall be giving many lectures in that course because that subject is computer programming. When I show a quiz here at 30 remote centers these thousand teachers will answer that quiz online. They need not have access to computer which is required if you set it up through moodle. And I want all that information from those 30-35 teachers to be collected automatically on your server and FTP to be initiated automatically here. A coalition software which will collect all these files and will show the results in 15 seconds flat. So that system is now being under designed to be implemented by about 40 people working in this summer. In exactly the similar way can you think of extending moodle to be a distributed system. For example, take this subject. All of you would be required to set up the moodle for this subject for the IST workshop in your places. We are going to use moodle.  You will give their assignments. You will do exactly the same thing at their place. They should also have access to the centralized system. Why can't we have only a centralized server and everybody access it? Of course we will have a centralized server. But imagine the internet connection breaks down. Should it mean that those 35 teachers who are assembled at your places can't do anything? They must of course be able to do that. So now we are talking about a true distributed design of the moodle framework, not just the database, backend database. That is a harder problem. Again a group of software engineers and summer interns are going to work on that problem. Tending which what my suggestion is, we will set up at least the backend interface where on a daily basis the incremental changes in your respective moodles can be uploaded into the central side so that we have the totality available here. Designing and implementing a distributed moodle of this magnitude has not been. Next we come to the subject portal. What is the purpose of that subject portal? We said that that will be a portal for collaborative creation of course contents, use of the question bank. Notice Professor Sundar correctly pointed out that if you have a question bank, people can select these questions. We are planning a question bank of minimum 2,000 questions and answers because 1,000 teachers are participating and each one would contribute 2, 3, 4 questions and answers. One of the requirements will be all these teachers must contribute multiple choice quizzes and they fill in the blankises which can be automated. So even for their students in their colleges they should be able to install this moodle for their college and use it for 100, 200 students for at least this course or this subject. But for the portal what do we expect? These 1,000 teachers all of you with three levels of coordination, hierarchy for that larger subject portal. IIT Bombay is the coordinating agency. It will set up the portal here, a much larger server. Next level of hierarchy is those 1335 coordinators who are actually participated in this program. Next level is those 1,000 teachers and the next level is those 8,000 teachers who teach programming in the country. And how many students? Every year 6 lakh students. I expect that within one year the moodle installation at the central site should be catering to 6 lakh registered students not necessarily from the management of their quizzes and assignments and so on. But at least from the point of you of exposing them to what contents have been developed by all these people accessing those contents and participating in discussion forums. So we propose to use that portion of the moodle which permits collaborative discussion and development of material on a continuous basis. Although the main intention of moodle is to be a learning management system. We are saying we are using it as a resource management system rather than grading and such thing for the portal. That is the objective. In this context if any one of you have any ideas of what should be the functionality of the subject portal and how exactly we could use moodle, what portion of the moodle could be useful etc. You are most welcome to post in comments.


Hello and welcome to Newsclick and People Dispatch. On this occasion of May day, we are joined by K. Hemlata, the president of the Center of Indian Trade Unions, or C2 for short. We will be talking to her about the condition of workers in India during this COVID-19 lockdown and the crucial role being played by them. Thank you for joining us today. So can you first talk about healthcare workers who are rightly being called the frontline warriors during this battle? Can you tell us about, particularly about the role being played by care workers such as Asha workers, Anganwadi workers, nurses, midwives, et cetera. And sort of treatment they're getting both at the hands of the government and the people. Yeah, the Asha workers and the Anganwadi workers, they are also along with the doctors and nurses. They are also part of the frontline workers. And they are asked to go house to house and take the identify the people and provide them advice and other things. So along with the nurses, they are going to different houses that are conducting a survey. And Asha workers, though the Anganwadi workers are actually not directly under the ministry of health, they are working under the ministry of women and child development. But because they have close contact with the people, they are also part of the team and they are also going house to house. And the main problem is that they are not provided with any protective equipment, either gloves or mask or anything. That is one area where they are exposed to risk. This is not part of their work, but they are doing this because they are closely related to the people, particularly in the villages, but they are not having any additional remuneration. As it is, the Ashas are not provided with any wages. They are only called social health activists and they are provided with some incentive, which is very low. And now they have additional work and they are not paid for that. That is one issue. Second, they don't have any protective gear. That is the second one. And third, in many places, they are being beaten up by the people. In some places they think, people think that they have come to conduct the CAA survey. And some places they are, because of this stigmatization and all these things, particularly in the minority areas, they don't want to give the information, they don't want people to go there. So this is, though now under this scheme, the government has announced that Ashas also will be provided this 50 lakh insurance. Actually it is when they die, their family will get. So, but even that is not there for the Anganwadi workers. So Anganwadi workers are also part of the team. They are also subject to all these difficulties. They also don't have any additional remuneration for this extra work. It is not part of their routine work. And they are also exposed to the risk. And they're also not provided with any protective equipment nor with this insurance. So these are the main issues that these health workers face to be. And if we talk about other sectors, there are also workers active in many other sectors who are not being talked about as much. So can you tell us more about them? And they're also working despite all these concerns. They haven't stopped their work and they're the ones sustaining us right now. So can you tell us more about the crucial role being played by the working class during this lockdown? So in addition to the health workers, that is the nurses or the doctors or the Ashas Anganwadi workers, there are various other workers who are also indirectly related, who are working in the particular circumstances, like the transport workers. The goods transport workers, the loading and unloading workers. And also the railway trackmen. Recently, we came across a condition, I mean a complaint, where the railway ministry is trying to fast track. Generally what they do when the repairs of the tracks, et cetera, the trackmen, is they do that. They are done in between some time when the trains don't pass. But now because the trains are not running, they want to fast track that. And they are not provided any, means they are not even under the consideration. There is no scope of social distancing. All of them have to together work and they are not provided with any protective care. So these are, and many places, they are finding difficulty to even attend the work because they're villagers. They come from nearby villages. In the villages, they have fast resolutions and they are saying that you can't go to work. If you go work, now the government has issued guidelines that when a particular sector is working, then the employer has to provide accommodation to the workers, their food, et cetera. But these, even the railways is not providing for their own trackmen. So these are, so there are many other sectors where workers are compelled to work, the municipal workers, the sanitation workers. So even the bank employees, the bank employees are also working, the banks are functioning. And because of the Jandham accounts, et cetera, there is lot of a crowd, particularly in the beginning of the month. But the bank employees are also not provided with any protective care or anything. So the various other sectors, the employees and the workers, they're also working. But the government is not at all taking care of them. In addition, of course, to the migrant workers, which has come out as a very big problem, the government guidelines, which are issued immediately after the lockdown, they say that the employers should not retrain the workers, including the contract workers and casual workers. Their wages should be paid. And those who are in leave, they also should be treated. Those who have taken leave before and could not join because of the lockdown, they also should be considered as attending the work and they should be paid wages. But nowhere is this being implemented very few places, including the public sector undertakings. Like the border road organization, we have been receiving a lot of complaints that they are retrenching workers who have been working for decades. And similarly in the private sector, many workers, they're not being paid. And not only the small and medium enterprises, even in the big IT sector, we have found that women, pregnant women, they are being retrenched. Many employees have been retrenched. We have been receiving complaints for a lot of companies based on, based in Pune, based in Calcutta, based in Chennai, Gurgaon, et cetera, IT companies, including multinationals, they have retrained their employees and they are also not paying wages. So this is organized, unorganized public sector and we have been demanding. It is very difficult for the small and medium enterprises to pay wages because they are so small and they can't pay full wages. So we have been demanding that the government should help them, the small enterprises. In many advanced countries also, the governments are paying the wages. So the government should at least pay the wages for the other workers in these enterprises. So in general, the package that the government has given, which is less than 1%, 0.8%. And even out of that, there are certain accounts like the Mandrega workers wages, which have been already accounted for in the budget. So if we remove those things, it comes to hardly 84 or 94,000 crores. So this is very meagre. We have been demanding that particularly the government has to take care of the migrant workers. They have to provide them the wages. And in addition, all the non-tax paying, non-income tax paying people in the country, there should be cash transfer across 7,500. So that's one foot and the other expenditures they can meet. And once the COVID is over, you need the workforce, people who have to work. Unless the people are there to work, they are subject to starvation and malnutrition, which is already very serious in our country, then how the economy will run? Yeah. And we also see that this far right Nayan Ramodi government in India is trying to take advantage of a working class, which is vulnerable right now by attacking their rights, such as the eight hour work day. So can you tell us more about that? One, the government is reportedly contemplating to increase the working hours. May day particularly, we all know that it is remembered for the fight for eight hours work. And that through lot of sacrifices the working class has achieved. But 134 years after that, today we find the governments are trying to increase the working. We are not talking about the employers illegally making the workers work 12 days. It is the government which is trying to legalize the illegal 12 hours work day. And in states like Gujarat, BJP, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, they have already issued notifications that 12 hours work will be, workers have to work for 12 hours without any overtime payment. That is one aspect. And the second is the codification. Even before that the government has been trying to codify the labor laws. Already the board on wages bill has been passed. Now there are three core spending bills. One is industrial relations, second on social security and third on occupational health safety and working conditions. So even there also the government was trying to increase the working hours. And the industrial relations quote, if that is passed it will be almost impossible for the workers to organize into trade unions. It will be almost impossible to go on a legal strike. The right to organize, the right to go on strike of the workers will be totally removed. And the government wants to get them through either an ordinance or through executive order. Now, because they are pending with the parliamentary standing committee, the industrial relations, the parliamentary standing committee's observation on the industrial relations court has been submitted. But the others are pending. But before that we receive reports that they are trying to push them through executive orders or ordinances. That means that taking advantage of this condition where the entire country is under lockdown, where workers cannot mobilize, they cannot protest etc. And that condition is taken advantage by the government to satisfy the demands of the employers. The employers have demanded the Gujarat chamber of commerce. They have demanded that the union should be banned. Formation of union should be banned for one year. They should be prohibited. Union should be prohibited for one year. And similarly, the hire and fire, that was the demand of the employer. So all these things the government want to do under this situation, where the people are suffering, people are losing jobs, people have no income. Instead of addressing the genuine situation of the people, their demands, the government wants to satisfy the employers and attack the rights of the workers. And of course, the unemployment is rapidly increasing and the economy is facing a deep crisis. And the more the government along with many other governments across the world, the response to this situation is that they are planning on opening up certain sectors and easing lockdown restrictions. So what is C2's response to this move? See, lockdown, whether a country-wide lockdown is necessary or not, that also means an issue, which is very slow, unanimity cut. Lockdown, if it is where the hotspots or where to contain the hotspots, this lockdown is not a cure. It is only trying to limit the spread of the disease. Main thing is you have to test. The testing, though it has been increased, even today the testing is less. It is very low in our country.  So that has to be the procedure, but that is not being followed. So even if certain sectors are opened up, then the workers will have at least some jobs, some income. So that will even start the economy again. So that has to be considered properly. Lockdown, maybe it cannot be lifted entirely throughout the country, but where the cases are very low, where it is already contained, that way in a phased manner, it can be removed. Gradually it can be, lockdown can be eased. So that is, we agree for that, but at the same time, the people's health cannot be sacrificed. And now what we say, you were talking about the liberalization. Today, who are the people actually fighting the coronavirus? It is the public sector, hospitals. Today also, there was a report in the media, in the newspapers, that today our two thirds of beds are with the private sector in our country. Because under neoliberal globalization, the public spending, the government spending on health has come down drastically. And 80% of the ventilators are with the private sector, private hospitals. 80% ventilators, two thirds of beds are with the private sector. And they are providing only 10% of, addressing the 10% of COVID patients. And not only the COVID patients, even for the non-COVID carol, so they are not providing, because they are safely locking themselves up because they don't want to take the risk. So that is the type. What we need today is that the government has to spend more on public health. The government has to, in some countries like Spain, they have taken over the private hospitals also in this situation. Because, and what we see today in the USA, which is the most powerful country in the world, there, almost one third of the cases are in the USC. Of the total global cases, one third are in the USC. And one fourth, deaths are in the USC. A country which is having so many missiles, submarines and spending so much on military, why can't it spend on its own, the health of its own people? So it is the policy. So the system, the policies are totally exposed. So in this system under neoliberalization, the health is not first, profits are first. So in the coming days, what we feel is that the government needs to spend more on public health. Health should not be a privilege. It should be treated as a right of the people, as a responsibility of the government. And I think from what we can all estimate from what it seems that the condition is not going to get better any time soon. And it is the working class, which is going to keep suffering the most. So in this situation, what protest actions have been organized by C2? What are they planning to do in the future? And what are the demands that are being put forward? Actually, we have already started. On 21st April, we had a all India protesting. The demand is one, at that time this demand has come up. The government is thinking of increasing the working hours. So that was one of the major demands. But in addition to that, this cash transfer of 7,500, no retracement, payment of wages, and then protective equipment, gloves, masks, et cetera, to the frontline health workers and all the needy, taking care of the migrant workers, providing them shelter, providing them food, et cetera. All these were the major demands. The slogan was, vahashan nahi reishan sayi. Vahashan nahi vetan sayi, vahashan nahi arthik sahaita sayi. For the peasants, it is time for the harvest. They don't have money for the harvesting. They don't have money for transfer of their products to the cities, transport, et cetera. So with these demands, we organized a protest demonstration all over the country, like maintaining physical distance, and maintaining all the guidelines under lockdown. People stand with the placards showing these demands and the flags in their hands. And at 1030, in their own houses, along with their family members, or wherever possible, the union offices or the SEITU offices like that, we have asked them to stand and raise their voice. Because still now they have been hearing a lot of vahashan, a lot of advices, they have practiced that. Now it is time that their voices need to be heard. And for 10 minutes, they have given slogan. And the response was beyond our expectation. In all the 22 states in the country, except of course, where we have our prison, SEITU, in Tripura, the government did not allow the threatened of vindictive actions, et cetera. But everywhere, including Jammu and Kashmir, to all the states, around 55,000 centers, this was held and in more than 400 districts. Out of the 718 districts in the country, this program was held in 408 districts in the country, more than 55,000 places, and approximately 5,000,000 people have participated. This was means beyond totally our expectation, with a short notice. Through social media, through telephone, they have communicated and they have responded. And again on May Day, we said that with this, no wage cuts, no retrenchment, no 12-hour works, tax the rich, tax the super rich and save the poor. Today, the super rich, even the wealth tax was removed in 2016-17 union budget by the BJP government. So even if you restore the wealth tax, if you tax the 953 people who are billionaires, whose minimum wealth is more than 5,000 crores, even you tax these people, the government can definitely allot around 10% of the GDP for the meeting this situation. It is not impossible. Instead of doing that, the government is cutting on the DA of the central government employees that are withholding the dearness elements, increase the dearness elements up to 2021-July. They are asking the government employees to pay, including the retirees, pensioners also. So the government is pushing the entire burden on the common people, not the super rich and the IRS officers who have suggested that they should tax the rich, the super rich and action has been taken against them, three of their senior leaders of the IRS association, they have been charged, which are including their general secretary. So this is the attitude of the government. So on May day also, we have decided with these slogans, we will similarly organize in a wider scale. And in the coming days also, we have to think about, we can't go on keeping silent when the government goes on attacking the workers and their rights. So despite the lockdown, we have evolved measures and how to express our people's anxieties and why is there demands? And in the coming days, definitely we have to unite. In the 21st program, we have appealed to the Kisan support, to the Agricultural Workers Union women and so many other sections, students, youth, et cetera. And everybody responded. So this time also, the call has been given along with the other trade unions, not only CITU, AITUC, INTUC, HMS, and the other trade unions also have joined together in giving this form of protest on May day. Their own flags, they will carry their own flags and these demands, common demands. And in their offices and houses, maintaining the physical distancing, not the social distancing, we want social unity and not the social distance. So maintaining physical distance, unitedly voicing our demands, we have decided to raise our protest. Thank you for joining us today. And that's all the time we have. 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