What the Eff is TMC Feet anyway?
I'm in Bangalore. And the panic of the day obviously has been the amazing Cauvery issue (again?).
Thousands of guys in my office - nobody working but everyone clicking F5 (Refresh) every few seconds on their favourite news site or message board. Such amazing productivity I say - and the news sites are also persistent, it was as if they had sworn they would not release more than a carefully worded 100 word article every 100 minutes.
So we're all anxious for news, and no news source is helping us. Only resort, friends in other offices - who it seemed had already been asked to go home (Lucky they, we thought).
Anyway, thought I'd watch some TV when I got back home and see if there is ay danger to any of us at all - I mean, the last time this issue surfaced it was big shit all over the place. and I also want to know if I should mentally prepare myself for a day off tomorrow or for another panicky day at my desk.
Anyway, so I watch all the gazillion channels that think that beaming news to the populace is their business. Well fine. But I do not understand why all these journalists on TV have to shout their news out? I mean - you have a journalist standing on a noisy intersection and reporting from there, okay I understand she has to shout in order to hear her own voice probably, but hey there was this guy on a golf course (a golf course!) and he was shouting like he was standing next to a rocket engine.
Dont believe me? Go to your TV and switch on NDTV. Or Headlines Today or any other channel for that matter...do you really think this is the way news is supposed to be presented? I have enough of noise and pollution on the roads here, dont want more noise on my TV as well!
Anyway, so the Cauvery issue. So somehow there are these numbers floating around, some people are chuffed, others are just shocked - Tamil Nadu gets a million TMC feet, Karanataka gets only one. I'm like what? Hello? Wtf is TMC Feet? So I put my mind to it and I think...Trillion million cubic feet? Naah..thats wrong..so it must be Thousand Million cubic Feet.
Who the hell invented this unit? the person who did, probably had no idea oit is going to be abused by teenage wannabe ninjas that abound on Indian news channels.
Dude! a Thousand Million is what? Its a billion. A bleeding billion. So why cant they say Karnataka now has to release 192 bcf of water, rather than Karnataka has to release 192 TMC feet of water. Well can I also release 192 TMC Hands?
The reason these dudes dont know this, (and their editors dont notice) is coz they have no idea what the viewers want or that the average IQ of their viewers is at least twice theirs. In which case, we must try and be sympathetic to them - but I'm not, coz I pay for my cable TV and I get this nonsense. None of these news presenters have even a fuzzy idea of what (regardless of whether its thousand million or a billion) cubic feet of water really is.
So I did some calculations so at least I'd elucidate myself on this subject.
First I'd rather convert to SI units coz I hate imperial units. Karnataka can keep 250 bcf of water.
250 TMC Feet = 250 billion cubic feet (bcf) = 7,066,000,000 cubic metres.
Dude - 7 billion cubic metres, thats a lot of water, but how much is it really?
Thats a cube of water 1900 metres high, wide and thick! Or, in other words, if we were to make a swimming pool of 1.5 metre depth (so most Indians could swim), it would forma lake more than 68 km long and 68 km wide! Or enough to cover an incredible 6 lakh sixty thousand (660,000) football pitches!
So hey whats the problem? It seems to be a lotta water...
How much does Karnataka need anyway?
Karnataka has about 52 million people.
This amount of water can (amazingly) provide for the needs of 3.5 million americans (who we all know are the most wasteful species on our planet). And we all know our water consumption is way below what Americans use. I mean we dont use dishwashers, few use washing machines, hell we dont even use wasteful automated car washers - we dont even wash our roads!
7 billion cubic metres of water will serve the domestic needs of (hang on) a staggering 230 billion people in India.
Oops, but we ony have a billion, and we're just talking about Karnataka aye? 52 milion. You know what, even though the average India domestic water requirement is only 30 litres per day, I'll give you 1000 litres per day so you think you have a lavish life. The 1000 litres per day for every person - EVERY PERSON - would mean we have a requirement of 52 million cubic metres of water. And hell, we have 7 billion!
So its really a question of how much we waste, rather than how much we use, or need.
Karnataka gets to keep 250 bcf of water, when it needs only 1.8 bcf of water to provide 1000 litres to every person in the state. Every!
The rest - for irrigation and for the river itself...
Crazy acronyms.
Correction: I am wrong. We need about 1.8 mcf per day for the daily domestic use of everyone. DAILY. So in an year this becomes 632 mcf. We still have 7bcf or 700mcf, so we're still rolling in plenty, but the figures are not as exagerrated as I first thought. My bad!
Thousands of guys in my office - nobody working but everyone clicking F5 (Refresh) every few seconds on their favourite news site or message board. Such amazing productivity I say - and the news sites are also persistent, it was as if they had sworn they would not release more than a carefully worded 100 word article every 100 minutes.
So we're all anxious for news, and no news source is helping us. Only resort, friends in other offices - who it seemed had already been asked to go home (Lucky they, we thought).
Anyway, thought I'd watch some TV when I got back home and see if there is ay danger to any of us at all - I mean, the last time this issue surfaced it was big shit all over the place. and I also want to know if I should mentally prepare myself for a day off tomorrow or for another panicky day at my desk.
Anyway, so I watch all the gazillion channels that think that beaming news to the populace is their business. Well fine. But I do not understand why all these journalists on TV have to shout their news out? I mean - you have a journalist standing on a noisy intersection and reporting from there, okay I understand she has to shout in order to hear her own voice probably, but hey there was this guy on a golf course (a golf course!) and he was shouting like he was standing next to a rocket engine.
Dont believe me? Go to your TV and switch on NDTV. Or Headlines Today or any other channel for that matter...do you really think this is the way news is supposed to be presented? I have enough of noise and pollution on the roads here, dont want more noise on my TV as well!
Anyway, so the Cauvery issue. So somehow there are these numbers floating around, some people are chuffed, others are just shocked - Tamil Nadu gets a million TMC feet, Karanataka gets only one. I'm like what? Hello? Wtf is TMC Feet? So I put my mind to it and I think...Trillion million cubic feet? Naah..thats wrong..so it must be Thousand Million cubic Feet.
Who the hell invented this unit? the person who did, probably had no idea oit is going to be abused by teenage wannabe ninjas that abound on Indian news channels.
Dude! a Thousand Million is what? Its a billion. A bleeding billion. So why cant they say Karnataka now has to release 192 bcf of water, rather than Karnataka has to release 192 TMC feet of water. Well can I also release 192 TMC Hands?
The reason these dudes dont know this, (and their editors dont notice) is coz they have no idea what the viewers want or that the average IQ of their viewers is at least twice theirs. In which case, we must try and be sympathetic to them - but I'm not, coz I pay for my cable TV and I get this nonsense. None of these news presenters have even a fuzzy idea of what (regardless of whether its thousand million or a billion) cubic feet of water really is.
So I did some calculations so at least I'd elucidate myself on this subject.
First I'd rather convert to SI units coz I hate imperial units. Karnataka can keep 250 bcf of water.
250 TMC Feet = 250 billion cubic feet (bcf) = 7,066,000,000 cubic metres.
Dude - 7 billion cubic metres, thats a lot of water, but how much is it really?
Thats a cube of water 1900 metres high, wide and thick! Or, in other words, if we were to make a swimming pool of 1.5 metre depth (so most Indians could swim), it would forma lake more than 68 km long and 68 km wide! Or enough to cover an incredible 6 lakh sixty thousand (660,000) football pitches!
So hey whats the problem? It seems to be a lotta water...
How much does Karnataka need anyway?
Karnataka has about 52 million people.
This amount of water can (amazingly) provide for the needs of 3.5 million americans (who we all know are the most wasteful species on our planet). And we all know our water consumption is way below what Americans use. I mean we dont use dishwashers, few use washing machines, hell we dont even use wasteful automated car washers - we dont even wash our roads!
7 billion cubic metres of water will serve the domestic needs of (hang on) a staggering 230 billion people in India.
Oops, but we ony have a billion, and we're just talking about Karnataka aye? 52 milion. You know what, even though the average India domestic water requirement is only 30 litres per day, I'll give you 1000 litres per day so you think you have a lavish life. The 1000 litres per day for every person - EVERY PERSON - would mean we have a requirement of 52 million cubic metres of water. And hell, we have 7 billion!
So its really a question of how much we waste, rather than how much we use, or need.
Karnataka gets to keep 250 bcf of water, when it needs only 1.8 bcf of water to provide 1000 litres to every person in the state. Every!
The rest - for irrigation and for the river itself...
Crazy acronyms.
Correction: I am wrong. We need about 1.8 mcf per day for the daily domestic use of everyone. DAILY. So in an year this becomes 632 mcf. We still have 7bcf or 700mcf, so we're still rolling in plenty, but the figures are not as exagerrated as I first thought. My bad!
Labels: Bangalore, Cauvery, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, TMC feet
