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2757 items in total found

Working Papers | 2011

Demand for Fertiliser in India: Determinants and Outlook for 2020

Vijay Paul Sharma and Hrima Thaker

Chemical fertilisers are key element of modern technology and have played an important role in agricultural productivity growth in India. However, the demand-supply gap of fertilisers in India has increased in recent times, thereby leading to increased dependency on imports. Indian imports, which were about 2 million tonnes in early part of 2000, increased to 10.2 million tonnes of fertilisers in 2008-09. In view of importance of fertilisers in agricultural growth and the possibility of an emerging demand-supply gap, there is need to forecast future demand. The paper begins with an overview of fertiliser consumption trends and then identifies important determinants of fertiliser demand and develops projects demand scenarios for fertilisers in India in 2020-21.
India is the second largest consumer of fertilisers in the world after China, consuming about 26.5 million tonnes. However, average intensity of fertiliser use in India remains much lower than most countries in the world but is highly skewed, with wide inter-regional, inter-state, and inter-district variations. The results show that non-price factors such as irrigation, high yielding varieties, were more important than price factors in influencing demand for fertilisers. Of the two price policy instruments, affordable fertiliser prices and higher agricultural commodity prices, the former is more powerful in influencing fertiliser demand. The paper suggests that in order to ensure self-sufficiency in agricultural production in the country, availability of fertilisers at affordable prices should be prioritized over higher output prices. By 2020, fertiliser demand in the country is projected to increase to about 41.6 million tones and is expected to grow at a faster rate in eastern and southern region compared with north and west. To meet the increasing fertiliser requirements of the country, a conducive and stable policy environment, availability of raw materials, capital resources, and price incentives will play a critical role.

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Working Papers | 2011

Whither Patent Litigation in India?

Anurag K. Agarwal

Patent litigation in India is growing. Awareness about patents and the possibility of commercial exploitation of patents is increasing. This is due to better laws and improving registration facilities. Indian firms are taking the patent disputes to courts, as was and is very common in the United States. More than a century back, disputes about electric bulb, telephone and automobile have been resolved in the American courts. Indian courts never had as much patent litigation as the American and English courts had. In the last ten years or so, things have changed. Post-WTO, Indian law has been amended and patent protection has become stronger. Patent law and protection provided by it is being increasingly used as a potent tool in competitive strategy formulated by many companies. The courts are playing a very important role in ultimately resolving the disputes and interpreting the law. There is, however, a need to expedite the process of resolution of such disputes.

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Working Papers | 2011

Unique Identity Project in India: A Divine Dream or a Miscalculated Heroism?

Rajanish Dass

The Unique Identity Project in India is a flagship project as being highlighted by the Government of India and is being portrayed as a panacea for all ills that exist in the country. Although time can only tell about the efficiency and efficacy of the project, but the very launch of this exercise has made it the largest biometric based identity disbursing e-government project in the globe. This paper, tries to put the current UID project of India into a perspective to evaluate the set of issues and concerns, as pointed by various stakeholders and try to understand the degree of criticality of those arguments. In this light, the areas of concerns around the UID project in India are also being pointed out. Given the largest IT project in nay government globally, the topic is of immense significance besides being timely and the discussion can provide impetus to a series of research activities in the areas of public policy, Information Systems planning and execution as well as appreciating the risks that get associated with such large initiatives.

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Working Papers | 2011

Medical Negligence: Law and Interpretation

Anurag K. Agarwal

Negligence by doctors has to be determined by judges who are not trained in medical science. They rely on experts' opinion and decide on the basis of basic principles of reasonableness and prudence. This brings into a lot of subjectivity into the decision and the effort is to reduce it and have certain objective criteria. This may sound simple but is tremendously difficult as medical profession evolves and experimentation helps in its evolution. Thus, there is a constant tussle between the established procedures and innovative methods. But, innovation simply for the sake of being different, without any reason is not acceptable. And, these issues make it extremely challenging to decide negligence by doctors. The paper examines the concept of negligence in medical profession in the light of interpretation of law by the Supreme Court of India and the idea of the 'reasonable man'.

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Working Papers | 2011

Finance Teaching and Research after the Global Financial Crisis

Jayanth R. Varma

Finance has come in for a great deal of criticism after the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Clearly there were serious problems with finance as it was practiced in the years before the crisis. To the extent that this was only a gap between theory and practice, there is a need for finance practice to go back to its theoretical roots. But there is a need to re-examine finance theory itself.

The paper begins with an analysis of what the crisis taught us about preferences, probabilities and prices, and then goes on to discuss the implications for the models that are used in modern finance.

The paper concludes that the finance curriculum in a typical MBA programme has not kept pace with the developments in finance theories in the last decade or more. While a lot needs to change in finance teaching, finance theory also needs to change though to a lesser extent. Many ideas that are well understood within certain subfields in finance need to be better assimilated into mainstream models. For example, many concepts in market microstructure must become part of the core toolkit of finance. The paper also argues that finance theory needs to integrate insights from sociology, evolutionary biology, neurosciences, financial history and the multidisciplinary field of network theory. Above all, finance needs more sophisticated mathematical models and statistical tools.

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Working Papers | 2011

Efficiency of Indian Banking Industry in the Post-Reform Era

Dwivedi Amit Kumar and Charyulu Kumara D.

One of the major objectives of Indian banking sector reforms was to encourage operational self-sufficiency, flexibility and competition in the system and to increase the banking standards in India to the international best practices. The second phase of reforms began in 1997 with aim to reorganization measures, human capital development, technological up-gradation, structural development which helped them for achieving universal benchmarks in terms of prudential norms and pre-eminent practices. This paper seeks to determine the impact of various market and regulatory initiatives on efficiency improvements of Indian banks. Efficiency of firm is measured in terms of its relative performance that is, efficiency of a firm relative to the efficiencies of firms in a sample. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has used to identify banks that are on the output frontier given the various inputs at their disposal. The present study is confined only to the Constant-Return-to-Scale (CRS) assumption of decision making units (DMUs). Variable returns to scale (VRS) assumption for estimating the efficiency was not attempted. It was found from the results that national banks, new private banks and foreign banks have showed high efficiency over a period time than remaining banks.

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Working Papers | 2011

An Exploration into Technological Capabilities among early stage Indian product based Telecom start-ups

Prageet Aeron and Rekha Jain

New technology based start-ups play a very important role in developing the economy of a country. In India, telecom sector has seen unprecedented growth over the last decade and this has led to emergence of several telecom related start-ups. However, product based B2B start-ups are rare and existing ones have to undergo several challenges in commercializing. Surprisingly not much research work has been undertaken in identifying capabilities among early stage start-ups although the early phase represents a very crucial phase for product based firms and has been known to determine the success or failure for start-ups. Present study explores the technological capabilities that enable commercialization among such early stage start-ups by adopting a multiple case (four independent cases) based inductive methodology with Indian telecom start-ups as the context. We have identified architectural design, algorithmic implementation and product adaptation as components of technological capability of such start-ups. We further drill in to each of the sub-components of the technological capabilities to unearth their antecedents and peculiarities in telecom product company context. As a result we also present a classification scheme for studying the product architecture in the telecom context. We analyze and point out differences in technological capability among telecom start-ups vis-à-vis established firms in the sector .

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Working Papers | 2011

Identification of Marketing Capabilities: A study on Indian product based B2B Telecom start-ups

Prageet Aeron and Rekha Jain

New technology based start-ups play a very important role in developing the economy of a country. In India telecom sector has seen unprecedented growth over the decade and this has led to emergence of several telecom related start-ups. However, product based B2Bstart-ups are still rare and they have to undergo several challenges to stay afloat. Surprisingly not much research work has been undertaken in identifying capabilities among early stage start-ups although the early phase represents a very crucial phase for product based firms and in determines the success or failure for start-ups. Present study explores the inherent marketing capabilities that enable commercialization among such early stage start-ups by adopting a multiple case based inductive methodology with Indian telecom start-ups as our context. We have identified market orientation, positioning and segmentation, selling and after sales services as components of marketing capability of such start-ups. We also identify several idiosyncrasies among telecom start-ups vis-à-vis established firms in the sector. Fina lly we make a case for policy level intervention to promote telecom start-ups in the Indian context.

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Working Papers | 2011

Opportunity Recognition in High Tech and Regulatory Environment: A study of product based Indian Telecom start-ups

Prageet Aeron and Rekha Jain

Opportunity recognition forms the first step of entrepreneurship. Off late entrepreneurship research has looked at opportunity recognition from varied lenses with entrepreneurial learning forming the core of most scholarly work. However opportunity recognition in high tech sectors is slightly different due to a high component of knowledge intensiveness inherent in such sectors and has been largely ignored in most work. So, we explore a specific high tech sector in the paper to understand and further the existing concepts within opportunity recognition process. We choose the Indian telecom sector as the context of the study and using an inductive case based approach arrive at conceptual combination as the dominant form of idea generation. The regulatory environment was found to acts as an enabler for the new ideas to flourish. We also bring in the idea of dynamic customization as the driving force behind the venture akin to symbiotic relationship present between organisms in the nature.

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Working Papers | 2011

Evolution of Technological Capabilities: A study of Indian products based Telecom start-up firms

Prageet Aeron and Rekha Jain

New technology based start-ups play a very important role in developing the economy of a country. However, product based B2B start-ups in India are rare and existing ones have to undergo several challenges in commercializing. Present study explores the evolution of technological capabilities that enable commercialization among such early stage start-ups by adopting a multiple case based (four independent start-ups) inductive methodology with Indian telecom start-ups as the context. We have identified architectural design, algorithmic implementation and product adaptation as components of technological capability of such start-ups. We explore the link between knowledge acquisition, telecom specific knowledge and capability evolution in present work in a regulated and knowledge intensive context. Finally, we put forth a three stage framework mapping the evolution of technological capabilities among telecom start-ups, as well as identify regulatory bodies, standard making bodies and social network as facilitators in the capability evolution process.

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