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Working Papers | 2008

Resolving Business Disputes in India by Arbitration:Problems Due to the Definition of Court

Anurag K. Agarwal

The definition of Court in the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, is substantially different from that in the earlier law of 1940. Due to this new definition, there is tremendous load of work on the District Judge, which was earlier shared by other judges in the Civil Court. The experience of the last ten years testifies it amply that the District Judge is not able to devote as much time as is expected to arbitration matters and the cases are simply poling up. It adds to the delay and makes matters worse for the litigants. The District Judge is the senior-most judge in the district taking care of civil matters and as a matter of practice, she is also the senior-most judge taking care of criminal matters as the Sessions Judge. The designation of the head of the District Judiciary is, therefore, District and Sessions Judge. As the routine criminal matters of bail, interim applications, etc. are much more urgent than the civil matters like arbitration, most of the time of the District and Sessions Judge is devoted to criminal matters. Even with the best of intentions, the District and Sessions Judge is generally not able to earmark sufficient time for arbitration matters which require in-depth study. The approach followed in this paper is primarily interpretive and historical. Part II begins by discussing business dispute resolution in India; and Part III examines the role of courts in arbitration and difficulties experienced due to narrow definition of court. Finally, Part IV questions legislative wisdom by analysing the causes of legislative indifference and failure of legislature to do its duty; and suggests that may be the only plausible solution lies with the judiciary in the shape of judicial legislation.

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Working Papers | 2008

Store Format Choice in an Evolving Market . A TPB Approach

Kamaljit Anand Singh and Piyush Kumar Sinha

The store choice has been studied extensively in the literature, but store format choice has had limited research attention. The store choice modeling has been primarily done in the random utility theory framework, which however is a neo-economics based view of choice decision that ignores the psychological and behavioral aspects of this planned behavior. The store format choice for bulk grocery purchase despite being a rational context has not been conceptualized in the most accepted construct in attitude behavior, the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Attitude-behavior linkage has been studied extensively in literature but there is still no consensus on the components of attitude, their interrelationship and resultant impact on conation. The Theory of Reasoned Action has evolved over time to incorporate perceived behavioral control and past behavior to improve its explanatory capacity as TPB; however, it has maintained its unidimensionalist approach and has not tested affect and cognition independently for its impact on behavior. It may therefore be relevant to explore the possibility of testing the proposed Converging framework of Affect and Cognition and comment on the relationship of the structural components of attitude and its impact on format choice. The impact of past behavior on future behavior in Theory of Planned Behavior has been ambiguous while there has not been much emphasis on the quality of past experience. The current research takes up the past experience quality and tests it in the attitude behavior relationship as an antecedent of actual behavior. This paper conceptualizes the store format choice behavior in the Theory of Planned Behavior framework by exploring the strength of attitude-behavior relationship mediated through behavioral intention and its impact on format choice as also the independent role of affect and cognition on the format choice.

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Working Papers | 2008

Loyalty Programmes: Practices, Avenues and Challenges

Preeta Vyas and Piyush Kumar Sinha

Complexity of modern business requires managers to strive for innovative strategies to acquire and retain customers in any product market field. As acquiring new customers is getting costlier day by day, business organizations have offered continuity/loyalty programmes to retain/reward existing customers and maintain relationships. The premise of CRM is that once a customer is locked in, it will be advantageous to both the organization as well as customer to maintain relationships and would be a win-win situation for both. Consumers find it beneficial to join such programmes to earn rewards for staying loyal. Through loyalty programmes, firms can potentially gain more repeat business, get opportunity to cross-sell and obtain rich customer data for future CRM efforts (Yuping Liu, 2007). This paper, exploratory in nature, attempts to provide a conceptual overview of Loyalty in organized retail sector, outlines practices of grocery retail outlets in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the state of Gujarat and the seventh-largest urban agglomeration in India, with a population of 56 lakhs (5.6 million). It also throws light on consumer expectations, perceptions and problems faced through indepth exploration. Based on literature review and environment in India, an emerging economy, it attempts to predict future of such programmes specifically in Indian organised retail sector and discusses managerial challenges of managing loyalty programmes and provides agenda for future research directions.

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Working Papers | 2008

Development of Corrugated Fiber Board Cartons for Long Distance Transport of Tomato in India

Girja Sharan, S Srivastav, Kishor P Rawale, and Umang Dave

Tomato growers of Gujarat , north-west India , traditionally send produce to wholesale market in Ahmedabad city for auction. Growing areas lie about 250-300 km from the city. Growers were constrained to sell there even if the prices were not attractive which the case usually as season advanced was. Lack of sturdy packaging deterred them from sending produce to more distant markets such as Bombay ( 600 km ) , Delhi ( 900 km) or Bangalore ( 2000) . Peti, the box used presently, made of strips of wood nailed together does not protect the produce adequately. Although, there are many large packaging firms in the region producing boxes for various consumer products, problem of tomato growers was not recognized. Their view was that tomato being a low-value commodity, growers will not buy better packaging. Being mostly small, growers were not organized enough to raise funds to sponsor research at public R&D institutions in the area. That task was therefore taken up. Boxes that protected the produce better on long journey and were affordable were designed and introduced successfully in the region. This paper describes the development.

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Working Papers | 2008

Strategies for Improved Servicing of the Customers: Case of Ghaziabad Goods Shed of the Indian Railways

G. Raghuram and Samantha Bastian

The Ghaziabad (GZB) goods shed was one of the top rail goods handling points in the National Capital Region (NCR). The growth was expected to be robust in the forthcoming years, since GZB and Noida were high growth districts in the Uttar Pradesh part of the NCR. GZB goods shed was one of the fifty high traffic sheds identified for improvement, as part of the Indian Railways (IRs) Mission 900 mt loading. The paper provides a comprehensive description of GZB goods shed, including facilities, traffic flow, customer interface, processes, etc. In this context, the paper raises questions regarding (i) main concerns in GZB goods shed as viewed (a) by customers and (b) from IRs perspective, (ii) analytical support for customer service improvement provided by demurrage (wharfage) data, (iii) operational, process and infrastructure improvements at GZB, (iv) long term improvements, and (v) need for perspective changes.

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Working Papers | 2008

Implementing Tabu Search to Exploit Sparsity in ATSP Instances

Sumanta Basu, Ravindra S Gajulapalli, and Diptesh Ghosh

Real life traveling salesman problem (TSP) instances are often large,sparse, and asymmetric. Conventional tabu search implementations for the TSP that have been reported in the literature, almost always deals with small, dense and symmetric instances. In this paper, we outline data structures and a tabu search implementation that takes advantage of such data structures, which can exploit sparsity of a TSP instances, and hence can solve relatively large TSP instances (with up to 3000 nodes) much faster than conventional implementations. We also provide computational experiences with this implementation.

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Working Papers | 2008

A review of the Tabu Search Literature on Traveling Salesman Problems

Sumanta Basu and Diptesh Ghosh

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most widely studied problems inrncombinatorial optimization. It has long been known to be NP-hard and hence research onrndeveloping algorithms for the TSP has focused on approximate methods in addition to exactrnmethods. Tabu search is one of the most widely applied metaheuristic for solving the TSP. Inrnthis paper, we review the tabu search literature on the TSP, point out trends in it, and bringrnout some interesting research gaps in this literature.

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Working Papers | 2008

An Exploratory Study of the Role of Educational Incentives in Primary Education in Gujarat

Vijaya Sherry Chand, Tathagata Banerjee, and Chattopadhyay Bhargab

This study explores the role of incentives—monetary or non-monetary compensation offered to children so that an educational need is fulfilled or perceived cost is brought down—in attaining certain expected educational enrolment and retention outcomes. It draws on a survey conducted in six villages in Gujarat. Incentives themselves may not be that critical in improving access and retention performance; other socio-economic and school-related factors may be more significant in ensuring access and retention. However, incentives may have help in keeping the poorer performers in school.

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Working Papers | 2008

Creation of a Single National ID: Challenges & Opportunities for India

Rajanish Dass and Bajaj R K

A National ID for all citizens and residents of India has long being considered a critical necessity, albeit the related projects have been in pilot mode for the past several years and no distinct road ahead seems to be coming out. The government has been focusing on inclusive growth and has launched several schemes at different levels to facilitate the same. However, monitoring the execution of these schemes and understanding clearly if the targeted citizens actually have got benefited, would demand for substantial granularity of information and doing away with information bottlenecks. Interestingly, proper execution of the National ID project by the government can prove to be useful for execution of various schemes and projects as well as in accessing multiple government and private sector services. This paper focuses on the need for a single national identity system in India and its proposed execution which may actually be linked to citizen life cycle. The other aspects covered and analyzed include current Indian scenario, challenges, existing identification systems and loopholes in the existing systems. Major challenges seem to be coming from enrolments, technology platform choice and strategic design, corresponding policy and legal frameworks. The paper also discusses about international scenario of single national id projects undertaken in 27 countries across the globe to understand current status, adoption and usage. To reinforce the need for national ID, the existing IDs were analysed based on a scoring model considering various dimensions. Primary research was conducted, based on which it was found none of the existing IDs was able to satisfy as a National ID based on the scoring model. The proposed road map has been discussed in length i.e technology platform, smart card technology, legal and administrative framework, business model based on Private-Public Partnership (PPP) considering the mammoth and diverse population. A ranking matrix may be created to come up with a composite score for all districts based on various dimensions. The execution may be planned to be executed without asking Indians to stand in queue for one more ID and accelerating towards a more secured society and more importantly ensuring better delivery of Government services to citizens.

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Working Papers | 2008

An Investigation of Incongruency and Distraction Hypotheses: The Context of Dubbed TV Commercials

P. Venkatesh and Piyush Kumar Sinha

When one looks at the Television commercials scene in India, one easily sees three distinct patterns of communication. One is the nation-wide campaigns that are language neutral, meaning, they are purely music based. The other kind is a pure regional communications, with regional content starting from the language to the props used. The third variety is more like the 'transition-ads' that are between a pure nation-wide and a pure regional communication. These are basically nation-wide commercials dubbed in the regional languages, while not changing any part of the visual: thus they are 'national' with their visuals and regional with their sound track. The current study seeks to understand the effectiveness of such dubbed advertisements. Here incongruency and distraction hypotheses are investigated through two experiments. A social message against the use of cell-phones is used with students as target audience. The results of the first experiment while indicates distraction effects, the ANOVA tests have a very low power. The second experiment apart from repeating the first experiment with a little larger sample also looks at amount of counterarguments in the treatment conditions. The results of the second study do not validate any of the hypotheses. However the recall results are intriguing. Divided attention and incongruency are found to be two competing theories in explaining the recall effects of dubbed advertisements.

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