Home Menu
icon-menu-close.svg

Faculty & Research

Faculty & Research

Research Productive

Show result

Clear
Search Query :
Area :
Search Query :
2757 items in total found

Working Papers | 2006

Employee Privacy at Workplaces: Some Pertinent Issues

Krishnan Sandeep K, Biju Varkkey, and Raghavan Anush

Employee privacy at the workplace is an issue of debate worldwide. With data security and other organizational interests becoming paramount, the employee rights for privacy and freedom is curtailed. This paper explores the underlying factors that contribute to violation of workplace privacy, the factors that affect how workplace privacy is defined, and debates on how privacy notions change based on cultural differences. We also try to understand the relevance of employee privacy nuances in the Indian context. The paper poses pertinent questions on definition of workplace privacy, and the balance of managing the employee and employer interests.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2006

Strategic Marketing Alliances, Partnerships and Networks – The Logic of Cooperation, Roots, Evolution and Advantage

Prathap Oburai and Baker Michael J

The marketing discipline is evolving and so is its agenda with the advent of relationship marketing, networks and other related sub-fields. Till recently, business literature focused largely on competition, and cooperation, its counter part, has received insufficient attention. With a view to redress the situation, this research article investigates the phenomenon of strategic marketing alliances, partnerships and networks, and aims to make fundamental theoretical contributions in the sub-field of business-to-business relations and cooperation. Eclectic and wide-ranging enquiry is a main research tool employed and hence the character of this research is interdisciplinary. An extensive literature review of a number of related disciplines is undertaken in order to capture the essence of cooperative strategies and implications for competitive advantage. In this paper, we examine the phenomenon of cooperation and its evolution over time, and highlight the advantages of cooperative strategies in the workplace and in economic organisation. Following an introductory section, we discuss in the second and third sections the evolution of cooperation and need for adaptation on the part entities in order to obtain favourable outcomes. Fourth section continues the discussion along the biological evolutionary lines and adds the crucial dimension of social organisation. Consequent changes that altered the ways in which societies and economies developed are captured in the fifth section. The final and concluding section is devoted to exploring avenues for building of theories that explain cooperative forms of organisation.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2006

Growth Acceleration and Potential in Gujarat

Ravindra H. Dholakia

The paper begins by considering the growth experience of Gujarat in 17 sectors compared to the nation during the pre-reform period of 1980-92 and reform period of 1991-2004 identifying areas of strength and weaknesses. It then identifies episodes of high economic growth over 4 and 10 consecutive years in each sector in the state over the last two decades and derives plausibly optimistic growth potential of the state in future. In order to examine the feasibility of such optimistic growth targets, a preliminary attempt is made to estimate traditional sources of economic growth in Gujarat in the neoclassical growth accounting framework for the primary and non-primary sectors in the two sub-periods. Sources of growth acceleration are derived and implications of targeting substantial growth acceleration implied by earlier estimate of optimistic growth potential in the state are examined. In the process, the paper provides first estimates of capital stock, growth of land input, factor shares and total factor productivity growth for Gujarat broadly comparable and consistent with the national level estimates. A simultaneous equations model to identify the prime-movers or drivers of economic growth in Gujarat is also fitted before concluding the paper with suggested strategy and policy changes based on the findings of the study to achieve faster growth in the state.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2006

Role of Educational and R&D Institutions in City Clusters: An Exploratory Study of Bangalore and Pune Regions in India

Rakesh Basant and Pankaj Chandra

This paper explores the role played by academic institutions in Bangalore and Pune cities of India. It shows that there exists a large variety of linkages between industry and academia in the two Indian cities; a hierarchy of institutions satisfies a hierarchy of local demands ranging from skills to new technologies. While labor market linkages continue to dominate, global and local changes are creating opportunities for knowledge based linkages. With enhanced competition and privatization of research and education, these linkages are bound to undergo significant change in the future and policy should facilitate this transition.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2006

Spotting Difficult Weakly Correlated Binary Knapsack Problems

Diptesh Ghosh and Tathagata Bandyopadhyay

In this paper, we examine the possibility of quickly deciding whether or not an instance of a binary knapsack problem is difficult for branch and bound algorithms. We first observe that the distribution of the objective function values is smooth and unimodal. We define a measure of difficulty of solving knapsack problems through branch and bound algorithms, and examine the relationship between the degree of correlation between profit and cost values, the skewness of the distribution of objective function values and the difficulty in solving weakly correlated binary knapsack problems. We see that the even though it is unlikely that an exact relationship exists for individual problem instances, some aggregate relationships may be observed. Key words: Binary Knapsack Problems; Skewness; Computational Experiments.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2006

Costing of HIV/AIDS Intervention of Providing Antiretroviral Therapy

Bhat Ramesh and Saha Somen

India's initiative to provide structured antiretroviral therapy has raised hope among people living with HIV/AIDS to lead a more productive life. However, from a programme perspective, providing structured antiretroviral therapy has got high cost implications and there are ethical issues related to the provision of second line therapy in case of drug failure. To date, evidences on the cost implications of running ART programmes are mostly from developed and African countries. The current study attempts to work out the cost implications of running the public funded ART centre in the state of Gujarat. Data on cost and patient load were collected through actual field visits to the centre. Using incremental cost approach the cost of providing ART therapy to a patient works out to be Rs. 668 per month. These calculations are based on provision of first line therapy only. Using this costing and assuming a provision of second line therapy for 16 per cent of the cases, we estimate that India will need financial provision of Rs. 454 crore to Rs. 1342 crore for a period of five years under different scenarios to successfully implement the programme. Note: For softcopy of this paper, please contact the author - email: rbhat@iima.ac.in

Read More

Working Papers | 2006

Commitment of State Health Officials: Identifying Factors and Scope for Improvement

Sunil Kumar Maheshwari, Bhat Ramesh, and Saha Somen

Commitment, competencies and skills of people working in the health sector has significant impact on sector performance and its reform process. The current paper is a part of broader multi state studies carried out by the authors in India. The paper attempts to analyse the commitment of state health officials and its implications for human resource practices in Gujarat. The study suggests Gujarat, as compared to other states of India, have achieved significant progress in ensuring commitment of its health officials. However, the state needs to invest progressively and in a proactive manner towards improving the leadership quality, supervision skills and autonomy at workplace to improve and sustain the motivation of its health officials. Improving motivation for the health staffs also involves issues related to infrastructure, involvement, supervision and monitoring, continuous medical education and training, human resource planning, smooth reporting process, administration and audit requirements and prioritisation and synchronisation of health programmes. In order to achieve this, two sets of strategies for reforms are suggested. One relates to short term achievable reforms and other relates to long-term research based actions.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2006

Financial Health of Private Sector Hospitals in India

Bhat Ramesh

Hospitals are an important component of the healthcare delivery system. Over the years, India has experienced a significant increase in the number of hospital beds to meet the growing health demands of its population. Most of this growth has been experienced in the small sized private hospital sector (popularly known as nursing homes in India). The corporate hospital sector, however, has not exhibited similar growth though private expenditures on medical and health care in real terms have grown at 10 per cent per annum and government of India initiating number of policy reforms after 1991 aimed at attracting more capital to hospital sector. This experience has something to do with the financial health and risks, as these are critical determinants in attracting private capital. Using the financial balance sheets and profit and loss account data of 128 hospitals in India, this paper examines the financial health of hospitals in the private sector. Based on 26 key financial ratios, the paper empirically identifies relevant dimensions of financial health of hospitals. These dimensions are: profitability, financial structure, overall efficiency, cost structure, profit appropriation, technology advancement, credit management, fixed asset intensity, liquidity and current assets efficiency. It then discusses the implications of the findings. Because of lower profitability, lower financial efficiencies and less understood economies of scale, the risks in the health sector are likely to remain high. Other risk factors are the geographic pull factor, long gestation periods, a highly fragmented sector and inadequacy of standards. In this scenario, new investment in the health sector will remain resource dependent on subsidised channels of funding and will be sensitive to the out-of-pocket payment of fees, which still remains the main channel of revenues of these hospitals.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2005

On the Optimal Staffing of Surgeons and Efficient Scheduling of Surgeries at a High-Volume Eye Hospital

Desai Tejas A

It is well-known that the demand for services at many if not all hospitals is variable over a given year such that the demand is significantly higher in some months compared to the rest of the months in any given year. This is especially true for surgical departments at many hospitals. Therefore, it is a challenge to staff the surgical departments in such a way that the demand for surgeries throughout a year is met without creating significant over- or under-staffing at any point in a given year. In other words, an optimal level of staffing is sought so that the staff is not significantly over- or under- utilized at any point in a given year. In this paper, we consider an algorithmic approach of arriving at such an optimal level of staffing given some practical constraints. We apply this approach to the surgery department of the paying section of the Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, India.

Go to link
Read More

Working Papers | 2005

A Study of Dew Water Yields on Galvanized Iron Roof in Kothara (North-West India)

Girja Sharan, Beysens D, and Milimouk I

In order to determine what amount of dew water can be collected without much investment during the dry season (October -May) in north - west India, a study was performed on plain, un-insulated, corrugated galvanized iron roofs that are common in this rural region. Between October 1, 2004 and May 31, 2005, the cumulative dew yield on a 18 m2 double - sloped (30°) test roof was 113.5 L. The west side gave 35 % higher water yield than the east side. The use of thermal insulation and more IR radiative materials would have increased this yield by 40 % (160 L). An analysis of dew events is made with meteorological data. It shows that the variable relative humidity is the most important parameter, which in turn is strongly correlated with the average wind direction with respect to monsoon direction. The cumulative dew water yield (6.3 mm) remains modest when compared with the average rain fall (300 mm). But dew occurs far more frequently than rain and it forms precisely during the dry season when water is most scarce.

Go to link
Read More
IIMA