Search results

Sustainable mobility will be the key to the survival of mankind in the 21st century. Cities with debt-ridden and poorly managed transport systems have to change to the ever-growing demands of the public transport system. The low cost of transport has been a key factor in sustainable development for any city. This study is trying to propose a framework for the selection of sustainable transport in context to an Indian case of NCR Delhi, India.

The present study has identified eight criteria for the selection of a sustainable transport system. Criteria for selection of sustainable transport are CO₂ emissions, cost of fuel, energy efficiency, cost of maintenance, number of accidents, congestion, number of injuries and road noise. Three alternatives of transport considered for this study are state-run bus, pooled car and Shuttl (App-based buses). The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to prioritize the criteria. The study has further illustrated a framework for the selection of sustainable transport based on these criteria.

It is observed that CO₂ emissions are the most important criterion for a sustainable transport system. It is followed by a reduction in congestion and the number of injuries. Three alternatives of transport considered for this study are state-run bus, pooled car and Shuttl (a service provider). Shuttl has been found to be the most sustainable transport system.

AHP is not able to capture the vagueness in decision-making. Therefore, fuzzy AHP can be considered for further detailed analysis as future scope of study in a different context of a sustainable transportation system. Major implications for policymakers and stakeholders are that development of public transport in cities should be done after considering different dimensions of sustainable operations.

The study has proposed a unique framework for the selection of a sustainable transport system by the public based on sustainability criteria. Findings will help policymakers in formulating strategies for developing sustainable transport system.

Infrastructural revolution, intense competition and customer attraction towards organised apparel retailing in India are potentially affecting traditional retailing. The authors seek to identify the factors that customers perceive during shopping in organised apparel retail store. This study also investigates the indirect effects of identified factors on behavioural outcomes such as loyalty.

The study randomly selected the customers immediately after shopping to minimise the experience's carryover effects. A sample of 648 customers was collected. Data were analysed using multivariate analysis of covariance.

The study has found that in-store logistics is the second order factor with ease of return, on-shelf availability, product accessibility, shopping convenience, and product information as the variables. The result shows that in-store logistics, store environment, store communication, merchandise assortment, perceived price and employee attribute influence customer satisfaction. As expected, these factors indirectly influence the loyalty.

This study focused on organised multi-brand apparel retailing, and the survey was conducted in a tier-II city of India only. Hence, any attempt to generalise the findings must be undertaken with caution.

In the context of multi-brand retailing, competition is fierce. New entrants and traditional apparel retailers hesitate to adopt organised apparel retailing. The findings of this study can be helpful for new entrants and traditional apparel retailers to adopt organised apparel retailing.

Previous studies in the field of multi-brand retailing have mainly focused on the marketing aspect of retail stores. This study contributes to the operations aspect and tests the impact of operational function (in-store logistics) on customer satisfaction.

Drawing upon the career construction theory, the present study aims to propose and test a mediation model exploring the association among technology readiness, adoption of human resource (HR) analytics by HR professionals, and organizational career growth.

A survey has been conducted to collect data from HR professionals (N = 347) working in various industrial sectors in India. The data collected is analyzed for mediation using SPSS PROCESS Macro (Model 4).

The study provided evidence about the mediating role of individual adoption of HR analytics between technology readiness (motivators, inhibitors) and organization career growth (career goal progress, professional ability development, promotion speed and remuneration growth).

Firstly, the results provide evidence in relation to the career construction theory with respect to adoption of human resource analytics by HR professionals. Secondly, the study findings validate the technology readiness model in the context of adopting HR analytics. Thirdly and most significantly, the study proposes a novel theoretical framework for adoption of HR analytics by HR professionals in organizations.

The findings imply that HR professionals' technology readiness (motivators and inhibitors) can facilitate better adoption of HR analytics in organizations. Moreover, the adoption of HR analytics shall promote better career growth for HR professionals.

The present study builds and tests a theoretical framework based on technology readiness, individual adoption of HR analytics, and organization career growth. The study is the first of its kind to the best of the authors' knowledge.

The case tells the story of a first generation entrepreneur, Dhirendra Singh, and his struggle for 15 years to establish a mango pulp based beverage marketing company without any external support and funding. The case highlights the travails that Dhirendra goes through in marketing an undifferentiated product, a mango drink. He survives, largely due to his grit and some lucky breaks, until an external funding agency notices him 15 years after he started his journey.

With growth and stability (in 2017, it was the fourth largest packaged beverage in India) come new issues for the enterprise to grapple with. The case leaves the reader to reflect upon these challenges that the company encounters. Can the company overcome these hurdles and thrive? How, is the question that remains unanswered.

Children are the most vulnerable group owing to long lasting impact of the violation of human rights in term of proper nutrition and their right to live. The purpose of this paper is to assess the risk of child mortality associated with size of child at birth and mother’s anemia level in northern India.

The data were used from 2015–2016 National Family Health Survey (NFHS). The participants (n = 41,412) were children aged under-five years from north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The main outcome measure was child deaths defined by under-five mortality. The univariate, bivariate and multivariate analyses were used in data analysis. Kaplan–Meier analyses, Log-rank tests and Cox’s regression analyses were performed to fulfill the objective of the study.

There were a total of 2,835 deaths out of 41,412 births in the past five years preceding the survey period. Children of very small size at birth were significantly two and half times more likely to die than children of average size at birth. The estimated adjusted hazard ratio indicated that the children of severely anemic mothers were significantly 1.5 times more likely to die compared to children of not anemic mothers. Size of child at birth, mother’s anemia level, mother’s age at time of her first birth, wealth index and mother’s education were significantly associated with the under-five mortality in northern India.

The limitation of this study is recall errors arising from the dates of birth and death given by women interviewed in the survey were minimized by restricting the analyses to births within the five-year period preceding the survey.

This study advocates the promotion of comprehensive prevention strategies through appropriate institutional mechanism would be the best intervention or adaptive mechanism to reduce the adverse impact of size of child at birth, mother’s anemia level on under-five mortality in Uttar Pradesh, India.

This research is original. This study enjoys a unique importance by exploring effect of size of child at birth and mother’s anemia on child survival in developing countries like India.

The purpose of the present study is to analyze the mixed convection water boundary layer flows over moving vertical plate with variable viscosity and Prandtl number. The non-linear partial differential equation governing the flow and thermal fields are presented in non-dimensional form by using appropriate transformation. The quasi-linearization technique in combination with implicit finite difference scheme has been adopted to solve the nonlinear-coupled partial differential equation. The numerical results are displayed graphically to illustrate the influence of various non-dimensional physical parameters on velocity and temperature. Further, the numerical results for local skin-friction coefficient and local Nusselt number are also reported. The present findings are compared with previously reported results, and these comparisons are found to be in excellent agreement.

The nonlinear partial differential equations governing the flow and thermal fields have been solved numerically using the implicit finite difference scheme in combination with the quasi-linearization technique. The numerical results are presented in terms of skin friction and heat transfer rate which are useful in determining the surface heat requirements for stabilizing the laminar boundary layer flow over a moving plate in water.

The effect of the ratio of free-stream velocity to the composite reference velocity is significant on the velocity profile. Near the wall region, as ratio of free stream velocity to composite reference velocity increases form 0.1 to 0.5, the velocity overshoot gets enhanced from 3 per cent to 41 per cent. The influence of buoyancy parameter and ration of free stream velocity to composite reference velocity on temperature profile is comparatively less than on velocity profiles. The increase in the skin friction coefficient is dependent on the increase in the value of ratio of free stream velocity to composite reference velocity if the buoyancy parameter λ is fixed and vice versa and increases in ΔT results in a decrease in N and Pr.

The present investigation is to deal with the solution of steady laminar water boundary layer flows over a moving plate with temperature-dependent viscosity and Prandtl number applicable for water using practical data. The fluid considered here is water, as it is one of the most common working fluids found in engineering applications.

In the present work, we focus on developing an in-house parallel meshless local Petrov-Galerkin (MLPG) code for the analysis of heat conduction in two-dimensional and three-dimensional regular as well as complex geometries.

The parallel MLPG code has been implemented using open multi-processing (OpenMP) application programming interface (API) on the shared memory multicore CPU architecture. Numerical simulations have been performed to find the critical regions of the serial code, and an OpenMP-based parallel MLPG code is developed, considering the critical regions of the sequential code.

Based on performance parameters such as speed-up and parallel efficiency, the credibility of the parallelization procedure has been established. Maximum speed-up and parallel efficiency are 10.94 and 0.92 for regular three-dimensional geometry (343,000 nodes). Results demonstrate the suitability of parallelization for larger nodes as parallel efficiency and speed-up are more for the larger nodes.

Few attempts have been made in parallel implementation of the MLPG method for solving large-scale industrial problems. Although the literature suggests that message-passing interface (MPI) based parallel MLPG codes have been developed, the OpenMP model has rarely been touched. This work is an attempt at the development of OpenMP-based parallel MLPG code for the very first time.

The work presents a novel implementation of the generalized minimum residual (GMRES) solver in conjunction with the interpolating meshless local Petrov–Galerkin (MLPG) method to solve steady-state heat conduction in 2-D as well as in 3-D domains.

The restarted version of the GMRES solver (with and without preconditioner) is applied to solve an asymmetric system of equations, arising due to the interpolating MLPG formulation. Its performance is compared with the biconjugate gradient stabilized (BiCGSTAB) solver on the basis of computation time and convergence behaviour. Jacobi and successive over-relaxation (SOR) methods are used as the preconditioners in both the solvers.

The results show that the GMRES solver outperforms the BiCGSTAB solver in terms of smoothness of convergence behaviour, while performs slightly better than the BiCGSTAB method in terms of Central processing Unit (CPU) time.

MLPG formulation leads to a non-symmetric system of algebraic equations. Iterative methods such as GMRES and BiCGSTAB methods are required for its solution for large-scale problems. This work presents the use of GMRES solver with the MLPG method for the very first time.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the gender differentials in childhood feeding practices, health care utilization and nutritional status of children by birth order and sex composition of previous living children in Northern India.

In this paper, data were drawn from India’s 2006 National Family Health Survey. A variety of different analytic methods were used to look for gender differentials in childhood feeding practices, health care utilization and nutritional status of children. Bi-variate analysis was applied to examine the raw values of gender differentials in childhood feeding, health care and nutritional status of children. Besides, gender differentials at the different birth order and sex composition of previous living children have been measured through multivariate logistic regression analysis.

The raw values of gender differentials in childhood feeding, health care and nutritional status of children, regardless of child’s birth order, mother’s number of living sons and other characteristics of the child or mother, shows that the proportion of children who received any liquid, proportion of children receiving solid/semi-solid food and the proportion of fully immunized children vary by their gender significantly. The results of standardized gender differentials by birth order and sex composition of previous living children in the selected indicators of childhood feeding, immunization and health care and nutritional status of children based on multivariate binary logistic regression show that among children of birth order 3+ (3 and higher), male children were less likely to receive solid/semi-solid foods during 24 hours prior to the survey in families with no living son, but two times were more likely to receive any solid/semi-solid food than female children in families with 1+ living sons (p<0.0001). Male children aged 12-23 months born to mothers with no living son were more likely to be fully immunized than female children, while male children born to mothers with 1+ living sons were less likely to be fully immunized than female children (p<0.05) at birth order 3+. However, the analysis showed no significant gender differentials in the nutritional status of children.

The authors observed a strong association between the extents of gender differentials and birth order of the index child and the sex composition of older living siblings. Strong evidence of sex bias against female children was found in families with no living sons and particularly at higher birth orders 2 and 3+ (3 and higher). Overall, the study demonstrates the need to focus on predominance of intra-household differential rather than inter-household differential.

This paper brings out the gender differentials in childhood feeding practices, health care utilization and nutritional status of children by birth order and sex composition of previous living children in Northern India.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate linkage among productivity, quality, and business performance in home-based brassware units in India.

This study involved action research of home-based brassware units applying procedures for three-stage least-squares (3SLS) regression analysis, with data obtained through questionnaire survey based on convenience sampling.

This study has supported the established belief that quality leads to productivity, and subsequently productivity leads to better business performance for home-based brassware units in India. The consistent and logical result of this study using 3SLS regression analysis has provided empirical understanding of the appropriate linkage among productivity, quality, and business performance.

This study has limitations of findings, as it studied the home-based brassware units in the Indian context only.

This study implies that marketable home-based brassware products are to be produced by taking into account boundaries of production within the framework of goals and value created by motivation and dependability for monitoring the business performance. Identifying an appropriate linkage among productivity, quality, and business performance may project a holistic evaluation of the policy development related to home-based brassware units.

This is an original study to test empirical linkages among productivity, quality, and business performance using 3SLS regression analysis particularly for home-based brassware units in India.