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The mounting focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in business has sparked substantial curiosity in understanding the nexus between ESG and the companies’ strategic decisions. This study aims to investigate the influence of firms’ ESG disclosure scores on their dividend payout. Furthermore, it examines the nuanced dynamics of this relationship by exploring the moderating role of the country’s investor protection regulations and regulatory enforcement.

This study uses pooled ordinary least square regression with year, industry and country effects. It analyzes a balanced panel data set of 192 non-financial firms drawn from the primary equity indices of BRICS nations. This study examined the data of six years spanning 2015–2020.

The findings discover a significantly positive relationship between ESG scores and dividend payout ratio, conveying that firms with higher ESG scores allocate more of their profits as dividends. Furthermore, the finding reveals that country-level robust investor protection and effective regulatory enforcement mechanisms undermine the positive association between ESG ratings and payouts of dividends, suggesting that the ESG disclosure of firms operating in a setting characterized by enhanced investor safeguards and stricter regulatory oversight will exert less influence on their dividend decisions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to concentrate on the ESG–dividend nexus in the BRICS countries. Furthermore, this study used each country’s investor protection index and regulatory enforcement scores to comprehend the influence of country-level legal frameworks in shaping the relationship between ESG and dividend decisions, thus adding value to the existing literature on corporate sustainability.

The purpose of this study is to get an understanding regarding the clusters of middle management employees on the basis of their knowledge sharing behaviour. Designing knowledge sharing behaviors with a distinct focus for a specified group of employees can be an effective and productive one. As it is often argued that the cluster of employees labeled as “middle management” is the key player for knowledge sharing behaviors – a subject of this study that intends to contribute to management strategy to enhance organizational effectiveness and subsequently to its knowledge sharing phenomona.

Cluster analysis was adopted as key tool as a part of quantitative method to accumulate the data from 597 employees who are working within the middle management of service sector located in the union territory of India named Jammu and Kashmir.

Three distinct segments namely – “knowledge sharing adepts (KSA),” “knowledge sharing scrupulous (KSC)” and “knowledge sharing servitudes (KSE)” as the prime domains of knowledge sharing behavior are identified.

To draw a narrow focus, the study was limited to the service sector of a union territory in India, hence the findings may not be generalized. Furthermore, as knowledge sharing behavior of individuals is always evolved out of social and historical practices, findings of this cross-sectional study should ideally be needed to be updated time to time through further research.

Cluster dynamicism of knowledge sharing behavior based on the differentiated and specified group of employee functions distinctly which in turn increases the organizational productivity with a particular focus on the mid-management of the service sector – a key managerial implication of this study.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research paper is the first of its kind in Jammu and Kashmir adding value to the international literature in the area of knowledge sharing behaviors of service sector.

Diagnosing the crop diseases by farmers accurately with the naked eye can be challenging. Timely identification and treating these diseases is crucial to prevent complete destruction of the crops. To overcome these challenges, in this work a light-weight automatic crop disease detection system has been developed, which uses novel combination of residual network (ResNet)-based feature extractor and machine learning algorithm based classifier over a real-time crop dataset.

The proposed system is divided into four phases: image acquisition and preprocessing, data augmentation, feature extraction and classification. In the first phase, data have been collected using a drone in real time, and preprocessing has been performed to improve the images. In the second phase, four data augmentation techniques have been applied to increase the size of the real-time dataset. In the third phase, feature extraction has been done using two deep convolutional neural network (DCNN)-based models, individually, ResNet49 and ResNet41. In the last phase, four machine learning classifiers random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR) and eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) have been employed, one by one.

These proposed systems have been trained and tested using our own real-time dataset that consists of healthy and unhealthy leaves for six crops such as corn, grapes, okara, mango, plum and lemon. The proposed combination of Resnet49-SVM and ResNet41-SVM has achieved accuracy of 99 and 97%, respectively, for the images that have been collected from the city of Kurukshetra, India.

The proposed system makes novel contribution by using a newly proposed real time dataset that has been collected with the help of a drone. The collected image data has been augmented using scaling, rotation, flipping and brightness techniques. The work uses a novel combination of machine learning methods based classification with ResNet49 and ResNet41 based feature extraction.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the health benefits, functional role of alpha linolenic acid (ALA) in combating diet-related non-communicable diseases, absorption, metabolism, toxicity and extraction of ALA.

A wide range of publications were identified through electronic databases (Google Scholar, PubMed, SciELO, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and ResearchGate) on the basis of different keywords such as dietary sources, functional role, metabolism, beneficial effects, toxicity and extraction.

ALA, an omega-3 fatty acid, is commonly found in dietary sources such as flaxseeds, rapeseed, pumpkin seeds, walnuts and fatty fish, with flaxseed being the richest among all the sources. Several convincing evidences depict the functional role of ALA in ameliorating cardiovascular functions, regulating systolic and diastolic blood pressure and improving neurological disorders, thus possessing anti-arrhythmic as well as anti-inflammatory properties. Its promising effect is also noticed on post-menopausal symptoms like hot flashes, insomnia and headache as well as in balancing the levels of sex hormones in women suffering from PCOS. Furthermore, it was also responsible for reducing the concentrations of C-reactive protein and interleukin-6. Its excess consumption may lead to gastrointestinal disturbances such as flatulence and bloating. Various extraction techniques, namely, medium pressure liquid chromatography, silver silica gel chromatography, silver ion-solid phase extraction and silver ion-high pressure liquid chromatography are used for the extraction of ALA from its sources.

This is a novel review which will provide a brief overview of dietary sources, functional role, absorption and metabolism, health benefits, toxicity and extraction of ALA.

Sharing of knowledge has always been accredited as the indispensable segment of knowledge management. As knowledge management practices are growing within the organizations, it is important that correspondingly, valid and reliable knowledge sharing behavior scales are developed to avoid validation issues. Therefore, this composition describes the development and validation of multi-dimensional tacit knowledge sharing behavior scale.

Herein, two analytical techniques, namely, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis have been used to derive the composition of the constructs.

The study proposes four-dimensional tacit knowledge sharing behavior scale for services which include voluntarily tacit knowledge donation, involuntary tacit knowledge collection, involuntarily tacit knowledge collection and voluntary tacit knowledge collection.

A more holistic approach to the tacit knowledge sharing behavior construct has been proposed, which is helpful in contributing to the literature of tacit knowledge sharing behavior of employees. Additionally, it has made an attempt to eliminate the gap as voiced by most of the literature related to tacit knowledge sharing in service industries which has focused upon western service sectors and limited research is available in the Asian context.

The ingenuity of the scale lies in the fact that it measures voluntary and involuntary aspects of tacit knowledge sharing behavior of employees which can be used by the organization to develop knowledge management plans and knowledge sharing practices based on the identified strategies.

The study is one of its kind that has considered various aspects namely, knowledge donation, knowledge collection, voluntary knowledge sharing and involuntary knowledge sharing together.

The study aims explore the prevalence of lonliness among married adults in India along with examining its association with marital quality and age.

A total of 1,084 married adults across four age-groups were included in the sample of the study. Semi-structured questionnaire for demographic details with validated psychometric instruments like Marital Quality Scale (MQS) (Shah, 1995) and UCLA Loneliness Scale (version 3) (Russell, 1996) were used to collect the data. The data was analysed using multiple regression, cross-tabulation, chi-square(χ²) and Pearson correlation.

The study found that 46.4 % of the sample experienced moderately high level of loneliness. The participants in the age group of 31–40 years felt the maximum loneliness. 56.18 % participants of the sample experienced a severely affected marital quality. Strong and significant correlation was observed between marital quality and loneliness (r = 0.526). Negligible correlation was observed between age with loneliness (p > 0.05).

The study suggests the urgent need for interventions to enhance marital quality and should focus more on interpersonal factors such as communication style, conflict resolution, support from the spouse, increasing empathy, sexual satisfaction and intimacy rather than focusing only on demographic variables.

The study will facilitate a better understanding of the pressing need to improve marital quality of Indian adults. Emphasizing on improving communication and intimacy in the marriage will improve overall well-being thereby also reducing loneliness.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is a first of its kind to explore the interrelationship between marital quality and loneliness among such a large sample in India. It also adds to the literature in understanding the dynamics of marital relationship.