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One of the serious crises faced chiefly by the developing countries is the large influx of people from neighbouring poor and less developed countries as a result of civil wars, political and social turbulence, to name some. Following UNHCR's latest available publication of data on refugees (2016), this chapter attempts to highlight the world's major refugee producing countries, inherent causes of such generation and destination of the emigrants on one hand and the scenario of world's major refugee hosting countries, refugees from countries received by them and their present condition, on the other. Disaggregation of data is done in each case to provide further insightful analysis.

This study aims to test the relationship between work from home (WFH) and employee productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study also examines the moderating role of gender in the relationship between WFH and employee productivity.

A sample of 250 respondents from hospitality, banking and information technology was taken from the National Capital Region and Punjab State of India. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling and multi-group moderation analysis.

The findings provide support for the negative relationship between WFH and employee productivity. This study also provides empirical evidence that gender moderates the relationship between WFH and employee productivity.

This study is the first of its kind to test the relationship between WFH and employee productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study contributes to the organizational behavior literature by providing empirical support to the organizational adaptation theory.

Gender-stereotyped organizational expectations compromise outcomes desired from numerically balanced gender representation. Sex-roles allow both men and women to exhibit masculine or feminine behaviors based on their self-construal of “psychological-gender.” Emotional intelligence (EI) is considered “feminine” and rational intelligence “masculine.” So, using Bem sex-role inventory and Emotional Intelligence Appraisal, the current study explored EI in 217 senior Indian managers from masculine/feminine sex-role perspective. There was no difference in EI of men/women. Moreover, EI did not differ in men/women categorized in “same” sex-role. However significant differences emerged across sex-roles with feminine sex-role participants actually scoring significantly lesser than androgynous or masculine sex-role participants although emotional intelligence is considered as a feminine intelligence. Implications of sex-role-driven differences in EI in organizational context are discussed.

The Tata owned Coastal Gujarat Power Limited is seeking to reopen Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) with state owned distribution utilities because of increase in imported coal prices resulting from a change in Indonesian laws. The Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) has decided to provide relief through a “compensatory tariff”. This is opposed by the power purchasers. Simultaneously, another Reliance Energy owned power project is seeking relief from unprecedented change in exchange rates using the CGPL decision as a precedent. The CERC and the power purchasers have to decide what to do next.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine sustainability reporting (SR) practices of top 10 Indian banks, on parameters derived from a Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)-G4-based persuasive communication framework.

SR metrics from GRI-G4 guidelines were mapped to persuasive communication parameters to develop a blended analytical framework. Content analysis (CA) technique was used to assess SR of top 10 banks on this framework.

The study has three key findings. First, most of the top 10 Indian banks are yet to adopt adequate disclosure and transparency practices in SR. Second, even though environmental and social goals are broadly reported, there are glaring omissions on metrics like “equal remuneration,” “occupational health and safety” and “customer privacy.” Third, stakeholder engagement focus is weak as reflected in low persuasive appeal of SR content of most banks.

The blended framework provides a theoretical and analytical pathway for operationalizing the sustainability context principle, which has been inadequately addressed even within the GRI framework implementation.

The paper provides a “health check” and identifies “red flags” in SR of top 10 Indian banks, enabling them to undertake a critical review of their sustainability metrics and reporting practices.

The paper establishes the significance of evaluating non-financial reporting practices addressing broader sustainability metrics in the banking sector, in an emerging economy context.

This paper develops a GRI-G4-based persuasive communication framework for SR assessment, and conducts an evaluation of top 10 Indian banks using CA technique.

The spirit of entrepreneurship among nationals of a country leads and contributes significantly to the growth process of a country. In this drive, there cannot be gender biases among men and women. The government in India has taken several initiatives to increase the participation of women entrepreneurs and, thus, making a partner to the growth and development process of the country. The initiatives in this direction were taken up through five-year development policy plans commencing from the fifth five-year plan (1974-1978). The focus of five-year plans since then has been reoriented toward women welfare stressing more specifically on women empowerment through women entrepreneurship programs. The purpose of this paper is to appraise the series of development plans and programs initiated for the empowerment of women entrepreneurship in India.

The paper is developed based on the concepts, policies and practices being implemented across the regions to promote women entrepreneurs. The methodology adopted to assess and analyze the relevant components very much matches the existing practices. The paper relates the concepts, programs and practices. This study has revealed certain issues based on the available data and information on women entrepreneurship to establish a view and rational as of why research is needed in the area of women entrepreneurship. To support this concept, the study has considered the experiences of two important states of India, namely, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

The study reveals that Government of India has launched several policies and development programs to infuse the spirit of entrepreneurship among the women groups and thereby not only making them financially self-sustained but also to contribute to the growth process of the economy. However, there remain many gaps in achieving the goals due to the variety of factors. This becomes more significant as the level of women entrepreneurship in India is very low as compared to other economies and also between the men and women entrepreneurs within the country. The study brings out the need and importance for the future research in the area of women entrepreneurship and thereby exploring the areas of concern and bringing out needed improvements to strengthen the women entrepreneurship programs and policies.

This research provides a future direction to the academicians, researchers and policymakers to provide a framework to reorient the programs and policies for the cause of women entrepreneurship growth in India. The paper very much emphasis that the research findings will have influence on government policies and serve as an effective tool for implementation of state programs meant for woman entrepreneurs more effectively and efficiently. The ultimate impact of research findings will be an economic change in the quality of life of woman enterprise in the society.

On October 1, 2017, Gopal Vittal, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer-India and South Asia, Bharti Airtel, was in his New Delhi office reviewing current trends and Airtel's position in Indian Telecom. His primary concern was the shifting data consumption trend in the Indian Telecom Industry (Exhibit 1) and the disruptive changes that were impacting pricing and profitability since the entry of Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (Jio) in September 2016. Data consumption in Indian telecom had started increasing exponentially after the entry of Jio who offered lifetime free voice services followed by rock-bottom data tariffs. As Vittal reviewed the data, he wondered if the voice market through a non-VOIP provision was now saturated and would rapidly decline. He was also concerned about the price and revenue implications for Airtel. How might the voice market evolve? How should he act on the pricing front to enable Airtel revenues to continue to grow in the context of what appeared to be predatory pricing by Reliance Jio?

Extracting suitable features to represent an image based on its content is a very tedious task. Especially in remote sensing we have high-resolution images with a variety of objects on the Earth's surface. Mahalanobis distance metric is used to measure the similarity between query and database images. The low distance obtained image is indexed at the top as high relevant information to the query.

This paper aims to develop an automatic feature extraction system for remote sensing image data. Haralick texture features based on Contourlet transform are fused with statistical features extracted from the QuadTree (QT) decomposition are developed as feature set to represent the input data. The extracted features will retrieve similar images from the large image datasets using an image-based query through the web-based user interface.

The developed retrieval system performance has been analyzed using precision and recall and F1 score. The proposed feature vector gives better performance with 0.69 precision for the top 50 relevant retrieved results over other existing multiscale-based feature extraction methods.

The main contribution of this paper is developing a texture feature vector in a multiscale domain by combining the Haralick texture properties in the Contourlet domain and Statistical features using QT decomposition. The features required to represent the image is 207 which is very less dimension compare to other texture methods. The performance shows superior than the other state of art methods.