Indian Institute of Management Calcutta

About: Indian Institute of Management Calcutta is a education organization based out in Kolkata, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Supply chain & Emerging markets. The organization has 415 authors who have published 1354 publications receiving 21725 citations. The organization is also known as: IIMC & IIM Calcutta.

Demystifying CSR and Corporate Sustainability, and Its Impact on the Bottom of the Pyramid

Abstract: Academic literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) suggests that organisations undertake CSR or sustainability activities with larger objectives in mind that generate several economic, social, and other returns. Some of these objectives include increasing their triple bottom-line performance, gaining social legitimacy in society, developing healthy stakeholder relationships, improved customer loyalty, and superior financial performance. However, organisations have always being haunted by the question, ‘Social performance is good for society, but does it pay?’ Quite often, the beneficiaries of the CSR and sustainability activities of organisations are poor communities, also known as the base of the pyramid (BOP) of society. Since BOP markets are largely informal and exist under the shadow of formal markets governed by public policies, using CSR as a tool to impact the ugly underbelly of our country is quite common. Academic research suggests that CSR has been widely leveraged as a poverty alleviation tool by organisations while also achieving business objectives keeping in mind the firms’ ethical values, while serving multiple stakeholders to meet their economic, legal, and philanthropic goals. Finally, organisations do look for a good corporate citizen image that helps them keep the momentum of ‘business as usual.’ However, it would be interesting to see empirical evidence of how things are shaping up in the Indian corporate landscape. In this study, we interview CSR and sustainability heads of ten large Indian organisations to understand how CSR and sustainability activities impact the bottom of the Indian pyramid.

How Effective Has Been Government Measures to Control Prices of Anti-Cancer Medicines in India?

Abstract: Cancer is one of the leading causes of illness and death in India and the government rightly acknowledges and stresses the importance of making cancer medicines more affordable. On February 2019, Government has imposed a ceiling of 30% trade margins on selected anti-cancer medicines to make these more affordable. The retails price is the sum total of what the manufacturers charge and the trade margins. While putting a cap on the later, the government has kept the former untouched. But manufacturers’ prices have been under price control under the Drug Price Control Order, 2013. This paper analyses how effective has been government measures to control the prices of anticancer medicines. The paper finds that despite the attempts to fix ceiling prices and to impose trade margin caps on some anti-cancer medicines, the prices have remained high and unaffordable and prices of the same product sold by different manufacturers vary widely. The lower priced products are not necessarily purchased more and even when the prices of some products have fallen substantially, the overall consumer gain has not been significant. This is attributed to some basic inadequacies and weaknesses of the way prices have been attempted to be controlled in India. The formulations market in India is essentially a branded generics market and suffers from market imperfections. The government has not made any attempt to tackle the imperfections. The paper also discusses the prices of patented products and biologic products which have become more important in recent years. No attempt has been made to control the prices of patented medicines. Other methods of making patented medicines more affordable, for example compulsory licensing has also practically remained unexplored. One of the reasons for the high prices of some of the biologic products is that the regulatory requirements have made it more difficult and costlier to enter the market. The paper stresses the importance of simplification of the regulatory barriers to facilitate entry of firms and make the market more competitive and prices more affordable.

A detail simulation study on Extended Source Ultra-Thin Body Double-Gated Tunnel FET

Abstract: This work presents an extensive simulation study on different design parameters of an Extended Source Ultra Thin Body Double-Gated Tunneling Field Effect Transistor structure. The study investigates the effects of different device design parameter variations on electrical parameters like: sub-threshold swing, trans-conductance, ON-state current and OFF-state current. Finally an optimum structure for Extended Source Ultra Thin Body Double-Gated Tunneling Field Effect Transistor has been derived from the simulation study, with encouraging results for parameters of interest.

Buffering Techniques in Sleep Doze Coordination and Grid Based Clustering Protocols as Power Management Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: 2 . Abstract- In this paper, we outline an approach to improve the lifespan of a wireless sensor network by introducing a variant to standard sleep synchronization protocols. A multilayered architecture is used. To ensure even higher scalability and lower message size in any particular layer, number of layers is limited to four and each layer is broken into grids. Each grid acts a localized network where data aggregation and lifetime maximization algorithms are being run. In standard sleep protocols like GAF, each grid must have one of its nodes in active state. Our sleep protocol considers one node per grid to be in the idle listening state called the 'doze' state for a fixed interval of time. Thus we propose a three state proactive algorithm in the form of the Sleep Doze Coordination (SDC) protocol to lower the duty cycle of the each sensor node and maximize the network lifespan with lower power consumption. Node buffers are provided to bring about higher data accuracy and lossless network operation. When node buffer gets filled to its capacity by data messages from the lower layer, it signals the 'dozing' node to transit to the active state. Thus the node does not have to remain active throughout its 'on' period and its overall lifespan increases for a given amount of energy. Results indicate that near-optimal performance of SDC is achieved when buffer size is large enough to hold 25 data messages. SDC increases network lifetime by approximately 20% over previous protocols like GAF and S-DMAC.