Attitudes of the Indian Middle Class: A Theory of Planned Behavior Approach

The author conducts a pilot study to investigate whether the benefits of global marketing and the purported liberal policies of the Government of India have percolated to the Indian middle-class since the year 2014, when the present government came to power. The author collects data through online surveys from Indian citizens, and then conducts a qualitative analysis of the same to test six propositions based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Model and the Theory of Reasoned Action. The author finds moderate to strong support for five of his propositions and sets the stage for a more robust research study that the author is planning to conduct on this highly relevant topic. Keywords: globalization, consumer experience, marketing strategy, political marketing

A Language-independent Network to Analyze the Impact of COVID-19 on the World via Sentiment Analysis

Towards the end of 2019, Wuhan experienced an outbreak of novel coronavirus, which soon spread worldwide, resulting in a deadly pandemic that infected millions of people around the globe. The public health agencies followed many strategies to counter the fatal virus. However, the virus severely affected the lives of the people. In this paper, we study the sentiments of people from the top five worst affected countries by the virus, namely the USA, Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa. We propose a deep language-independent Multilevel Attention-based Conv-BiGRU network (MACBiG-Net) , which includes embedding layer, word-level encoded attention, and sentence-level encoded attention mechanisms to extract the positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. The network captures the subtle cues in a document by focusing on the local characteristics of text along with the past and future context information for the sentiment classification. We further develop a COVID-19 Sentiment Dataset by crawling the tweets from Twitter and applying topic modeling to extract the hidden thematic structure of the document. The classification results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves an accuracy of 85%, which is higher than other well-known algorithms for sentiment classification. The findings show that the topics which evoked positive sentiments were related to frontline workers, entertainment, motivation, and spending quality time with family. The negative sentiments were related to socio-economic factors like racial injustice, unemployment rates, fake news, and deaths. Finally, this study provides feedback to the government and health professionals to handle future outbreaks and highlight future research directions for scientists and researchers.

Possibilities and Challenges of Online Education in India During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The undergraduate and postgraduate studies of colleges and universities in India have been affected badly amidst the lockdowns for COVID-19 pandemic. The Government has insisted to start the academic activity through online platforms. The biggest concern for the academic institutions now is to select an appropriate e-learning platform. This paper compares different features and facilities available in some widely used online platforms and analyze their suitability from the perspective of socio-economic constraints of students in India. A generic framework for conducting online classes is described that meets the special requirements of the unprivileged students. Some strategic plans to overcome the challenges are identified and suggested. A technical solution for implementation of time-bound assessment module is also proposed.

Economic Feasibility of Solar Irrigation Pumps: A Study of Northern Bangladesh

Bangladesh is the most densely populated country in the world. With a total population of around 165 million, the country has constantly been facing food security challenges and other problems. Therefore, increasing food production is one of the feasible solutions to this challenge, and proper agricultural land use for food production bears critical importance. Adopting sustainable irrigation systems and viable technologies would be vital for ensuring efficient use of agricultural land in Bangladesh to safeguard the country's food security. Solar irrigation pumps (SIPs) can be a reliable option in this regard. However, Bangladesh has experienced a prolonged growth rate of SIP installation in the last decade. The countryhas set a target to install 10000 SIPs by the year 2027, albeit it is a tiny share of the 1.57 million conventional irrigation pumps operating in the country. This study aims to investigate the economic feasibility of the SIPs operating in the northern region of Bangladesh in terms of estimating financial feasibility and environmental benefits. The study is mainly based on primary data collected from the users of SIPs from two Upazilas of Dinajpur and Rangpur districts. A total of 14 SIPs, categorized into large, medium, and small pumps, are selected randomly from the available SIPs in the study areas. The financial analysis reveals that small SIPs are the most profitable option (20% IRR) for investment. Large SIPs are moderately profitable (10% IRR), and their profitability can be improved (10.50% IRR) by introducing additional uses of solar energy. However, medium SIPs are the worst (5% IRR) option for investment. In the study areas, large and medium SIPs are designed for the 'fees for service model', and small SIPs are designed for the 'fees for ownership model'. It is found that the 'fees for ownership model' is more profitable than the 'fees for service model'. Moreover, the net environmental benefit for all SIPs is found almost equal to the given subsidy for installing them. Also, the net environmental benefit per kilowatt peak (kWp) is highest for the small SIPs. This paper recommends that additional use (e.g., husking, grinding, supply excess electricity to grid, and so on) of solar energy can improve the profitability of investmenton SIPs. Further, the government should continue giving grants for installing SIPs and promote 'fees for ownership model' (small SIPs) for personal use. It would speed up the dissemination rate of SIPs and help increase the country's agricultural production and improve the environmental conditions.

Impact of Indias Export on Indian GDP after Liberalisation

Economic and political policy interventions were reflected on the economic development of the countries with respect to improving economic and social well-being of poor, market productivity and considerable growth rate in GDP. Specifically, in Indian context, these economic decisions have been a considerable influence on inclusive growth of the nation. It is evidence that India embarked on economic reforms in July, 1991, from the effect of a balance of payment crisis. The government initiated economic reforms basically is to provide an environment of sustainable growth and stability. Thereby the LPG (Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization) system has come to the picture for economic progress of the country. Thepresent study investigates the linkage between foreign trade trends of India and its economic development in the light of economic reforms in India since 25 years (1991-2016). The outcomes of the study strongly support that there is a causal relationship between exports to GDP and GDP to exports and also causality between imports to exports in India.

Impact of Tax reforms in Government of Indias Indirect Tax Collections with Special Reference to Year 2000-2020

In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyse the implications of tax reforms after the economic liberalization in 1991 with respect to collection of indirect tax revenue of the Government of India during the last two decades (2000-20). The composition of indirect tax revenue of the Government has undergone a drastic change during the last two decades. Post implementation of the GST Act, the levy of Central Excise has been restricted to petroleum and tobacco products and GST has evolved as the major contributor to the indirect tax revenue collections followed by the Customs Duty. Comparative analysis of indirect tax collections of the Central Government with respect to its growth, share in gross tax revenue, percentage of GDP and composition has been done for the period from 2000-01 to 2019-20. The current study has revealed the growth rate of indirect taxes has not only been uneven but also declined during the year 2001-02, 2008-09 and 2009-10. The share of indirect tax in the gross tax revenue has also gradually declined from 63% in 2000-01 to 46% in 2019- 20%. The indirect tax-GDP ratio has remained stagnant in the range of 3.5 to 5.5 % during the last two decades.

Smart Voting System Using Facial Recognition

In this paper a new authentication technique is discussed i-e; facial recognition verification for online voting system. It aims to develop a computerized voting system to make the election process more secure and user friendly. The electorate want to visit distinct locations like polling cubicles and stand in an extended queue to cast their vote, because of such reasons most of the people skip their chance of voting. The voter who isn't eligible also can forged its vote via way of means of faux way which can also additionally cause many problems. That's why in this project we have proposed a system or way for voting which is very effective or useful in voting. This system can also save money of the government which is spent in the election process. Overall this project is being developed to help staff of election commission of India and also reduce the human efforts. Keywords: Online Voting, Biometric Authentication, Security System.

Government and innovation performance: evidence from the ICT enterprising community

Purpose The purpose of this paper will be on finding and analyzing the impact of government on the information and communication technology (ICT) companies’ innovation performance. The study aims to conduct in-depth research about the government as an integrated actor of the innovation ecosystem (IE), not a sole member. This would be the core finding toward doing further research about the impact of the innovation ecosystem in the ICT sector in Kosovo. Design/methodology/approach Quantitative research has been considered the most suitable data collection method. Furthermore, in this study, it is used convenience sampling as a technique of the sampling process. The sample size of this study is 106 participants. The participants are owners or representatives of ICT companies in Kosovo. Since the study is conducted using the deductive approach, the questionnaire is considered to be the most suitable instrument for gathering data. Findings This paper provides empirical insights that the company’s size and the dedicated department for research and development have no impact on how the company takes advantage of public funding from the government. Furthermore, the authors of the paper found out that government has a positive impact on companies’ introduction of new products and services, while the impact of the government on a company’s financial performance was insignificant. Research limitations/implications The future research direction should be firstly on studying other IE actors and their impact on companies’ innovation performance and secondly on measuring the IE actors as a set of actors to have a broader picture on how IE impacts the companies’ innovation performance. Practical implications The scientific contribution of this study will be on mapping, analyzing and proposing government policies in accordance with the findings of this study that would lead to a more comprehensive and sustainable IE in Kosovo. Originality/value This study tries to fulfill an identified need to study the impact of interconnected actors of an innovation ecosystem and to show how they affect each other. In this study, it is taken for research one fragment of a set of actors.