Voting our Constitutional Right

Voting is a right given to a member of a group or the citizen of the country to express their opinions thus enabling collective and democratic decisions.Voting is one of the fundamental rights given to all Indian citizens who are above 18 yrs.Voting is a nation building process and as responsible citizens of this democratic nation it becomes our prime responsibility to participate in voting. As India is a developing country we need strong leadership at the top so as to bring the required rate of development, this is possible only when people exercise their constitutional rights and cast their votes. There can be many other factors that provide the ground for voting, but the most important of all is that it’s our right and in true democracy every votes counts.

It has been observed that on the day of voting there are some people who genuinely vote while others treat it as a paid holiday. Although there are many initiatives taken by the government, election commission and public agencies to improve the awareness, yet the percentage of people who cast their vote is not substantial.  As per election commission of India total turnout of votes in 2009 was 58.21%, 2014 was 66.7% while in 2019 it increased marginally and was 67.11%. After 71 years of Independence, can this figure be really adequate? Though we can see an improvement in voting turn out percentage however the situation in India is still not very promising andthis might be the basic problem of paralyzed growth of India.The fault lies with both the leaders and the people

So, what can be done to improve the situation as social security, economic growth and development of country lies in the hand of effective and able leaders. Situation will improve only when every Indian citizen, above the age of 18yrs exercise their rights of casting the vote and choosing a right government. Else, should India also have compulsory voting like Australia, Argentina, Beligum and many more?

Ms. Anu Bhardwaj

Assistant Professor

Department of Management Studies

Technology and its perils

Excessive use and dependency on technology is injurious to health. Always and all the time we all are enclosed in and dependent on technology and it’s changing rapidly. Technology has not only  transformed our life completely but also made it easier. Whenever and whatever we want, technology helps us in just one click and provides everything at your door step like… shopping and hospitality services.

Earlier we used to go for shopping with parents and friends but now shopping happens online and because of this we are losing the connection with other people. When their used to be one landline phone at home everyone was connected but now everyone was has a phone but no one is connected.

We have 1000’s of friends on facebook’s friend list but no one comes to support, when you are sad and are actually looking for somebody’s support. We always share our cherished and happiest moments of life online but once we get a single dislike or do not get likes as much expected our happiness turned into depression just because we live in an artificial world and forget that we are human beings and need to invest some time with family and friends instead of using the technology to stay connected.

After some time either the technology starts to lead you or you will feel helpless without it. Internet revolution made our life lot easier and fast and people thought  this will saves our time but now we all are spending maximum time on internet and forget to see the outside world how is it. Technology can provide solution for your entire technical problem but cannot make you feel better when you actually need someone to understand you.

Technology can show you how the world is beautiful but humanity will show your inner beauty to the world.

Ms. Divya Gupta

Assistant Professor

Department of Management Studies

Inclusive and Sustainable Growth of Rural Economy

Augmenting farm income through innovative agricultural practices is the key to inclusive development in rural sector. The concept of inclusive growth came into being with the launch of the eleventh five year plan. It is a critical aspect determining the sustainability of future agricultural growth in India.

Some of the researchers who link advancements in agriculture to an inclusive and sustainable growth opine as follows:

According to Richard (2004) , agriculture  growth  and  rural  development  had a  significant  potential  to achieve  inclusive  growth  among the Asian  countries.    Hasan  and  Quibria  (2004)  believed  that  rural poverty  was a common phenomena  countries  where agriculture  was  the  main source of livelihood.  Hence the growth  of  the agrarian sector  was  the  key to  poverty  reduction  and  inclusive  growth. This would reduce  rural  poverty by  increasing  productivity  and  incomes.  According to OECD (2006), agriculture connects economic growth and the rural poor.

 Sharma et al., (2010) believed that an inclusive growth was essential to develop agriculture on sustainable manner  by reducing  disguised  unemployment  in  the  farm  sector  in  the  way  of  shifting labor to  the  non-farm  sector  and  increasing  average  size  of  land  holding. This would   result in an increase in marginal productivity of labour.  

Hence, the focus of concern was to engage the farmers in allied areas of agriculture. Now-a- days, farmers are engaged in floriculture, honeybee breeding etc.

 Birthal et  al., (2012)  supported the above view when they proposed  that  diversification  of    agriculture  through  livestock production  would  accelerate  the  agriculture  growth  and  it  provide  livelihood  support  to  the  small  and marginal  land  holders.    Agriculture  growth  and  rising  farmers  income  was an  important  aspect  for  inclusive growth in agriculture sector. 

However, economic  growth  scenarios  of  India  as  well  as  the  major  growing  states  have  not  been successful  in  combining  growth  with  equity  and  making  growth  inclusive.   The  trickle-down  process  of growth  has  eluded sectors  such as  agriculture  where  labour  is  concentrated  (Bhalla, 2008).    Rao  (2009) observed   that   regional   disparity,   rising   income   inequality,   inequality   of   land   holdings   and   high dependency  of  workforce  were  important  obstacle  for  inclusive   growth  in  agriculture  or   equitable development in the all sectors of the economy.

Perhaps the first step in this direction would be to educate the farmers towards adoption of latest techniques and good agricultural practices.

Initiatives by the Central and State governments in this regard must adopt a multipronged approach. Water, roads and cold storage facilities are essential prerequisites for a good crop. Thereafter its distribution through a proper channel would ensure a good return to the farmers. These facilities would empower the farmers.

The third is the presence of an enforcement mechanism to oversee the smooth functioning of the entire production and distribution system. This may include a technical support system in the form of extension facilities from the Agricultural Universities. The gram panchayats would resolve the legal issues and conflicts of interest at the grass root level. These two bodies are already in place and functioning effectively. However a monitoring body from the state government could carry out random checks to ensure that there is no mismanagement of funds at this level and that the timelines are being adhered to.  This mechanism should also include a grievance redressal and counseling centre for the farmers.   

Hence this cycle comprising of three Es, namely, educate, empower and enforce would certainly lead to an inclusive and sustainable growth of the rural economy and the aim of doubling farmers income as envisioned by honorable PM Narendra Modi  would  soon be realized.

Ms Suchitra Srivastava

Associate Professor

Department of Management Studies

Importance of Quality Research

Research is made up of two words: Re- search. This means that an individual has embarked on a journey of searching again. Research leads to creation of new body of knowledge or adding to the existing one. This unfolds the importance of doing research. Academicians all over the world have been indulging in research as it has been made mandatory in educational institutions. Good quality research is hard to come by as more of the research is done with the purpose of replicating another research. Research is conducted either to create new theory or can also be contextualised in another country or segment. Earlier pure sciences were more into research but today social sciences research has caught on. Reputed publishers in the field of social sciences are Emerald, Inderscience, Elsevier, Sage, Springer to name a few. Within these various journals with Scopus and ABDC indexing along with impact factors determine the quality of research published. So, the next question is what is quality research? Quality research is a relative term which can be used to describe a research which is new, innovative and interesting. In fact, the reviewers have a key role to play in improving the quality of research. If their review guides the researcher in the right direction, a research can be improved to a large extend.

A research can be deemed as quality research if it happens to be systematic. Formulating the right kind of research questions is the key to a good start. The research questions should be clear, concise and can set the goal for research. The research methodology determines how the research will be carried out. A scientific approach has to be followed in determining the methodology. Although quantitative research has been popular over the years, qualitative research is also gaining popularity. Another way of conducting research is through a mixed method approach which involves both the qualitative and quantitative methods. The relevance of the research to the industry is equally important. If practitioners can use academic research to better reach out to customers, improve their working then definitely the research becomes relevant in the modern world. The research should also have significant theoretical contributions. After all the research should contribute to theory building exercise in its field.

 India as a country is lagging behind in producing good quality research. The education system has not been research -oriented and generally a person comes to know the nuances of research only in a PhD programme. If research is included rigorously in post graduate and even under graduate level, then perhaps, we could improve the quality of research in the country. UGC had set up norms of making research more attractive for faculty members in terms of promotions linked to quality research. Various accreditation councils like NAAC have also included points for research publications in their assessment of institutions.

Research is the backbone of education system in a society. The sooner we realise the importance of research the better it will be for us as an academia. Research empowers an individual and institutions should provide incentives for conducting quality research. Since research is time consuming, and requires a lot of effort on the part of the researcher, adequate motivation to conduct research will go a long way in improving the quality of research. Plagiarism checks have to be kept in order to avoid cut copy paste mentality. Sub standard journals and research work should be discouraged. Guidelines by apex organisations like UGC should be formulated for a proper research policy in the country. These measures could pave the way for quality research in India.

Dr. Sartaj Khera

Assistant Professor

Department of Management Studies

Non Traditional lifestyle and Stress

Technology has empowered our lives everywhere. Mobile phone are the most important and essential part of our day to day life. Traditionally mobile phones were considered as the tool for communication but due to technological up gradation and smart phone invasions mobile phones have been used now a day’s not just for communication but it’s now majorly used as checking emails, shopping online ,accessing news ,downloading music and movies ,engaging self on social networking sites and many more. Every individual is now literally carrying internet in their pocket .Such use of technology has shifted the lifestyle from traditional to non traditional.

Some identifiable stressors are follows:

·         Perpetual Distraction: A study in UK has shown that smart phone user on an average 80-85 times unlocks their phones to check messages and other works. This study can be backed up by the fact that due to high use of technology and smart phones the cognitive skills such as attention, memory and learning has been retarded.

·         Sleep Dysfunction: due to excessive usage of phone and technology has interrupted the circadian rhythm (i.e. sleep-walking cycles) .Poor sleep and its disorders results in poor resilience and higher levels of anxiety and stress.

·         F.O.M.O: (Fear Of Missing Out) A new kind of behavioural disorder has been seen to arise among youngster now a days due to increase in technological interventions this is the fear of missing out on something ; whether it is an event or some post of friends on social networking sites. The more an individual is connected, the more likely is the experience of FOMO.

·         Social Comparison: The social comparison theory suggests that individual’s thought process is governed by social comparison. Social Media, by its nature, actively encourages social comparison, as it is littered with information that can easily be used as metrics of apparent social success (e.g. friends, likes, shares, followers and so forth). 

Dr.Manisha Gupta

Assistant Professor

Department of Management Studies

Decision making  method  in Mathematics

In various situations in life, we have to choose between different alternatives, where the choices themselves are full of uncertainity. Right from infancy , choosing which school to go , at the secondary stage choosing which stream to opt for which career or profession to choose, Which party or candidate to vote for in an election, in which company to invest financially, whether to invest in shares or mutual funds, and so on, there are so many examples where one has to decides without having precise or complete continuous stream of decisions and usually these are tackled on the basis of previous experience, intuition and subjectivity. This blog introduced decision analysis, which takes a rational look at decision making and develops methods for improving decisions in a variety of circumstances. The first difficulty of decision makings the complexity of situations in which decisions have to be made. To overcome this problem decision making in a number of situations will be considered with decision making under uncertainty. There is only one event and the solution procedure is to list the consequences  and select the one  with the best value. Decision making under uncertainty has a  number of possible events, but there is no way of saying which are more likely. The decision criteria  will be used. Decision making under risks allows probabilities  to be assigned  to events and expected values  or expected utilities will be used. Finally, series of sequential  decisions are considered, emphasizing the use of decision trees.

In order to introduced a systematic  approach  to decision making, some techniques that are often used  are payoff tables, opportunity loss , use of posters or probabilities and decision trees. According to the functional cycles of managements, the managerial activities  as a whole is include s five phases or life processes which are planning, organizations, directions, supervision  and control. In performing all of these activities, the management has to face several such situations where they have to make a choice of the best among  a number of alternative courses  of actions. This choice making is technically termed as  decision making, or decision taking. Decision is simply a selection from two or more courses of action. Decision making permeates all management activities . It is essential  for setting objectives, deciding basic corporate policies, preparing future profits and asset requirements of the enterprise.  It also involves determining the future type of organizational structure ascertaining how to motivate personnel’s and accepting innovations , Hence we can define the decision theory as follows.

“A process which results  in the selection from a set of alternative courses of action, that course of action  which is considered to meet the objectives of the decision problem more satisfactory then others as judged by the decision maker.” Or in other words “ The process of logical and quantitative analysis  of all factors  that influences the decision problem, assist the decision maker  in analyzing these problems  with several course of action  and consequences.” Therefore one can use this techniques  to make a decision in a  situation of fuzziness in life problems.

Dr. Hakimuddin Khan 

Associate Professor

 Department of Information Technology

What are taxes?

A charge which is mandatory imposed by the Government on income earned by individual or corporate, goods , services or any activity in order to raise revenue. It is considered as the penalty to live in this world. Taxes are charged to raise fund for various public expenditure. In terms of law failure to pay tax is a punishable act. There are various types of taxes , such as  income tax, property tax, capital gain tax, service tax, value added tax, excise duty tax, GST etc.

Taxes are divided into two parts:

·         Direct Tax

·         Indirect Tax

Direct Tax

Taxes which are paid directly to the government are known as direct tax. It cannot be transferred to another person. Income tax, Corporate Tax, Capital Gain tax, Property tax etc are considered as direct tax. Direct taxes may be adjusted to the individual characteristics of the taxpayer. Under this system government collects the tax from the person on whom tax it is imposed. Under direct tax system, the taxpayer and tax bearer are the same person. Direct tax is progressive in nature which means that if the income increases, percentage of tax charged  will also increase. i.e. tax payers in the higher tax bracket have to pay higher rate of tax.

Indirect Tax

A tax which is collected by the intermediary from the person who bears the burden of tax and then pays the taxes to the government is known is indirect tax. It can be transferred to another person. Sales tax, value added tax (VAT), excise tax, GST are the few types of indirect taxes. Indirect taxes are collected by supplier of goods and services and are paid by the consumer of goods and services. Thus, the burden of tax is shifted to the final consumer. Hence, indirect tax is regressive in nature i.e. all the consumers have to bear the burden of tax irrespective of their capacity to bear tax. Under indirect tax system, tax payer and tax bearer are two different persons.

Dr. Himani Gupta

Associate Professor

Department of Management Studies