Forgiveness is the best medicine

The main reason as to why do we carry excessive psychological baggage throughout our lives is that we tend to not forgive others and hold grudges for long.

The pertinent question is: What stops us?

And there is only one answer to that question and that is: Our EGO (And EGO is the false self image made over the number of years).

But the thing is, when we forgive, who is benefitted, is it the forgiver or the forgiven? It is Both, as the stress carried in the mind of the forgiver for so many years has been wiped clean and there is an issuance of positive vibes resulting henceforth.

It results in Positive Wellbeing, peace and also in restoring mental balance, So therefore it is propagated that one must adopt the practice of Forgiving quickly, without dragging the things for long. And that will ease of lot of pain, particularly caused due to miscommunication and misunderstanding.

(Source: Author)

And forgiveness is not only to be practiced by not only individuals but also by nations at the macro level.

The Nations must forgive each other and move forward to a level of better understanding and world peace.

Practicing forgiveness will lead a psychological well-being and lot of de-stressing.

The Art of HO'OPONOPONO

Highlighting one of the method of forgiveness is the technique of HO'OPONOPONO, popularized by Dr. Hew Len in treating the prisoners in a hospital by never ever visiting them.

The method is extremely useful in cleaning the bad memories in the subconscious and therefore it results in clarity and peace for oneself.

How to practice HO'OPONOPONO:

Setting the stage by accepting 100% responsibility for the current situation.

The practice can be started by repeating the following in the sequence.

STEP 1-I love you

STEP 2-I am sorry

STEP 3-Please forgive me

STEP 4-Thank you

The above method was followed by Dr. Hew Len in treating the prisoners and the real case study was mentioned in the bestselling book (2007), Zero Limits by Dr. Joe Vitale.

So the basic message is one can follow any method of practicing forgiveness as one desires but the ultimate objective is to have peace of mind which gets disturbed due to haunting past memories.

Mr. Vipul Singh

Assistant Professor, 

Department of Management Studies

Women entrepreneurship

The socio economic status of women was not that of equal to man in the Society. Women were deprived of the opportunity in Education, Employment, earnings and even entitlement to assets, which made their role not so significant although they extended a much larger support and service to the mankind. The awareness of women empowerment started in the past three decades and there has been a concern to empower women providing opportunities to them and to main-stream them in development. Also, women entrepreneurs see the world through a different lens and in turn do stuff differently.

Given the opportunities for training, she can definitely diversify her activities and can enter new areas of work. In the preparation of report and other formalities, credit linkages are quite essential which may be taken care of, as saying goes “If you assist the man you will be assisting a person but if you assist a WOMAN you are assisting the entire family.”

A women entrepreneur can be defined as “confident, innovative and creative women capable of achieving self economic independence individually or in collaboration, generates employment opportunities for others through initiating, establishing and running the enterprise by keeping pace with her personal, family and social life.”  It has been noticed that women in 21^st Century is no more a traditional resource confirmed to home only. They possess the capacity to transform economies into thriving enterprises. It’s always a great start for any women, who organizes herself and is able to dictate it with passion, seek opportunities and aggressively bonds with her decision making. For more than a decade, the number of a woman owned businesses has grown at one and a half to two times the rate of all businesses. Even more important, the expansion in revenues and employment has far exceeded the growth in numbers. 

There is good scope for women to become entrepreneurs. As more women in all the regions have become active in the workforce in the past two decades, national economies have expanded. The concealed entrepreneurial capacity of women has been changing step by step with the developing affectability to the part and mass trading status in the general public.Women today are transmitting that unmistakable sparkle of administration. The time has aimed to get the countries to commend and salute the achievement of women. It is high time that nations ought to adapt to present circumstances and make more help supportive network for empowering more business among women. It’s high time that women split far from stereotyped outlooks.

But being a woman as an entrepreneur is not an easy task, there are some of the challenges which are faced by the women being an entrepreneur:

Patriarchal Society

Entrepreneurship has been traditionally seen a male preserve and an idea of women taking up entrepreneurial activities are considered as a distant dream. If this idea is initiated and if possible, it is immediately curbed. Women also have to face a role conflict as soon as they initiate any entrepreneurial activity.

Marketing Problems

Women entrepreneurs continuously face the problems of marketing their products. For marketing the products women entrepreneurs have to be at the mercy of middlemen who pocket the chunk of profit. Women entrepreneurs also find it difficult to capture the market and make their products popular.

Financial Problems

Obtaining the support of bankers, managing the working capital, lack of credit resources are the problems which still remain in the males domain. Women are yet to make significant mark in the quantitative terms. These problems are such obstacles which even training doesn’t significantly help the women.

Family Ties

In India, it is mainly a women’s duty to look after her family. Men play a secondary role. Support of husbands seems necessary condition foe women entering into a business. The educational level and family background of husbands positively influence women’s entry into business activities.

Scarcity of raw material

Most of the women are hindered by the scarcity of raw material and necessary inputs. Their ability to grow stops because of insufficient abilities of the inputs which they require. The failure of many women co-operations in 1971 such as these engaged in basket making were mainly because of the inadequate availability of forest based raw materials.

Stiff Competition

Women entrepreneurs do not have organizational set up to pump in a lot of money for canvassing and advertisement. They have to face a stiff competition for marketing their products both with organized sector and male counterparts. Such a competition ultimately results in the liquidation of women enterprises.

There is a need of Government, promotional and regulatory agencies to come forward and play the supportive role in promoting the women entrepreneur in India. All they need is proper inspiration, training and promotions.

We got to know a lot about women entrepreneurship. What it actually means, which traits make a woman as an entrepreneur, what challenges she faces as an entrepreneur, how government helps a woman to start help business. But the main question is how women make a successful entrepreneur after all the challenges she faces? To understand this question I took examples of one of the most successful woman entrepreneurs.

1.  Indra Nooyi

The most well known face amongst Indian women entrepreneurs. Strong willed, with an acute acumen for financing strategizing. Nooyi is the CFO and President of PepsiCo. Indra Nooyi is an Indian-born American business executive currently serving as the Chairperson and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo, one of the largest food and beverage business in the world by net revenue. She consistently ranked among the world’s 100 Most Powerful Women. She was ranked the 82^nd most powerful woman on the fortune list 2016.

2. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw

She is an inspiration for the youth especially for the women entrepreneurs. Her personality and brilliant entrepreneurship skills made her way to enter the club of most powerful women in India. She is renounced face of business world. She is the chairman and managing director of Biocon limited, a biotechnology company based in Bangalore, India and the chairperson of IIM Bangalore. She is on the Financial Times top 50 women in business list. As of 2015, she was listed as the 85^th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.

3. Chanda Kochhar:

Chanda kochher is the managing director and chief executive officer of ICICI Bank. She is widely recognized for her role in shaping retail banking in India. In 1984, kochher joined International Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) as a management trainee. During her early years at ICICI, she handled project appraisal and monitoring and evaluated projects in industries such as textile, paper and cement.

So, these were some of the Famous examples of successful women entrepreneurs which are important to show the world that women entrepreneurs are equally good as male entrepreneurs are.Now a day’s women entrepreneurs are growing in numbers as well as in their size. It is not right thing to say that business world is only for male entrepreneurs. Everyone in this economy has equal abilities whether it’s male or female. Both are boon for the economy and both of them should be given equal chance.

Ms. Priyanka Gupta

Assistant Professor

Department of Management Studies

­­­­­­­­­­­­­Digital India: Objectives, Initiatives and Inherent Challenges

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Following China, India as of December 2015, had the largest populace of internet userswith an astonishing number of around 402 million. Nevertheless, such high number still represents not more than 33% of the total Indian population . The remaining population contributes somewhat directly and/or indirectly to the digital illiteracy of the masses. Strategic advancements in the field of Information Technology (IT) play a vital role in the transition of developing countries into developed countries. Such a strategic project had been launched by honorable Indian Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi on 1^st July, 2015 and under the name of “Digital India” . Digital India is focused on bringing about a new revolution in the country- the IT revolution. The Government of India entity Bharat Broadband Network Limited which executes the National Optical Fibre Network project acts as the custodian of Digital India project under the leadership of Prime Minister.

The connectivity of rural areas with high speed internet networks is the key outline of Digital India project. The creation of digital infrastructure, delivering services digitally to the masses and multiplying the digital literacy rate in the country are the core components of Digital India. The aspiring ₹ 113,000 Crore Digital India project is designed to open up new platforms to provide digital access to all citizens along with upgrading and improving the existing provisions. The objective of the project is to integrate the government departments and the people of India electronically and the same should be achieved by promoting digitally available services, thereby reducing paperwork and ensuring swift service.

Digital India is expected to support the government in achieving progress and growth on numerous fronts, specific targets, as called the “Pillars of Digital India”, of the project are as follows:

a)      Broadband Highways

b)      Universal Access to Mobile Connectivity

c)      Public Internet Access Program

d)     e-Governance

e)      e-Kranti

f)       Information for All

g)      Electronics Manufacturing

h)      IT for Jobs

i)        Early Harvest Programs

Being aproject to be launched and implemented on such a colossal scale and in a country with perturbing digital literacy rate, Digital India project inherits inevitable challenges.  This study is aimed to assess and highlight the various objectives, initiatives taken up by the government and challenges associated with the successful implementation and execution of the Digital India project.

OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT

The summarized objective of Digital India project is to transform India into a digitally-empowered society and knowledge economy through utilization of innovative ideas and practical solutions.  The efforts are concentrated on the following nine Pillars of Digital India or key objectives of the project which are:

a)  Broadband Highways: Digital India aims to have broadband networks that will span India’s cities, towns and 250,000 villages by the end of 2016, along with a system of networks and data centers called the National Information Infrastructure. It is expected to transform citizen access to multimedia information, content and services. It is also intended to give the government access to a great deal of information.

b)  Universal Access to Phones: This focuses on mobile network penetration, with a plan to fill the gaps in connectivity in India by 2018.

c)   Public Internet Access: This aims to increase the number of government-run facilities (Common Service Centers or CSC) that provide digital services to citizens, especially in remote or rural areas with low connectivity.The objective is to increase the 140,000 facilities to 250,000, or one in nearly every village. It also aims to convert 150,000 post offices into multi-service centers.

d)  e-Governance: This aims at various processes and services which are needed to be implemented to achieve digitizing of manual databases, introducing online applications and tracking, using online repositories for citizen documents, introducing publicly-visible government workflow automation, and public grievance redress.

e)   e-Kranti: It comprises 41 large e-governance initiatives, called “mission mode projects”. They span e-education (all schools to get broadband and free wi-fi, as well as MOOCs - Massive Online Open Courses), e-Healthcare and technology for farming, security, financial inclusion, justice, planning and cyber-security.

f)   Information for All: This set of web, mobile and social media platforms aims to connect citizens with the government. It is already well under way, both on social media, and the citizen portal www.mygov.in.

g) Electronics Manufacturing: This plan aims for “net zero imports” in electronics, or imports that match exports by value, by 2020. The plan includes incentives for big chip fabrication as well for mobile and set-top box manufacturers, and clusters and incubators for start-ups.

h)  IT for Jobs: This aims on training 10 million students from smaller towns and villages for IT sector jobs over five years. Setting up Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) locations in every north-eastern state, 300,000 service delivery agents to be trained for IT services, and 500,000 rural workers to be trained by telecom operators for their own needs.

i)  Early Harvest Programmes: Early Harvest Programme basically consists of those projects which are to be implemented within short timeline. A few of the projects under the Early Harvest Programme are Biometric attendance, Secure Email within Government, Public Wi-fi hotspots, SMS based weather information, disaster alerts, National Portal for Lost & Found children, etc.

INITIATIVES TAKEN UP BY THE GOVERNMENT

The digital initiatives undertaken by the government towards the successful execution of Digital India project this year are as:

a)   Digital Locker: As per this initiative there is no need for people to carry the hard copies of the certificates issued by states, municipal agencies, and other bodies. Birth certificates, school and college leaving certificates, residence and marriage proof, and even PAN cards will be digitized. The government is expected to roll out a national depository that will hold these records. Each private locker will store all the important documents of users, which are digitally verified by the government. Now rather than sending physical copies, the link of that cloud folder having digital copies of verified certificates can be shared.

b)  Digital Life Certificates: The ‘Jeevan Pramaan’ scheme, with this, the pensioner will do away with the requirement of submitting a physical life certificate in November each year and can now digitally provide proof of their existence to authorities for continuity of pension every year. A software application developed by the Department of Electronics and IT enables the recording of the pensioner’s Aadhar number and biometric details from their mobile device or computer, by plugging in a biometric reading device. The key details of the pensioner, including date, time, and biometric information, will be uploaded to a central database on real-time basis, ultimately enabling the pension disbursing agency to access a digital life certificate.

c)  Twitter Samvad: The Twitter Samvad will enable the citizens to be the first to know about new government initiatives and actions. It is a service that let leaders and government agencies communicate with the people through tweets and SMS.

d)  Madad: This initiative is introduced by External Affairs Minister, the portal ‘Madad’ will enable Indian citizens living abroad to file consular grievances online to address the complaints promptly. The initiative will speed up forwarding and handling of complaints, improve tracking and redress and escalate unresolved cases. According to officials, maximum priority would be given to cases related to bringing back ‘mortal remains’ of any national.

e) SMS-Based Cyclone Warning System: This program is to create an SMS-based weather information and disaster alert system. Information on warnings will be disseminated to officials involved in administration, district magistrates/ collectors besides fisherman, farmers, and general public.

f)   Online Facility for Firms to File Single Return: In order to cut down the complexities of doing business and reduce cost, the Labor Ministry launched an online facility for firms to file a common return on its portal to comply with as many as eight labor laws at one go. With this, the companies can now file single unified return which will reduce cost of business transaction.

g) Online facility to Issue PAN Card in 48 hours: An online facility under which a PAN card will be issued within 48 hours of applying. Under this initiative, special camps will be organized throughout the country including rural areas to help people get PAN cards.

h)  eMoney: The Department of Posts (DoP) has planned to provide electronic money order service to 70% of its total post offices by December. Also, it will make the whole process secure and fast. People can send a maximum of Rs 5,000 through e-money order.

i)  Pragati: It is an interactive platform for public grievances redressal. It is aimed at monitoring and reviewing programs and projects of the Government of India as well as state government initiatives and also addressing common man’s grievances. This step is expected to make governance in India more efficient and responsive.

INHERENT AND INEVITABLE CHALLENGES

Even though the project is ambitious and continuous efforts are being made on all fronts simultaneously to lead it to greater success, it is not free from various challenges associated with its various aspects. Successfully implementing a project on such an extensive scale poses various hurdles and obstacles which are needed to be clearly understood and progressively eradicated. The various challenges associated with the specified targets and objectives of Digital India project are as:

a)  Broadband Highways: Laying a net of cables doesn't ensure their proper and efficient utilization.  After years of broadband and nationwide fibre-optic infrastructure targets, India remains stuck at a total of 15 million wire line broadband users. Yet mobile broadband use has exploded, currently standing at 85 million users. This project needs content and service partnerships with telecom companies and other firms, with new entrepreneurs.

b) Universal Access to Phones: “Universal access” does not guarantee a working network. Even in its major cities, India’s mobile networksare so stressed resulting in call failures and drops. An intense shortage of spectrum has driven up costs and driven down service quality for India’s telecom industry.

c)   Public Internet Access: A low digital literacy rate and digital divide are of concern with respect to this project.

d) e-Governance: A number of challenges have limited the reach and impact of e-government. Several social, economic and political barriers constrain the scope of transformation and restrict the ability of policy makers to make effective use of new technology. The two most commonly cited constraints are digital divide and the political nature of public sector reforms. 

e)  e-Kranti: It will be a big challenge for the government to set up the required digital infrastructure in the rural areas and ensuring that the benefit of technology reaches all the citizens and not just the urban lot. 

f)   Information for All: Cyber security and fraud is major concern for a project dealing with online hosting of information & documents.

g) Electronics Manufacturing: Demand for electronic goods is increasing with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22% and is expected to touch 400 Billion USD by 2020. Existing structures are inadequate to handle this goal and need strengthening.

h)  IT for Jobs: The challenge here is not just the numbers, but quality. The technology sector increasingly finds that the dwindling manpower resources available for its jobs are under-trained and mismatched to its needs. A pool of more skilled workforce is crucial to meet this goal.

i)   Early Harvest Programmes: Digitization of various departments and documents, use of dedicated communication modes i.e. government emails etc. would require enhanced and upgraded infrastructure.

To get the fruits of the Digital India initiative, there should be efficient inter-governmental coordination. Although the Department of Electronics and IT (DeitY) is leading it forward, there is an active involvement of telecommunication, justice, finance and planning, health department et al. Without a smooth teamwork between them, this mission would never be implemented to its full strength.

Though India has every necessary resource required to implement it, the government needs to realize the strong capability being built in the private sector and needs to leverage that.

These challenges indicate that Digital India has a long way to go on its road to reality in its truest sense. The government cannot overstep them, no matter how trivial they might seem to be.

Ms. Shikha Kukreja

Assistant Professor

Department of Communication Studies

Data Analytics: The “art” of the Narration

“Data is the new oil”, this saying comes from a man who has achieved immense recognition from people all around the globe; Mukesh Ambani.

In the 21^st century everyone uses google for everything from searching jobs to music to their kid’s science projects. While using Google there are always recommendations mentioned which tries to match with what you are looking for, ever wondered how they are able to do that. Most of the results meaningful are found in the first page itself and very rarely people change pages. Is Google Intelligent? Yes, of course it is. Google collects data of every search being done and based on the links viewed it verifies and shows the optimum results. Google has its own tool called ‘Google Analytics’ where it reports all the recent searches done in the past day or week. It is a kind of descriptive analytics to tell what happened. Narration done through visuals is a better way to communicate and explain those results to “non-analytical people”.

Collecting Data from diverse sources is relatively easy than earlier times due to Digitization, but the main challenge lies to showcase the Data. An analysis is termed as good if they are able to convert those numbers into business sense. Something which the organization can relate to. Turning Raw data to Meaningful idea’s. The amount of resources spent on collection and storing data has reduced significantly and now organizations are swamped with the amount of raw data but they have no clue what to do with it. The organizations are not able to focus on what part of the data is more important and what can be overlooked. It is the skill of the people that makes the difference. Their way of approaching the data, to visualize the pattern and relationship between data, to interpolate or extrapolate and finally, to find solutions for their Business needs and requirements.

Data can be misleading and it often requires the right question to be asked at the right time. It should be realized what distinct types of results this data can produce so while presenting the data or is often termed as “storytelling” you must be aware of the story you are going to present or probably it won’t be a good one then.

The best decisions come from insights by informed data which lays the foundation of a data-driven organization 

Huge information which the organization have needs to be smartly eliminated one by one depending upon the data which is required by the organization and is going to affect them. While presenting the Data never show any type of analysis done through different tools such as R or Python or plots formed, instead be focused on showcasing simple visuals to represent the outputs and trends and their relationships. Also, the nature of the question can be modified with such as instead of finding why a product is not successful in the market, we can look for what other products have in better than the product which makes those products more successful. This type of modelling focusses on the pattern of behavior of the person. While presenting the data to the company the story told should begin with results and the details of the report analytically should be mentioned for the footnote of your report.

As organizations look forward to finding a solution to the increasing complex challenges, Learning to answer bigger questions using data analytics, having better insight and ability to answer and present valuable decision, and focus on quality of the story told rather than giving a picture of the data which has no meaning to the organization. It is always a good thing to understand the unusual ways to tell a story rather than knowing just one.

Ms. Priyanka Gupta

Assistant Professor

Department of Information Technology

FOG COMPUTING

Fog computing is a term invented by Cisco. It is extension of cloud computing which provides cloud services to the edge of a network. Fog computing is also known as Edge Computing or fogging. Fog computing provides computing, storage and networking services between end devices and cloud computing data centers.

The areas of concerns in cloud computing architecture are high latency and QoS (Quality of Service). The goal of fogging is to improve efficiency and reduce latency time. It also reduces the amount of data to be transported to the cloud for processing, analysis and storage. It not only improves efficiency but it may also be used for security and compliance reasons.

The metaphor fog comes from the meteorological term for a cloud close to the ground, just as fog concentrates on the edge of the network. The OpenFog Consortium was founded in November 2015 by members from Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, ARM and Princeton University. Its mission is to develop an open reference architecture and convey the business value of fog computing.

The data is generated and collected by edge devices and sensors in the network. They don't have the compute and storage resources to perform advanced analytics and machine-learning tasks. The servers at cloud with high storage capacity have the power to do computation, but they are often too far away to process the data and respond in a timely manner.  It increases latency time as well as degrades overall performance of the network. In addition to this, having sending raw data to the cloud over the internet can have privacy, security and legal implications.

In a fog environment, the processing takes place on a smart device, or in a smart router or gateway, thus reducing the amount of data sent to the cloud. It is important to note that fog networking complements not replaces cloud computing. Fogging allows for short-term analytics at the edge, and the cloud performs resource-intensive, longer-term analytics.

The major area of application of Fog computing is IoT. Because For many IoT applications where cloud computing is not feasible, fog computing can be used. Fog computing addresses the needs of IoT and industrial IoT. The smart sensors and IoT devices generate immense amount of data. It would be costly and time-consuming to send this huge amount of data to the cloud for processing and analysis. Fog computing reduces the bandwidth requirement and reduces the back-and-forth communication between sensors and the cloud which can negatively affect IoT performance. Fog computing is very effective in the adhoc network environment with intermittent connectivity and low bandwidth medium.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Reduces amount of data sent to the cloud	Physical location takes anytime,anywhere, anydata benefit of the cloud
Conserves network bandwidth	Security issues: IP address spoofing
Improves system response time	Privacy issues
Supports mobility	Trust and authentication concerns
Minimizes network and Internet latency	Wireless network security concerns

Ms. Nisha Wadhawan

Assistant Professor

Dept. of Management Studies