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The use of technology in 4th industrial revolution is at its peak. Industries are trying to reduce the consumption of resources by effectively utilizing information and technology to connect different functioning agents of the manufacturing industry. Without digitization “Industry 4.0” will be a virtual reality. The present survey-based study explores the factual status of digital manufacturing in the Northern India.

After an extensive literature review, a questionnaire was designed to gather different viewpoints of Indian industrial practitioners. The first half contains questions related to north Indian demographic factors which may affect digitalization of India. The latter half includes the queries concerned with various operational factors (or drivers) driving the digital revolution without ignoring Indian constraints.

The focus of this survey was to understand the current level of digital revolution under the ongoing push by the Indian government focused upon digital movement. The analysis included non-parametric testing of the various demographic and functional factors impacting the digital echoes, specifically in Northern India. Findings such as technological upgradations were independent of type of industry, the turnover or the location. About 10 key operational factors were thoughtfully grouped into three major categories—internal Research and Development (R&D), the capability of the supply chain and the capacity to adapt to the market. These factors were then examined to understand how they contribute to digital manufacturing, utilizing an appropriate ordinal logistic regression. The resulting predictive analysis provides seldom-seen insights and valuable suggestions for the most effective deployment of digitalization in Indian industries.

The country-specific Industry 4.0 literature is quite limited. The survey mainly focuses on the National Capital Region. The number of demographic and functional factors can further be incorporated. Moreover, an addition of factors related to ecology, environment and society can make the study more insightful.

The present work provides valuable insights about the current status of digitization and expects to facilitate public or private policymakers to implement digital technologies in India with less efforts and the least resistance. It empowers India towards Industry 4.0 based tools and techniques and creates new socio-economic dimensions for the sustainable development.

The quantitative nature of the study and its statistical predictions (data-based) are novel. The clubbing of similar success factors to avoid inter-collinearity and complexity is seldom seen. The predictive analytics provided in this study is quite elusive as it provides directions with logic. It will help the Indian Government and industrial strategists to plan and perform their interventions accordingly.

The purpose of this paper is to validate the theoretical finding that digital MNEs avoid physical presence norms of permanent establishment and royalty characterization rules for business and royalty taxation, respectively, to escape tax incidence in the market economy, using information, communication and technology features and transfer pricing (TP) manipulations.

Multiple case studies of MNEs from technology sector, based on judicial decisions in 141 cases, over taxability of profits earned from Indian economic activities. Additional in-depth case study of the Uber Group to study the tax avoidance structures under platform economy, by routing of Indian profits through The Netherlands, a tax haven.

The study finds a significant number of digital MNEs earning profits from India and avoiding tax by defying physical presence and royalty characterization. In majority of the cases, demand-side business activities are discharged through incorporating and remunerating affiliates at cost plus low markup, thus avoiding tax incidence, using TP manipulations under the arm’s length principle applied by governments for benchmarking the intragroup transactions of the MNEs.

The research findings validate the view that digital features promote tax avoidance in the market economy.

The originality of the study lies in the validation of profit shifting through digital features from the developing market economy and portending that digital MNEs defy physical presence to avoid business taxation through TP manipulations.

Introduction: As Internet usage increases, so does widespread concern about surveillance and privacy. While most of the research primarily focuses on a particular digital setting, these problems cut beyond national boundaries and impact economies everywhere.

Purpose: This study critically analyses the Data Protection Bill 2019’s effectiveness within the context of surveillance and privacy in India’s digital economy. Investigating critical provisions of the bill, comparing it to international privacy laws and standards, and identifying potential gaps and weaknesses, this study provides insights into the bill’s ability to protect personal data and limit surveillance practices.

Methodology: The chapter is based on secondary sources of data, including academic articles, government reports, and news articles on the topics of surveillance, privacy, and the Data Protection Bill 2019 in India, involving content and critical discourse analyses.

Findings: The Data Protection Bill 2019 evaluation reveals a set of provisions with the overarching intent to safeguard citizens’ privacy worldwide and curtail undue surveillance practices exercised by both governmental bodies and private enterprises. Intricately delineates the entitlements of individuals concerning their data, encompassing vital aspects such as the right to access, rectify, and erase their data, the bill mandates stringent adherence to the principle of explicit consent when collecting and processing personal data.

Nevertheless, a comprehensive analysis also reveals several gaps and constraints inherent in the bill’s framework. One such area is the inclusion of exemptions for governmental entities, an aspect that raises international concerns regarding potential disparities in data protection practices.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the present situation in the development of indigenous digital libraries in India. The study aims to evaluate different retrieval features of Indian digital libraries, especially those provide access to multilingual and multimedia documents.

For this study, eight digital libraries originated in India, which are available in 24×7 timeframe and accessible worldwide through the internet, have been identified and selected. The retrieval features and other information on these digital libraries have been collected mostly from their respective websites and from other published literature, annual reports, etc.

The paper finds that Indian digital libraries provide universal access to informative and culturally rich digital content related to South Asian region. The digitisation efforts in Indian institutions make these digital libraries operational.

The institutional repositories and open access archives of Indian institutions that give access to the current research literature are not included in this study, because their retrieval features are mostly similar to each other as they use either DSpace or GNU EPrints open source software.

Indigenous digital libraries in India provide universal access to information and knowledge related to culture and heritage of people of South Asian counties. This study gives an insight on how diverse contents are integrated and disseminated to the end‐users in a user‐friendly manner. This study also indicates research initiatives on different aspects of multilingual contents in this region.

No such evaluation on Indian digital libraries has been done from the perspective of information retrieval features. This study will generate new knowledge in area of indigenous digital libraries in a developing country like India. This study is also an attempt to popularise Indian indigenous digital libraries among the world community.

In the last 10 years, the global financial services industry has significantly benefited from fintech. As the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem continues to change, more fintech-use case-driven firms are created, and more investors are supporting these enterprises. India is acknowledged as a powerful fintech centre internationally.

The goal of the current research is to comprehend the revolutionary landscape of the Indian financial system.

Methodology: The research methodology entails a thorough review of several research papers and government reports better to understand fintech's role in the Indian financial system. This requires examining the trends, regulations and technical breakthroughs driving the fintech ecosystem to present a comprehensive picture of its influence.

The present chapter indicates that the fintech industry is flourishing in India. Over the following years, technological improvements will fuel the market's continuous expansion and change how financial products and services are produced, distributed and used.

The purpose of this research is to identify and evaluate the collections within digital libraries and repositories in India available in the public domain.

The digital libraries and repositories were identified through a study of the literature, as well as internet searching and browsing. The resulting digital libraries and repositories were explored to study their collections.

Use of open source software especially for the creation of institutional repositories is found to be common. However, major digital library initiatives such as the Digital Library of India use custom‐made software. The collection size in most digital libraries and repositories is in a few hundreds.

The paper highlights the state of digital libraries and repositories in India in late 2007.

The paper is the first of its kind that attempts to identify and evaluate digital libraries and repositories in India. It also gives a comprehensive listing of digital libraries and institutional repositories in India available in the public domain.

This study aims to endeavor to explore the extent of gender digital divide(GDD) in Uttar Pradesh (U.P., IT-Hub of North India), a most populous state of India, with a particular focus on the first and second order of digital divide, including availability, access time and use of the internet.

The authors have adopted stratified multistage sampling procedure for this research and conducted an empirical study on the data set of 600 respondents of six districts of U.P. to perform the inter-regional analysis. Furthermore, χ² method has been used to reveal the factors responsible for the GDD among selected districts of UP.

Statistical results clearly indicate that out of 12 sub-districts, most of the districts suffered from first order as well as second order of GDD, and this gender disparity within an increasing digitization environment is due to the existence of exclusion from basic technological skills, social norms and financial constraints.

The results have implications for the U.P. Government in general and policymakers behind digitization projects in particular as well as the promoters of gender equality including researchers and fellows.

This study is the first to illustrate the orders of the digital gender gap in a developing economy such as India and to gain an insight into the factors behind it. This research will also consider a promising avenue for future work.

According to the Government of India’s Ministry of Labour and Employment Report (2015), almost 90% of the Indian workforce can still be categorized as informally employed, generating approximately 50% of the national product. Challenges with data availability have made a rigorous analysis of the informal economy in India often difficult and inadequate for policy formulations. This study aims to fill the gap by providing an empirical analysis of the informal economy in India using micro-data from the World Bank’s Informal Enterprise Surveys.

The authors contribute by empirically testing the association between the adoption of digital technology (payments) and firm performance proxied by firm sales. Matching models are used to mitigate sample selection bias arising out of simultaneous sample selection.

The results suggest that the participation in digital platforms, namely, use of digital payment instruments, is associated with higher sales for firms. The results of this study also show that adoption of digital payments helps in both situations – whether a firm has been using digital technology or has just started using it since the outbreak.

More in-depth data over time, spanning across more cities of India, is needed to conduct a further detailed investigation.

The results should allow policymakers in India to reconsider youth-centric and women-centric business needs, even within the informal sector, which does not often enter the purview of the government but remains responsible for the growth and sustenance of 90% of the country’s workforce. If further research on this issue could engage with the impact of demonetization of currency in 2016 as a lagged shock on sales and reestimate subsequent growth, it would perhaps offer a wider spectrum of how the performance of the informal economy in India affects the entire economy, which has over the last four years and before the onset of Covid reported slower growth.

Productivity is measured in terms of sales of informal firms in India in a regular month or in recent period like last month. Adoption of technology such as making payments using digital platforms can enhance productivity of firms by lowering standard transaction costs and time spent for visiting banks or financial institutions. Albeit not extensively, the literature has investigated digital technology adoption in the context of firms achieving comparative advantage (D’Ippolito et al. 2019; Scuotto et al. 2017), firms generating value creation (Magistretti, Dell’Era and Petruzzelli, 2019), and in helping with strategic initiatives and agility of firms (Ghezzi and Cavallo, 2018; Piccoli and Ives, 2005). Nonetheless, it would incur certain fixed costs, including acquiring skills and awareness, to manage digital platforms. In addition, physical access to instruments such as smartphones or computers and internet connectivity are prerequisites for productivity enhancements. Firms belonging to the informal sector in India generally face these challenges but may also benefit significantly following successful adoption. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to conduct a preliminary empirical analysis of the impact of digital technology adoption on the performance of informal sector firms in India.