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Increasing the share of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in public procurement through targeted support policies is often fraught with organisational and institutional challenges as can be seen from the experiences of many developed countries. This has profound implications for emulating such policies in developing countries where administrative capacities may be low for efficient policy management. The purpose of this paper is to widen the canvass of SME procurement policy discourse by exploring a developing country context.

The study provides qualitative assessment using insights from policy implementation-related theories. Due to limited reporting of target data on SME participation in India, the study conducts analysis based on key informant interviews with 20 public sector enterprises.

The evidence drawn from India mainly shows uneven performance among the procurers in achieving the SME procurement targets, and reveals serious policy implementation shortcomings. These findings correspond and complement the earlier studies on SME procurement in the developed world. The Indian case additionally reveals barriers which may be common to other developing countries such as the lack of policy-administrative capacity compounded by the prevalence of “efficiency syndrome” on the part of procurers.

By providing an in-depth developing country-specific assessment, the study helps informing assumptions underpinning SME-oriented procurement policies. The study, therefore, fills a gap in the literature on SME-oriented public procurement policy-making and its execution.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue and outline its major themes and challenges, their relevance and the research opportunities the field presents.

The paper reviews prior literature and outlines the need to view public procurement as a policy tool to introduce the contributions to this special issue.

Public procurement has been consistently used to further public policies in a wide range of fields. The collection of articles in this special issue contributes to a broader understanding of the role and potential of public procurement in delivering desired policy outcomes in society. The articles show that public procurement largely has strategic aspirations, and its potential to deliver on wider societal issues is attractive to policy makers. The issues raised in this collection of articles, however, also demonstrate that public procurement often lacks strategic maturity and critical issues, notably around how to demonstrate and evaluate its impact and “success”.

This paper aims to stimulate interdisciplinary research into the role of public procurement as a policy tool and its ability to achieve public value.

This paper discusses theoretical and empirical findings that highlight the importance of public procurement for achieving public value. The special issue examines the interdisciplinary literature on public procurement and shows how it is being used to achieve public value.

The paper examines the public procurement experiences of India and China during the Covid-19 pandemic and locates them in a framework it proposes. The paper aims to enrich the knowledge of how public procurement could be strategically used in emergencies.

For the two countries, the paper sieved through government orders and notifications promulgated during and for the pandemic, examined the prevailing laws and statutes that were invoked and comprehensively scanned online news portals to gather evidence. In addition, the author also engaged with select, relevant people in the sector who offered useful information about ground-level scenario.

It is found that as compared to China, in India (a) despite the presence of significant flexibilities, (b) there was a little divergence from standard procurement practices, perhaps explained by (c) weaker governance capacity and legitimacy, (c) more allocative (rather than structural) goals of procurement and (d) higher levels of centralization.

The findings of this paper are based entirely on secondary evidence limited to health care as a category of spend. This paper looks at two large countries and not their internal variations in procurement quality. The framework can also be enriched further by drawing additional categories to make the theoretical framework more promising.

The underlying design and motivation of public procurement policies in India need significant changes to make procurement policies responsive to disasters. Also, one can learn decentralization during emergency from the otherwise centralized politics in China.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to compare pandemic procurement-related policies of the two large countries across the Himalayan border. It also attempts to develop a scale/framework on which emergency procurement in countries can be assessed.

Micro-finance has a significant role in the better performance of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). This study aims to provide a comprehensive picture of the existing literature on the role of micro-finance and its approaches in MSMEs.

This work performs a bibliometric analysis using a data set of 631 articles collected from the Scopus database. The Bibliometrix R package and Vosviewer are used to conduct performance analysis and scientific mapping. Performance analysis shows the publication trend, key authors, journals and top influential articles. Science mapping through a bibliographic coupling network of documents is prepared to discover the intellectual structure of the field.

This review has identified the four major themes: access to finance and schemes, women empowerment and poverty alleviation, the performance of micro-finance institutions and recent development in micro-financial institutions. With the help of these research themes, the paper also highlights future research agendas.

This paper enriches the understanding of the role of micro-finance services in performance of entrepreneurship with the bibliometric review of top contributors.

Case A uses the context of unfair, non-transparent process of spectrum allocation by the Indian government to private operators that led to Supreme Court (SC) cancel 122 licenses. It gives scope to discuss the relationship between policy and regulatory agencies and their effectiveness, role of other institutes outside telecom sector such as the Prime Minister Office, Empowered Group of Ministers and the Comptroller & Auditor General of India.

Malnutrition is a serious public health problem, which occurs because of an inadequate supply of nutrients and therefore affects many children and women (especially pregnant and lactating women of low economic class) worldwide. There is a great need to develop cost-effective fortified food supplements to overcome this problem. Therefore, this study aims to examine the factors that should be considered in the development of low-cost supplementary foods for breastfeeding women.

A wide variety of relevant publications were identified through search in electronic databases (ScienceDirect, PubMed, SciELO, Google Scholar, SpringerLink and ResearchGate) based on different keywords such as malnutrition, specific considerations, supplementary foods and breastfeeding women, which were published before 2020. After looking for adequate literature, 71 articles were examined, which provided an overview of these aspects.

Various food supplements and food products already available in the market are generally expensive and go beyond the purchasing power of lower- or middle-class families. Traditionally, efforts have been made to prepare such supplements at home, but the composition of these products varies based on the economic status of consumers. Therefore, the nutritional status is clearly compromised because of the low standard of living, which requires a great need to develop low-cost nutritious food products, accessible to all and that meet the appropriate nutritional, sensory and economic attributes without ignoring the regulatory guidelines.

This review is majorly focused on the specific considerations, alternative sources, ensuring nutritional and sensorial attributes and economic aspects for the development of supplementary low-cost food products for breastfeeding women with the goal of eliminating malnutrition.

This paper outlines how Design for Lean Six Sigma methods aided a medical device manufacturing company in developing a new strategic space management and approval process for its manufacturing site.

The project demonstrates the application of the Design for Lean Six Sigma and structured Define, Measure, Analyse, Design, and Verify methodology in designing and implementing a process that enables the case study manufacturing site to improve its space utilisation and free up space.

The project was validated in one manufacturing department, and the Design for Lean Six Sigma methodology resulted in creating 15% new space for that area, with opportunities identified to free up 44.7% of the total manufacturing floor space and realise over €2.2 million cost savings as well as start to manufacture new products launched.

The manuscript highlights for the first time how the Design for Lean Six Sigma methodology can be utilised for space utilisation and can be leveraged by other manufacturers. The current study's limitations are that it is a single-site case study application. Future longitudinal case studies on Design for Lean Six Sigma application in more manufacturing space utilisation projects would be useful. This study has implications for identifying best practices for Design for Lean Six Sigma methodology application in the device industry, thus improving the state of the art for introducing new manufacturing lines.

This is the first published work to utilise Design for Lean Six Sigma methodology for space utilisation in a medical device company. This review will provide medical devices and other manufacturing organisations with recommendations on utilising Design for Lean Six Sigma and design for improved space utilisation to reduce costs.

Breast cancer (BC) presents a major public health challenge world-over including India. While several risk-factors, early signs and symptoms of BC are known, the knowledge and awareness of this disease remains poor among the population. The present study aimed to determine the extent of knowledge and awareness of BC, its risk factors, early signs and symptoms and breast self-examination (BSE) practice as an early detection method among Indian college-going female students.

The authors conducted a cross-sectional survey at a University in Delhi-NCR. Data on socio-demographic, knowledge and awareness of BC including BSE was collected using a pretested questionnaire. Chi-square test and logistic regression analysis was performed. All tests were two-sided and significance was set at p < 0.05.

A total of 866 female students participated in the study with mean age of 22.32 (±0.146) years having mean body mass index (BMI) of 21.22 (±3.52). As high as 82.1% of the participants had heard of BC but while 74.8% thought early detection is possible, 70.7% believed BC cannot be prevented. Gene mutations (60.2%) were identified as a significant risk factor, while breast pain (61.4%) was commonly recognized as a sign of BC. Only 29.8% of students ever performed BSE. Increased odds of performing BSE (OR = 3.4) was found among students who recognized gene mutations as an important BC risk factor.

Knowledge and awareness of BC including BSE among female college students were found to be below average. It is suggested that there is an urgent need for increasing BC awareness among young girls through workshops and mobile-health interventions.

This study provides new information on the level of knowledge and awareness of BC risk factors, sign and symptoms and self-examination practice among young college girls. Moreover, this study advocates the need for design and implementation of a sustainable digital health model for active population BC screening, which is not being done currently.

BC is a highly aggressive disease, which is now one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in India and world over. Although the knowledge of BC risk factors and its signs and symptoms have increased, the awareness of these elements among the general population at large is low and/or missing, especially in India. Furthermore, as a consequence of unorganized screening programs in the country, majority of women are presenting young with locally advanced disease. Understanding the existing level of knowledge and educating school, college and University students of the pertinent factors and screening practices such as BSE could drastically help in improving the self-screening and/or clinical examination rates. This could potentially lead to early detection and improved prognosis, thus ameliorating disease burden.

This study is one of the few studies conducted in India among young female college students belonging to non-medical backgrounds, delineating the level of knowledge and awareness of BC risk factors and signs and symptoms along with practice of early detection method such as BSE. The study has a considerable sample size and provides valuable evidence for a need to implement programs incorporating digital health models for accelerating awareness and screening of young girls in both rural and urban settings.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the application of the tools and techniques of Quality by Design (QbD) approach in an Indian pharmaceutical drug product manufacturing company and to understand the challenges, managerial implications and lessons learned while implementing this initiative.

This work adopts the Action Research methodology for impurity reduction in a drug product manufacturing company in India by using the tools and techniques of QbD approach. Various QbD tools like Design of experiments, process capability evaluation and control charts were effectively utilized for the study.

As a part of QbD implementation in the organization, a specific drug product was identified and the impurity level in the product was studied. Significant variables impacting the impurity were identified and the optimum levels for the significant variables were identified through design of experiments. The solutions were implemented and the impurity levels were reduced significantly.

Even though the article is based on a single case study related to tools and techniques of QbD in a single organization in India, the identified problem is a generic product quality related issue for any pharmaceutical drug product manufacturing company. Hence the findings of this research are applicable to pharmaceutical drug manufacturing industry in general.

This article illustrates the systematic usage of various tools and techniques of QbD methodology in a pharmaceutical drug product manufacturing company. The usage of Design of Experiments for process optimization and application of other tools and techniques are ready references for the practitioners and novice users in the field.