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The learning outcomes of this study are as follows: this case deliberates the strategic design and business model that provides entrepreneurial opportunities to re-sellers and small business owners; this case discusses the complexities and opportunities related to using social media (Facebook) as a selling platform; this case provides a thorough understanding of the direct-to-consumer model; this case helps students understand the concept of social commerce in emerging markets; and this case discusses brand-building tactics, particularly for online businesses.

This case is about the entrepreneurial venture of three women on Facebook. A venture that started with the simple thought of creating a trusted selling and buying platform with convenience has turned into an opportunity for thousands of other women to become entrepreneurs and start their businesses with minimum investment and low risk. Shoppers Darbar is an online shopping portal on Facebook that started in 2016. This is a private group exclusively for women with more than 165,000 registered members, which saw a boom during the pandemic and merged as a parallel platform of e-commerce retail sites and physical stores and exhibitions. Although social commerce in India is still in its growing stage, it is facing indirect competition and an identity crisis. Hence, to build Shoppers Darbar as a brand and retain vendors, founders need to find methods within Shoppers Darbar’s limited means to sustain and create a community of sellers and buyers for getting more and more business for the vendors associated with them.

Postgraduate level.

Teaching Notes Consent Letter Annexure 1.

CCS 3: Entrepreneurship

The purpose of this study was to see the impact of increased out-of-pocket expenditure oh health care exerting budget pressure on households, which leads to change in dietary consumption.

It was a hospital-based cross-sectional study comprising 414 patients with a chronic or major illness attending a large tertiary care public hospital at Delhi, India. Each patient represented a household with total number of family members of 2,550 in the study. Questionnaire was used to gather data on factors responsible for changes in consumption of 12 major food items.

Moderate decrease in food consumption of a household after major illness is associated with: rural residence (p < 0.001), decrease in savings (p < 0.001), more number of household items sold (p < 0.001), education of the children affected (p < 0.001), upper socio-economic status (SES) (p < 0.001) and children started working after illness in family (p = 0.043). In addition to decrease in food items, there was also deterioration in quality of food preparation. More than 80% of the families did not change the intake of cereals (rice and wheat), pulses and sugar. Food items that were decreased by most families were fruits, followed by milk and its products, vegetables, meat and egg, oils and ghee.

This study is a subset of other two studies previously published. The authors had not been able to cover this aspect fully in those two studies but understood the importance of impact of expenditure on illness on food consumption. The authors studied change in food consumption pattern (not amount) in subjects after illness. The impact of weather changes in food consumption on the impacted nutritional status of family has not been studied. The authors only collected cross-sectional, observational data and recall bias cannot be completely ruled out and corrected. With such data, only associations could be concluded, not causality. The illness condition of a household was measured by presence of chronic disease and inpatient treatment. Such measures did not take into account the types of illness and number of episodes. Data of this study cannot capture whether food intake of family prior to illness was sufficient/in excess/deficient. The Kuppuswamy scale, mostly used in urban and peri-urban settings, was also used for rural subjects in the study, which might have resulted in impaired capture of rural SES. The authors did not assess whether families were allocated food grains by schemes like public distribution system, which might have resulted in biased decrease in food consumption. Questionnaire used was not validated.

This study demonstrates the various factors that act as barriers to proper food consumption, including non-financial factors. The policy of user fee in government is hitting poorer section, and equity and access to health are compromised. Health expenditure should be increased by public sector policies to implement uniform healthcare. There is need for more studies to identify measures that could be put in place when designing policies and interventions for the uniform distribution of benefits.

The policy of user fee in government is hitting poorer section, and equity and access to health are compromised. Health expenditure should be increased by public-sector policies to implement uniform healthcare.

Major or chronic illness affects money acquisition and priorities of expenditure, resulting in deterioration in quality of food consumption and by a household.

Subject area information and communication technology (ICT) for development.

Master of Business Administration Program’s Management Information Systems courses. Or introductory courses in Masters in ICT for Development.

The paper aims to highlight the endeavour of public distribution system (PDS), a food security scheme for under-privileged people in India, towards excellence, using ICT in the state of Chhattisgarh. It presents two important roles of ICT: one, as a system improvement tool, through supply chain integration (in Phase 1) and, the other, as tool for empowerment, by providing choices through computerized online real-time electronic (CORE) PDS (in Phase 2). CORE PDS was intended to provide choices of retail outlets to poor beneficiaries for collecting their food entitlement, breaking the retail outlet’s monopoly. The project was successfully implemented in some urban areas of Chhattisgarh, providing motivation for its mass scale roll-out. But, the contextual differences between rural and urban settings were raising questions on the ultimate value expected to be delivered by the project in rural areas.

Two major learning outcomes of the case: students will appreciate the multi-faceted role of ICT in improving the performance of a system meant for a financially poor section of the society; students will understand the role of contextual settings in a developing economy in the endeavour of ICT projects for societal development.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 10: Public Sector Management.

The present study is an attempt to extend the Model of Goal-directed Behavior (MGB) to consider health consciousness and perceived privacy protection as two critical factors to predict desire and intention by individuals to adopt and use wearable health devices (WHDs).

Based on the literature review hypotheses were framed and tested using data collected through a questionnaire survey. A total of 418 self-reported complete responses were considered to analyze the hypotheses proposed in the study. Structural equation modeling, effects analysis and model comparison (MGB and extended MGB) were performed to understand the predictability of the suggested model.

The results of the study corroborate that along with MGB, health consciousness and perceived privacy protection also induces the intention of users toward using WHDs. Health-consciousness is found to have a positive and significant direct and indirect impact on intention to use WHDs. Further, the model comparison exhibits that the proposed extended MGB is a better predictor of intention to use WHDs.

Apart from the conventional framework of MGB, health consciousness and perceived privacy protection promote desire and intention to use WHDs. This research provides a framework for marketers to promote health consciousness among consumers by motivating them to adopt WHDs. Further, privacy protection features should be showcased in order to induce trust in consumers which in turn will trigger their intention to use WHDs to lead a healthy lifestyle.

The current study incorporates health consciousness and perceived privacy protection in MGB to fit into the context of healthcare intention study, which enhances the predictability of intention behavior of consumers and adds to the existing body of MGB and healthcare literature.

Transformational leadership has caught the significant attention of many academic scholars in the leadership domain. In recent studies, emphasis has been given on green transformational leaders who empower their subordinates, which, in turn, leads to employees’ discretionary behavior toward environmental management of the organization, which has been denoted as organizational environmental citizenship behavior. Organizational citizenship behavior has been strongly advocated as a means to improve the environmental performance of organizations. A green transformational leader encourages his subordinates to undertake activities that are beneficial to the organization’s environmental management, such as thinking about the sustainable development of the organization, solving environmental problems and contributing to the firm’s environmental performance. This study aims to investigate the domain of environmental leadership by examining the mechanism and conditions under which green transformational leaders induce organizational environmental citizenship behavior.

Information technology (IT) firms across four major cities in India were considered for the survey to examine the proposed hypotheses. Online questionnaires were shared with 1,286 employees working across seven branches of IT companies. A total of 378 respondents completed the survey, but only 293 questionnaires were suitable for further analysis using structural equation modeling.

The findings of the study show that green transformational leadership promotes green empowerment and organizational citizenship behaviors toward the environment (OCBE) among the employees. It also reveals that environmental passion plays a key role in promoting eco-initiative and eco-helping behavior among the employees when they are empowered for green practices. Also, the influence of resource commitment fosters eco-civic engagement among the employees.

Results hold strong implications for human resource managers on how green transformational leadership approaches can help trigger organizational citizenship behavior among employees. Also, understanding the impact of green empowerment on employees’ involvement in extra-role behavior will help organizations to develop strategies to strengthen their sense of empowerment toward green practices.

This study attempts to investigate the impact of green transformational leadership on employees’ OCBE and the mechanisms through and conditions under which green transformational leadership may impact the indicators of OCBE. The study proposes a mechanism and social and psychological conditions that can potentially explain the linkages between green transformational leadership and OCBE: green empowerment, resource commitment and environmental passion.

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) is growing rapidly and the e-retailers are finding it pertinent to enhance customers’ online shopping experiences and engage them with e-commerce portals. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual model of customer engagement, where credibility and usefulness of online reviews are found to trigger the adoption of reviews and customer trust that augments customer engagement.

A survey method design has been used to capture responses from 219 young customers (university students) of a reputed university in India. The hypothesized relationships have been examined through multiple regression analysis.

The findings of this study corroborate that the credibility and information usefulness of online reviews induce the adoption of reviews and propensity to trust e-commerce websites. The propensity to trust the reviews has been found to lead the adoption of reviews. The adoption of reviews is found to have a significant impact on the customer’ engagement with these portals.

The present study contributes to the theories of online marketing in the space of e-shopping, online reviews, customer trust, customer engagement and online shopping behavior. Further, this study provides a framework for managers to engage customers by triggering customers’ online trust through the facilitation of credible and useful reviews.

The study aims at understanding the role of different attributes associated with the online reviews’ credibility and information usefulness in driving customer engagement with specific focus on online shopping through the utility of online devices. The study is one of the pioneering empirical studies that explore the role of online reviews in driving customer engagement.

The present study aims to investigate the influence of key factors on the success of women micro-entrepreneurs in select states of India.

An empirical study is carried out to understand the influence of the psychological, socio-cultural, skill and resource-related factors on the success of women entrepreneurs. To achieve the set goal, a comprehensive questionnaire is developed for collecting data and is analyzed using the t-test, the chi-square test and structural equation modeling.

The proposed model is validated using structural equation modeling, and the fitness values indicate that the model is fit to explain the entrepreneurial success of women entrepreneurs in India.

The result advocates that the participation of women entrepreneurs may be increased to not only improve national growth but also empower women in India.

In the context of the women micro-entrepreneurs, no such study covering such a vast area of India has been carried out.

The main motive behind framing this paper is to provide a compromised solution for trapezoidal fuzzy number–multi-objective fully quadratic fractional optimisation model (TrFN-MOFQFOM) by avoiding ambiguities and confusion of decision-makers (DMs). Many researchers have used Taylor's series and parametric approach to transform fractional objective function into non-fractional ones, but Taylor's series expansion is valid only up to a neighbourhood. To avoid these extra efforts, this article suggests a methodology in which numerator of objective function is optimised under the condition of optimising denominator.

This paper suggests an efficient procedure to search for compromised solution of MOFQFOM with fuzzy coefficients using α-level set and FGP approach. Incomplete data in model is dealt with α-level set. Then after defuzzification, non-fractional models are built from fractional model to get optimal solution of every objective. Finally, the linear weighted sum of negative deviational variables is minimised to satisfy all objective functions up to maximum possible extent.

On applying suggested approach to the example given in end, the authors arrived at compromised solution having μO1(O1(x))=1 and μO2(O2(x))=0.71. The applied procedure requires less computational efforts and provides the preferred compromised solution.

This work has not been done previously by anyone. The idea being developed here of constructing non-fractional model by dealing numerators and denominators separately is completely new. 10; In the end, an algorithm, flowchart and numerical are also given to clarify the applicability of the suggested approach.

To break the chains of inequality for access to education for marginalized groups across India and move toward an egalitarian society, where all people can live with dignity and fulfill their dreams, the need of the hour is to strengthen the education system and prepare teachers with secular and reformative thinking. This chapter attempts to examine the problems of various marginalized groups in Indian society and their educational provisions. This work also aims to analyze several issues and challenges related to preparing teachers for inclusive schools and to draw attention to the need to reframe and revise teacher education programs and enforce inclusive teacher education practices in India to promote inclusion.

In the Indian system of medicine – Ayurveda, Musa paradisiaca has been mentioned as a remedy for various diseases and ailments. Based on the folkloric use, the purpose of this paper is to verify and compare the hypoglycemic potential of unripe, ripe and overripe fruit extract of Musa paradisiaca.

Hypoglycemic activity of fruit extracts has been evaluated using various in vitro methods, namely, determination of glucose adsorption capacity, glucose uptake in yeast cells, amylolysis kinetics and glucose diffusion.

The extracts of unripe, ripe and overripe fruits of Musa paradisiaca adsorbed glucose, and the adsorption of glucose increased remarkably with an increase in glucose concentration. In the amylolysis kinetic experimental model, the rate of glucose diffusion was found to increase with time, and all the extracts of unripe, ripe and overripe fruits of Musa paradisiaca demonstrated significant inhibitory effects on the movement of glucose into external solution across the dialysis membrane as compared to the control. The extracts under study also promoted glucose uptake by the yeast cells in all the five glucose concentrations used in the study.

Here, the authors have verified and compared the hypoglycemic potential of Musa paradisiaca, its unripe fruit extract was found to show a better activity than ripe and overripe fruit extracts.

Banana, being an all season readily available fruit, is widely consumed due to its ready availability and low cost. It acts as a complete food for even low socio-economic classes of society, owing to its rich nutritional values. Even in a processed and unprocessed manner, it is an important constituent of diet. The research suggests that instead of consuming ripe and overripe fruit, the unripe fruit will help in management of diabetes.