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Practical conservation of heritage buildings in Kolkata started in the 1990s and the first restoration project was the Town Hall, a public building built by the British in 1813, in the central business district by a public‐private partnership. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the restoration process and adaptive reuse of the Town Hall as a case study.

A team of conservationists, architects and structural engineers worked during 1996‐1998. The methodology included surveying and documenting the existing structure; examining old materials and methods of construction, earlier repairs and the suitability of matching new materials; analysing the structure, defects and their causes; prescribing remedial measures; preparing items of work, estimating and tendering for appointment of contractors; allocating funds for restoration; supervision and monitoring of the works.

It was necessary to undertake structural strengthening and physical restoration through corrective measures, and reinstallation of all service systems, which resulted in the opening up of this edifice again for various kinds of public use, that included a museum.

This was a pilot project for the state administration and the people of Kolkata. After this project, the conservation of historic buildings became an agenda of government and civil society. The lessons learned here were applied to the restoration of other similar buildings in Kolkata.

Conservation‐researchers, academics and practitioners will gain from this paper an in‐depth understanding of the restoration process in Kolkata.

In the rapidly urbanizing Indian cities, large buildings are being built demolishing old buildings often with historic, cultural and architectural merit bringing the conflict between development and conservation. In Kolkata, the authority has taken a unilateral decision to construct high-rise buildings demolishing a hundred-year old Bow Barracks housing complex. The purpose of this paper is to present a research study that empirically explored the appropriateness of the policy decision and a recommendation for appropriate development based on the research result.

The design of the research is formulated on the survey method that encompasses observation, interview and collection of data through questionnaire, and survey, documentation and testing of architecture. All findings are analysed; research question and hypothesis are tested with validation.

The research has found that the old housing is of cultural heritage and use value, and the inhabitants are a very special community in Kolkata. The new development proposal in terms of space generation and cost involvement over the benefit of conserving the existing housing is not beneficial. Therefore, the decision of the local body, in terms of value for money, architecture, culture, heritage and sustainability is not proper.

Such a research exploring the benefit between development and conservation for choice of appropriate path of development in managing the development of a city in global south stands for its uniqueness.

Gateway cities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata are central in the tourist experience to India, yet the official government authorities and destination marketing organizations tend to underestimate the potential of these destinations to prospective and returning international tourists. In particular, there is little empirical research on urban tourism, food tourism and city marketing in the aforementioned cities. This paper aims to explore the scope for the promotion of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata as food urban destinations.

For the purposes of this study, a case study methodology using content analysis was developed to ascertain the nexus between food and tourism in the three observed cities. Materials were gathered for the year 2019, with a focus on brochures, tourist guides, websites and social media accounts for Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. A two-coding approach through NVivo was designed to analyse and report the findings.

The findings of the study suggest that the cities of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata fall short in positioning themselves as food urban destinations. Moreover, the study reports a dissonance between the imagery of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata portrayed to international tourists through induced images and the food-related experiences available in the cities. This divide reflects a pattern in destination marketing in India observed in previous research.

The exploratory nature of this study calls for more research in the trends and future directions of food tourism and urban marketing in Indian cities. Moreover, this study calls for further research on the perceptions of urban food experience in Indian cities among international and domestic tourists.

A series of practical implications can be drawn. First, urban and national destination marketing organizations need to join efforts in developing urban marketing campaigns that place food as a key element of the urban experience. Second, cities worldwide are rebranding themselves as food destinations and Indian cities should reconsider local and regional culinary traditions as mean to reposition themselves to food travellers’ similar niche segments.

The quest for authenticity is central in the expectations of incoming tourists. Moreover, the richness and variety of local and regional food in the cities analysed in this study can enhance urban visitor experience, with obvious economic and socio-cultural benefits for the local businesses and residents.

This study is the first of its kind to provide preliminary evidence on the nexus between food and tourism in Indian cities. Building from the literature, it developed a conceptual framework for the analysis of food tourism and urban branding and shed light on a currently overlooked aspect of incoming tourism to India.

Geographical location has been of noted importance for technology entrepreneurship, i.e. technology clusters. While social resources have been investigated as strategic in management literature, media reputation appears to be an overlooked reason why technological entrepreneurship has been less prevalent in some geographical locations, despite there being fertile economic parameters. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Utilizing methodology developed by Rindova et al. to explore how media (local and foreign) describes technological entrepreneurship (local and foreign), the paper compares Boston, MA and Kolkata, India in terms of positive or negative valenced recognition and explores their relation to technology entrepreneurship location.

Geographical media reputation is contextualized and does not transfer readily. Unlike the absolute positives of economic reasoning, positive media reputation in the local context does not scale globally. Also, negative reputation is very hard to overturn at the global level. Social resources often have their own social dynamics that are localized in culture and environment.

This paper is an exploratory, illustrative analysis of the relation between geographical reputation at local and global levels and the location choice of technology entrepreneurship. Other factors do exist that the paper does not examine specifically but tries to match through sample selection, realizing no two geographical locations can ever be exact matches and in this case are rough equivalents.

Geographical location imputes social resources – namely media reputation – that can affect the location choice of technology entrepreneurship beyond economic considerations.

This paper aims to understand the factors affecting the evolution of retailing in India since the mid-nineteenth century.

This paper compares the trajectories of four distinct retail stores in India – Spencer’s pan-Indian retailing empire since 1863, Akbarallys’ department store chain in Mumbai since 1897, Apna Bazar’s consumer cooperative chain in Mumbai since 1948 and the Future Group’s pan-Indian retailing chain since the 1980s. Historical sources include firm biographies and newspaper archives.

This paper proposes a systems theory linking environmental influences and service innovation, to explain the evolution of retailing in India since the mid-nineteenth century. The key environmental influence on retailing has been state patronage – colonialism and high-end department stores until the 1940s, socialism and cooperative stores until the 1980s and liberalisation with restricted foreign direct investment in retailing until 2015 associated with indigenous corporate large retail format stores. Service innovation in terms of home delivery and recreation of the bazaar atmosphere due to norms on gender and community have also interacted to shape individual success in modern retailing and the dominance of small shop retailing over the long run.

This paper questions standard accounts of retailing history in India that began with the late-twentieth century by showing the scale of a pan-Indian retailing chain in the early-twentieth century. It also provides an account of retailers that is missing in the current literature on the history of consumption in India.

Findings of this study will be useful to marketing professionals and teachers who wish to learn more about the history of retailing in India. It also shows how retailers navigated changes in the regulatory and business environment.

Through a comparative study, this paper outlines the environmental influences on retail formats and service innovation strategies that are required to serve the Indian market. It also brings to fore the significance of retailing chains in colonial India.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the physicians’ attitude toward branded generic drugs in prescribing those drugs in some selective medical conditions and to identify the factors that influence physicians’ behavior toward prescribing branded generic drugs in the said selective medical conditions.

The study was carried out across six major cities in eastern India with 301 physicians. The current study introduced some significant elements into the modified technology acceptance model (TAM) with title the extended tam for product usage (TETPU) to analyze the prescribing factors that influence physicians in five common yet serious medical conditions in India. Out of nine factors considered here, seven were selected from the previous literature studies of different product segments and two were proposed by the authors. Demographic factor was proposed as the confounding variable.

The results indicated that apart from the factors “perceived no need” and “physicians’ perception and need achievement” rest of the factors showed satisfactory to excellent results.

The current study findings may enable the pharmaceutical managers to revise or modify their current marketing communication and other brand-building strategies so as to achieve a superior performance that offers them a competitive advantage.

The paper fulfils a need for advancing the knowledge on the physician’s prescription influencing factors by introducing the newer aspects of the concept and offers a theoretical framework for the academia and practical framework for the managers who desire to implement the strategies to achieve competitive advantage.

This paper aims to develop a set of affordable space and dimensional standards for market-driven low-income housing in Indian context for the purpose of mass production using industrialised building system.

For this, the paper first explains the significance of standardisation from the literature and revisits the codes and contemporary practices in industrialised building system (IBS) in India. Next, it undertakes a market survey of ongoing/completed housing projects to study the space/dimensions reflected in the market demand by the people. After considering conditions like modular grid suitability and provisions of code, it identifies a set of dimensional standards of activity spaces, emerging from the market study. It also suggests a framework of modular units showing the incremental attachment possibility for component-based construction using IBS. These standards and design frameworks will make the path for developing various products and components towards an open system in India.

The paper gives an insight of the market trends of low-income housing, focusing on unit designs and spatial elements.

Local contextualisation during the unit designs will be required and that is not addressed in this paper.

This will benefit developers, manufacturers, designers as well as policymakers towards a market-driven housing delivery using IBS.

As a result of this standardisation, housing delivery will be faster and there will be more numbers of market-driven affordable housing in masses for low-income people, thus solving housing shortage.

A developing country like India is a diversified country having many geographical and social variations. Such standardisation for a space and design framework has never been attempted before and will make a contribution for the public housing sector.

Since 1991 with the advent of globalization and economic liberalisation, basic conceptual and discursive changes are taking place in housing sector in India. The new changes suggest how housing affordability, quality and lifestyles reality is shifting for various segments of the population. Such shift not only reflects structural patterns but also stimulates an ongoing transition process. The paper highlights a twin impetus that continue to shape the ongoing transition: expanding middle class and their wealth - a category with distinctive lifestyles, desires and habits and corresponding ‘market defining’ of affordable housing standards - to articulate function of housing as a conceptualization of social reality in modern India. The paper highlights the contradictions and paradoxes, and the manner in which the concept of affordability, quality and lifestyles are embedded in both discourse and practice in India. The housing ‘dream’ currently being packaged and fed through to the middle class population has an upper middle class bias and is set to alienate those at the lower end of the middle-and low-income population. In the context of growing agreement and inevitability of market provision of ‘affordable housing’, the unbridled ‘market-defining’ of housing quality and lifestyles must be checked.

This paper discusses the urban management challenges in the Greater Kuala Lumpur area. Before examining Greater Kuala Lumpur's economic and social environment, we will look at the factors that make it a competitive and fiscally sound entity. When considering urban development and redevelopment, we consider how proposed and ongoing projects, as well as plans, hierarchical links, and road networks, contributed to the increase. Because there is no urban growth boundary, land use change and rural encroachment, as well as environmental degradation and the impact of national economic projects on urban expansion, are both rapid and linear in the analysis. This paper also considers how to manage linear development that results in the creation of new suburbs. Finally, we propose strategies for achieving sustainable urban expansion and management by balancing the financial and governance capacities of Greater Kuala Lumpur local governments.