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Working Papers | 2008

Development of Corrugated Fiber Board Cartons for Long Distance Transport of Tomato in India

Girja Sharan, S Srivastav, Kishor P Rawale, and Umang Dave

Tomato growers of Gujarat , north-west India , traditionally send produce to wholesale market in Ahmedabad city for auction. Growing areas lie about 250-300 km from the city. Growers were constrained to sell there even if the prices were not attractive which the case usually as season advanced was. Lack of sturdy packaging deterred them from sending produce to more distant markets such as Bombay ( 600 km ) , Delhi ( 900 km) or Bangalore ( 2000) . Peti, the box used presently, made of strips of wood nailed together does not protect the produce adequately. Although, there are many large packaging firms in the region producing boxes for various consumer products, problem of tomato growers was not recognized. Their view was that tomato being a low-value commodity, growers will not buy better packaging. Being mostly small, growers were not organized enough to raise funds to sponsor research at public R&D institutions in the area. That task was therefore taken up. Boxes that protected the produce better on long journey and were affordable were designed and introduced successfully in the region. This paper describes the development.

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Working Papers | 2008

Strategies for Improved Servicing of the Customers: Case of Ghaziabad Goods Shed of the Indian Railways

G. Raghuram and Samantha Bastian

The Ghaziabad (GZB) goods shed was one of the top rail goods handling points in the National Capital Region (NCR). The growth was expected to be robust in the forthcoming years, since GZB and Noida were high growth districts in the Uttar Pradesh part of the NCR. GZB goods shed was one of the fifty high traffic sheds identified for improvement, as part of the Indian Railways (IRs) Mission 900 mt loading. The paper provides a comprehensive description of GZB goods shed, including facilities, traffic flow, customer interface, processes, etc. In this context, the paper raises questions regarding (i) main concerns in GZB goods shed as viewed (a) by customers and (b) from IRs perspective, (ii) analytical support for customer service improvement provided by demurrage (wharfage) data, (iii) operational, process and infrastructure improvements at GZB, (iv) long term improvements, and (v) need for perspective changes.

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Working Papers | 2008

Implementing Tabu Search to Exploit Sparsity in ATSP Instances

Sumanta Basu, Ravindra S Gajulapalli, and Diptesh Ghosh

Real life traveling salesman problem (TSP) instances are often large,sparse, and asymmetric. Conventional tabu search implementations for the TSP that have been reported in the literature, almost always deals with small, dense and symmetric instances. In this paper, we outline data structures and a tabu search implementation that takes advantage of such data structures, which can exploit sparsity of a TSP instances, and hence can solve relatively large TSP instances (with up to 3000 nodes) much faster than conventional implementations. We also provide computational experiences with this implementation.

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Working Papers | 2008

A review of the Tabu Search Literature on Traveling Salesman Problems

Sumanta Basu and Diptesh Ghosh

The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most widely studied problems inrncombinatorial optimization. It has long been known to be NP-hard and hence research onrndeveloping algorithms for the TSP has focused on approximate methods in addition to exactrnmethods. Tabu search is one of the most widely applied metaheuristic for solving the TSP. Inrnthis paper, we review the tabu search literature on the TSP, point out trends in it, and bringrnout some interesting research gaps in this literature.

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Working Papers | 2008

An Exploratory Study of the Role of Educational Incentives in Primary Education in Gujarat

Vijaya Sherry Chand, Tathagata Banerjee, and Chattopadhyay Bhargab

This study explores the role of incentives—monetary or non-monetary compensation offered to children so that an educational need is fulfilled or perceived cost is brought down—in attaining certain expected educational enrolment and retention outcomes. It draws on a survey conducted in six villages in Gujarat. Incentives themselves may not be that critical in improving access and retention performance; other socio-economic and school-related factors may be more significant in ensuring access and retention. However, incentives may have help in keeping the poorer performers in school.

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Working Papers | 2008

Creation of a Single National ID: Challenges & Opportunities for India

Rajanish Dass and Bajaj R K

A National ID for all citizens and residents of India has long being considered a critical necessity, albeit the related projects have been in pilot mode for the past several years and no distinct road ahead seems to be coming out. The government has been focusing on inclusive growth and has launched several schemes at different levels to facilitate the same. However, monitoring the execution of these schemes and understanding clearly if the targeted citizens actually have got benefited, would demand for substantial granularity of information and doing away with information bottlenecks. Interestingly, proper execution of the National ID project by the government can prove to be useful for execution of various schemes and projects as well as in accessing multiple government and private sector services. This paper focuses on the need for a single national identity system in India and its proposed execution which may actually be linked to citizen life cycle. The other aspects covered and analyzed include current Indian scenario, challenges, existing identification systems and loopholes in the existing systems. Major challenges seem to be coming from enrolments, technology platform choice and strategic design, corresponding policy and legal frameworks. The paper also discusses about international scenario of single national id projects undertaken in 27 countries across the globe to understand current status, adoption and usage. To reinforce the need for national ID, the existing IDs were analysed based on a scoring model considering various dimensions. Primary research was conducted, based on which it was found none of the existing IDs was able to satisfy as a National ID based on the scoring model. The proposed road map has been discussed in length i.e technology platform, smart card technology, legal and administrative framework, business model based on Private-Public Partnership (PPP) considering the mammoth and diverse population. A ranking matrix may be created to come up with a composite score for all districts based on various dimensions. The execution may be planned to be executed without asking Indians to stand in queue for one more ID and accelerating towards a more secured society and more importantly ensuring better delivery of Government services to citizens.

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Working Papers | 2008

An Investigation of Incongruency and Distraction Hypotheses: The Context of Dubbed TV Commercials

P. Venkatesh and Piyush Kumar Sinha

When one looks at the Television commercials scene in India, one easily sees three distinct patterns of communication. One is the nation-wide campaigns that are language neutral, meaning, they are purely music based. The other kind is a pure regional communications, with regional content starting from the language to the props used. The third variety is more like the 'transition-ads' that are between a pure nation-wide and a pure regional communication. These are basically nation-wide commercials dubbed in the regional languages, while not changing any part of the visual: thus they are 'national' with their visuals and regional with their sound track. The current study seeks to understand the effectiveness of such dubbed advertisements. Here incongruency and distraction hypotheses are investigated through two experiments. A social message against the use of cell-phones is used with students as target audience. The results of the first experiment while indicates distraction effects, the ANOVA tests have a very low power. The second experiment apart from repeating the first experiment with a little larger sample also looks at amount of counterarguments in the treatment conditions. The results of the second study do not validate any of the hypotheses. However the recall results are intriguing. Divided attention and incongruency are found to be two competing theories in explaining the recall effects of dubbed advertisements.

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Working Papers | 2008

Assessing the Changing Employment Profiles in the Telecom Sector: Implications for Education and Training

Rekha Jain

Telecom sector in India has been growing very fast and changing very rapidly in service delivery mechanisms used, target segments addressed, technogical platforms for service delivery etc. Globally also the growth scenario is very positive. This means that this sector offers employment opportunities that are attractive. In order to exploit these opportunities, the sector needs people with the approppriate employment profiles that match the changing requirements both in atributes and numbers. However, the current education system is not equipped to provide the requisite profiles. This paper identifies and quantifies the skill gap both in terms of focus areas and numbers by segmenting the sector. It suggest directions in which the change must happen. It also reviews innovative approaches in the private and government sector in India and abroad with a view to assess the adapatability of these approaches on a larger scale in India.

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Working Papers | 2008

Design and Application of Risk Adjusted Cumulative Sum (RACUSUM) for Online Strength Monitoring of Ready Mixed Concrete

Goutam Dutta and Sarkar Debasis

The Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) procedure is an effective statistical process control tool that can be used to monitor quality of ready mixed concrete (RMC) during its production process. Online quality monitoring refers to monitoring of the concrete quality at the RMC plant during its production process. In this paper, we attempt to design and apply a new CUSUM procedure for RMC industry which takes care of the risks involved and associated with the production of RMC. This new procedure can be termed as Risk Adjusted CUSUM (RACUSUM). The 28 days characteristic cube compressive strengths of the various grades of concrete and detailed information regarding the production process and the risks associated with the production of RMC were collected from the operational RMC plants in and around Ahmedabad and Delhi (India). The risks are quantified using a likelihood based scoring method. Finally a Risk Adjusted CUSUM model is developed by imposing the weighted score of the estimated risks on the conventional CUSUM plot. This model is a more effective and realistic tool for monitoring the strength of RMC.

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Working Papers | 2008

Lessons from Massive Floods of 2006 in Surat City: A framework for Application of MS/OR Techniques to Improve Dam Management to Prevent Flood

Dileep Mavalankar and Srivastava Amit Kumar

In the month of August 2006, a massive flood in the city of Surat caused major human tragedy and property damage estimated at Rs 22,000 crore. Floods also lead to loss of human and animal life and threat of epidemic. The flood of 2006 was the 3rd major flood since 1994, when plague epidemic broke out in Surat after similar flood. Given the repeated floods in Surat policy makers, administrators, experts and people have to rethink about how to improve dam management to reduce the risk floods. With global warming the risks of extreme weather events will also increase. Given this situation we have tried to analyse the available literature and evidence, including 'People's Committee on Gujarat Flood 2006: A Report', about how Ukai dam was managed during the flood of August 2006 in Surat. This analysis shows that Ukai dam is still being managed using static "Rule Book" originally developed in the 1970s. No modern OR/MS techniques or computer based modeling is used in dam management to reduce risk of flooding. Based on this analysis of the floods and dam management practices we develop a conceptual framework for a Decision Support System using simple modeling of Tapi River and Ukai dam using basic of MS/OR techniques. We have identified more than 18 parameters which should be used for such DSS to minimize risks of flooding and risk of lack of irrigation water in summer. Given that India is a world leader in computer software it should not be difficult or expensive to develop a computerized model of the dam system which will enhance the capacity to balance various risks involved in the dam management. We discuss what needs to be done in public management to develop and apply such DSS in major dams in rivers.

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