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Purpose: The cities are distinctly engine of economic growth, which depends upon speed at which innovations are brought out and trigger entrepreneurship. Smart city initiatives are one of the opportunities to unleash innovation and entrepreneurship in developing countries like India. Entrepreneurial ecosystem research in smart cities is still in its nascent phase. Therefore, the study aims to bring out elements for a start-up ecosystem to promote entrepreneurship in smart cities. Design/methodology/approach: Focus group discussion has been applied to gain a variety of insights and opinion from selected participants with diverse expertise. Findings: The study proposes a framework for developing a start-up ecosystem in smart city. The findings suggest the technology infrastructure along with the elements of start-up framework as knowledge hub, public policy, entrepreneurship and city economy. Research limitations/implications: The study does not show the impact of smart city strategies over an extended period. Practical implications: A robust entrepreneurial framework usually impact on utilization of technologies for economic activities and regional development. The innovators, policymakers, city administrators, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and various stakeholders in society will get benefit from the outcomes of this study. Social implications: The evolution of smart cities is a social initiative with various stakeholders –such as governments, residents, businesses and entrepreneurs. The creation of start-up ecosystem in smart cities requires several levels of interventions such as new programs and institutional reforms. Originality/value: The research explores pillars and constituents that describe a start-up ecosystem in smart cities and nurtures a collaborative culture of innovations and entrepreneurship.

Purpose: This paper aims to identify the key factors to design efficient, healthy and potentially economical neighbourhood places in the surroundings of smart cities to reduce the urban polarization for the sustainable urban development. Design/methodology/approach: A two-stage methodology is followed. First, the key factors for neighbourhood are identified from literature studies. The selected factors are validated by sample t-tests. Second, the total interpretive structural modeling is used to interpret the complexity of relationships among various factors. Further, cross-impact matrix multiplication is applied for classification analysis to find the most driving factors for neighbourhood design. Findings: The contribution of this research is to show hierarchical relationships among the various factors to design the neighbourhood places as smart from the perspectives of city planners and decision makers. Research limitations/implications: The applicability of the research findings is limited to developing countries mainly where population is large and most of cities have high pressure on its infrastructure to fulfil the citizens’ demands. Practical implications: This paper will aid policymakers, city planners and government officials to design a sustainable smart city model in which smart neighbourhood would also be the potential solution to decrease pressure on a city’s critical infrastructure especially in developing countries. Social implications: A smart city could be considered as the centre point of smart initiatives to develop a place smart, and it should continue beyond the city boundaries to enhance the facilities, services, resources utilization and working environment in neighbourhood places also. Originality/value: The study explores the various literature on neighbourhood planning and then link with smart city development as current need of urban development scenario. The authors propose a hierarchical relation framework to develop the neighbourhood places as smart places to meet the future demand of urbanization in developing countries like India.

Due to increasing awareness among consumers and government legislations for preserving environment manufacturing firm’s needs to identifies and analyse the various variables involved in their supply chains. While, the identification of key variables for organisations those either implemented or thinking to initiate green activities in supply chains is a challenge. This paper provides an interpretive structural modelling (ISM)-based approach to implement and initiate green activities in supply chains. Variables such as supplier and stakeholder commitment, cost benefits, environmental issue, and customer redundancy, etc., have been identified and categorised under enablers; green and sustainable products, processing time and green productivity and efficiency, etc., under results. The research result interprets the variables possessing higher driving power requires high attention. Finally, proposed a model to present the ISM-based hierarchy in order of preference of variables in GSC. The variables in proposed ISM model are input through a case paper industry in northern India.

While we witness an increasing number of government websites day-by-day, the user experience with the various government websites is not uniform. This emanates from different technology standards, design layouts, navigation architecture, functionality, etc. This is one major impediment in making government website usage by citizens pervasive. Again, websites, both government and otherwise are frequently subjected to hacking, privacy violations, and defacement. Thus, such kinds of cyber attacks compromise the information security and privacy of data/information available on web portals. The meaningfulness of web portals as a medium to reach-out to citizens is lost in such a case. As an exploratory study, this paper examines various information security challenges in Indian Government web portals, and the initiatives taken to combat these challenges by various Indian Government departments, agencies and organisations.

In recent years information system (IS) outsourcing is increasingly being explored as an option to get the better output from the IS infrastructure. However the results of IS outsourcing are mixed. This paper has tried to assess the impact of IS outsourcing in short, medium and long term. The study also has compared the impact of IS outsourcing according to the different degree of outsourcing. The study shows that there is significant improvement in short–term impact in terms of efficiency, service level and cost savings with the increase in degree of IS outsourcing. However, in long–term, impact of outsourcing may not be favourable at high degree of outsourcing.

Research on digital government focus mainly was hitherto on strategic implementation of government services, without an accountability of service quality expected by the users. Good service quality helps in return users and thus can enhance the usage of e-government services. Very few studies which have been done on e-government service quality. Researchers generally adopt multidimensional scale proposed for e-commerce to measure the e-service quality of government projects. But are the two comparable? An empirical research based on conceptual model in this paper highlights to what extent an e-commerce model can be implemented to evaluate the service quality of government digital services offered over the internet. The findings have been explained, which can serve as a valuable input for researchers and practitioners to understand user perceived service quality for e-government portals. The study was based on an Indian Government portal and might be a limitation for taking a holistic approach to address the issues existing in government portals of different countries.

An attempt is made in this article to gain an understanding of the evolution of Electronic Governance (E-governance) in India. The initial part of the article examines the Historical Perspectives and the evolution of E-governance in India since the formation of the Department of Electronics. The following sections give a detailed study about the initiatives taken by the Government of India over periods of five years and their Missions and Objectives in the creation of a “Transparent and Efficient Govern ability” from grass root levels. The relative development with the induction of these technologies through various policies and reforms are mapped against the projects and gauge the significant impact on the ability of our government to establish the current E-governance structures.

A total of 140 patients younger than 20 years of age have been operated upon for mitral stenosis by the closed technique at our institution. The mortality rate has been 3.5 per cent, and 90 per cent of the patients are doing well on follow-up of 1 to 6 years. Patients in developing countries are young, have pliable valves, and have a low incidence of atrial fibrillation, atrial thrombus, and calcification. A number of patients will need operation for restenosis on longer follow-up. In addition there are shortages of trained personnel, equipment, and drugs. For these reasons we believe that most of the patients in developing countries should have closed mitral valvotomy.

A young woman with scleroderma heart disease is presented. Complete work-up including hemodynamic studies revealed biventricular dysfunction, left ventricular hypokinesia and normal coronary arteries with slow flow velocity in coronary arteries. This finding, though not diagnostic, is consistent with small vessels disease secondary to scleroderma. Favorable prognosis in our patient on medical management is encouraging. No conclusions can be drawn on the basis of one patient. Further work is warranted in scleroderma patients with cardiomegaly to define the status of the myocardial microcirculation and its possible role in their prognosis.

Earlier, we reported that rat liver peroxisomes contain Cu-Zn superoxide dismutase (J. Biol. Chem. 267, 6870), thereby suggesting a new antioxidant role for this organelle in free radical metabolism. In this study, we report for the first time that mammalian peroxisomes also contain glutathione peroxidase. Using highly purified rat liver peroxisomes isolated by Nycodenz gradient, we found that peroxisomes contain glutathione peroxidase which shows enzymatic activity with different substrates such as hydrogen peroxide, cumene hydroperoxide, and t-butyl hydroperoxide. This activity could be inhibited in vitro by mercaptosuccinate. Western blot analysis revealed that peroxisomes from control and ciprofibrate-treated livers show immunoreactive bands with antibodies raised against glutathione peroxidase. The intraperoxisomal distribution of glutathione peroxidase was investigated by using peroxisomal membrane and matrix proteins. The results revealed that glutathione peroxidase is a matrix enzyme. The presence of glutathione peroxidase in peroxisomes provides an alternate enzyme system responsible for the degradation of organic peroxides and the degradation of H₂O₂ under conditions in which catalase is inactivated (e.g., ischemia-reperfusion and endotoxemia). These findings suggest that glutathione peroxidase in peroxisomes may play a novel role in the cellular antioxidant responses to various oxidative stress conditions.Copyright 1994, 1999 Academic Press, Inc.

Studies were performed on the mode of action of tolnaftate and resistance to this drug in Microsporum gypseum. Cells grown in the presence of tolnaftate (at the IC 50) showed a reduced content of total phospholipids and sterols whereas there was an increase in total RNA content. Incubation of cells with tolnaftate (at 10 ×× MIC), followed by addition of different macromolecule precursors revealed inhibition of the biosynthesis of all macromolecules except for RNA. The activity of membrane-bound enzymes did not change on treatment with tolnaftate (10 ×× MIC) whereas an increase in the leakage of intracellular 32P was observed. The content of total phospholipids was higher in tolnaftate-resistant cells, whereas the content of total sterols, DNA, RNA and protein was comparable to that of susceptible cultures. Activity of phosphodiesterase decreased and 5′′-nucleotidase increased in tolnaftate-resistant cells. Our results suggest that the antifungal activity of tolnaftate is due to differential action on various targets site(s) which are modified in strains resistant to the drug.

Any practical approach to information system (IS) design should have a criteria for value assessment and justification of information investment. But the issue has not found the attention it deserves in IS design procedures. The reason may be lack of a information value concept or operationally quantifiable measures. Opinion based analysis of individual information value structure appears to be the most viable and rational approach which has been proposed in this paper as a managerial assessment technique of information value and has been modelled in the extended Physical Systems Theoretic (PST) framework to analyse its relationship with cost. Extended PST is an effort to take explicitly into account the qualitative aspects of hard and soft systems.

A 900 t/day capacity installation, used for recycling of ammonia to a urea plant, with two ammonia streams and four receiver tanks, failed after 3 years in service. The vessels were of the cylindrical bullet type, made of SA 516 grade 70 carbon steel. Of the four receiver tanks, only one suffered stress corrosion cracking, caused by incomplete mixing of the 0·2% water required by the process parameters. The vessel was operated at ambient temperature and a pressure of 1·765 x 106Pa; the design pressure of the vessel was 2·256 × 106Pa.