Public procurement: a case study of the Indian Railways

Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest public sector organizations. Its network, traffic, organization and extent of vertical integration are gigantic. This paper undertakes a critical examination of its procurement process to understand the procedures and institutional mechanisms which have evolved over time for safeguarding institutional interests. The paper examines issues such as organizational structure, procurement organization, source selection methodology, procurement oversight and regulation and their impact on the economy, efficiency, transparency and accountability aspects of procurement. It is found that a unique combination of internal vigil, external oversight by independent bodies and organizational characteristics contribute to robust procurement processes

Public procurement: a case study of the Indian Railways

Indian Railways is one of the world’s largest public sector organizations. Its network, traffic, organization and extent of vertical integration are gigantic. This paper undertakes a critical examination of its procurement process to understand the procedures and institutional mechanisms which have evolved over time for safeguarding institutional interests. The paper examines issues such as organizational structure, procurement organization, source selection methodology, procurement oversight and regulation and their impact on the economy, efficiency, transparency and accountability aspects of procurement. It is found that a unique combination of internal vigil, external oversight by independent bodies and organizational characteristics contribute to robust procurement processes

Choosing the appropriate project management structure, project financing, land acquisition and contractual process for Indian railway mega-projects: a case study of the Dedicated Freight Corridor project

A large number of railway mega-projects are planned or are under implementation for capacity augmentation, for serving the needs of trade, specific regions or industry sectors. Since transport capacity is one of the main levers of economic progress, it is essential that augmentation of transport capacity is not held up. It is therefore essential to choose the appropriate project management structure, project financing, land acquisition and contractual process to ensure design, construction and commissioning of projects without cost and time overruns. These choices have to be made keeping in view the context of the organisational technical capacity, financial capability, contractor capacity, and industry and trade growth pattern. This paper examines the various project management structures, methods of project financing, land acquisition and contractual processes along with their advantages and disadvantages. The paper takes the specific case of the Dedicated Freight Corridor project to examine the appropriateness of options

Preference-Based Privacy Markets

Correction IEEE ACCESS Volume9 Pages14179-14180 Article Numbere abe4038 DOI10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3051825 Published 2021In the modern era of the mobile apps (the era of surveillance capitalism - as termed by Shoshana Zuboff) huge quantities of surveillance data about consumers and their activities offer a wave of opportunities for economic and societal value creation. ln-app advertising - a multi-billion dollar industry, is an essential part of the current digital ecosystem driven by free mobile applications, where the ecosystem entities usually comprise consumer apps, their clients (consumers), ad-networks, and advertisers. Sensitive consumer information is often being sold downstream in this ecosystem without the knowledge of consumers, and in many cases to their annoyance. While this practice, in cases, may result in long-term benefits for the consumers, it can result in serious information privacy breaches of very significant impact (e.g., breach of genetic data) in the short term. The question we raise through this paper is: Is it economically feasible to trade consumer personal information with their formal consent (permission) and in return provide them incentives (monetary or otherwise)?. In view of (a) the behavioral assumption that humans are 'compromising' beings and have privacy preferences, (b) privacy as a good not having strict boundaries, and (c) the practical inevitability of inappropriate data leakage by data holders downstream in the data-release supply-chain, we propose a design of regulated efficient/bounded inefficient economic mechanisms for oligopoly data trading markets using a novel preference function bidding approach on a simplified sellers-broker market. Our methodology preserves the heterogeneous privacy preservation constraints (at a grouped consumer, i.e., app, level) upto certain compromise levels, and at the same time satisfies information demand (via the broker) of agencies (e.g., advertising organizations) that collect client data for the purpose of targeted behavioral advertising.Peer reviewe

Organizing National Elections in India to Elect the 543 Members of the Lok Sabha

There are 833 thousand polling stations in all of the 543 parliamentary constituencies spread over 35 states of India. On the day elections are being held in any one of these polling stations, a minimum of 4 Central Police Force(CPF) personnel must be deployed there, to maintain law and order and guarantee that voters can vote freely without being intimidated by anyone. As the number of CPF personnel available for this activity is limited, it is not possible to hold the Indian General elections on a single day over the whole country. So the set of 35 States of India is partitioned into a number of subsets, with elections in each subset of states being held on a single day. This partition is required to satisfy the constraints that the states in each subset are contiguous, and the subsets themselves must be contiguous. We present a method for organizing the Indian General Elections subject to these constraints, and minimizing the total number of election days required, and the total cost for the movement of CPF personnel involved. The method is based on the shortest Hamiltonian path problem, a tour segmentation problem defined in the paper, and the bipartite minimum cost flow problem

Towards Green Freight Transportation Using Train Design Optimization

It is imperative to re-design the freight transport modal mix to ensure a shift from road to rail to limit energy consumption and global GHG emissions. However, one of the main barriers to the shift is the ability of the railways to handle consignments from customers with less than ‘unit’ train loads. In such cases, railways have to combine consignments from different customers to form ‘unit’ trains. Combining consignments is a train design optimization process involving designing a trip plan with the minimum number of trains formed and satisfying a set of conditions. However, manually optimizing train design for high-density freight traffic is challenging and practically impossible. Hence, it is essential to develop an automated train design optimization methodology that railways can quickly implement. Among several conditions of train formation, the two key constraints are the ‘number of work events’ and ‘number of block swaps’. However, the existing literature only considers either one of these two constraints in a single decision-making model. We have proposed a train design optimization method based on a genetic algorithm with a priority generator to simultaneously consider both the above-mentioned constraints. The train design optimization method developed has also been demonstrated using real-life data.</p