No abstract

Farm debt waivers have been introduced in India, from time to time, to provide relief to the indebted farmers. The chapter focuses on the viability of farm debt waiver in India—whether it serves as an ephemeral palliative (a temporary reassuring measure) or an enduring risk management tool (a permanent remedy to build resilience against a longstanding debt crisis)—for farmers by employing situation, actor, process, learning, action, performance (SAP-LAP) framework. Loan waivers occasionally appear as a quick fix to alleviate farmers' misery. They trigger moral hazard as the farmers make no attempts to repay the loans themselves with the expectation that an imminent waiver from the government would clear their debts, thus ruining the credit culture of the country. From a policy viewpoint, it is imperative to make agriculture sustainable by lessening inefficiencies, augmenting income, moderating costs, and affording protection through premeditated and well-defined insurance schemes.

Digital business has marked an era of transformation, but also an unprecedented growth of cyber threats. While digital explosion witnessed by the banking sector since the COVID-19 pandemic has been significant, the level and frequency of cybercrimes have gone up as well. Cybercrime officials attribute it to remote working—people using home computers or laptops with vulnerable online security than office systems; malicious actors relentlessly developing their tactics to find new ways to break into enterprise networks and grasping defence evasion; persons unemployed during the pandemic getting into hacking; cloud and data corruption; digital fatigue causing negligence; etc. This study adopts a case-based approach to explore the importance of business ethics, information sharing and transparency to build an information-driven society by scouting the case of Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative (PMC) Bank, India. PMC defaulted on payments to its depositors and was placed under Reserve Bank of India’s directions due to financial irregularities and a massive fraud perpetrated by bank officials by orchestrating the bank’s IT systems. The crisis worsened when panic-stricken investors advanced their narrative through fake news peddled via social media channels, resulting in alarm that caused deaths of numerous depositors. It exposed several loopholes in information management in India’s deposit insurance system and steered the policy makers to restructure the same, thus driving the country consistent with its emerging market peers. The study further identifies best practices for aligning employees towards ethical behaviour in a virtual workplace and the pedagogical approaches for information management in the new normal.

Deposit insurance is intended for providing security to depositors from the standpoint of averting bank runs. It is crucial for nations to examine their institutional environment, banking structure, and regulatory framework before insuring deposits in the interest of maintaining market discipline. In the case of India, while Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation (DICGC) has been contributing appreciably to the stability of Indian banking system by safeguarding depositors against possible loss of their entitled deposits with insured banks, the system is based on “paybox” mandate and affords limited conditional protection to depositors. Guided by the need for a stronger resolution mechanism, the Indian government introduced the Financial Resolution and Deposit Insurance (FRDI) Bill in August 2017, which had its own share of controversies, conceivably the most confounded provisions being the bail-in clause and omission of explicit declaration of maximum coverage. The economic and political pressures, however, led to the dropping of the Bill in July 2018, thus creating further vacuum in an already underprovided deposit protection.

The famous ‘cultivation' theory proposed by Professor George Gerbner suggests that people are influenced by jingles and catchlines, and a good deal of their conceptions of social reality depends on their exposure to television. The impact of incessant exposure to similar messages engenders cultivation, or the consolidation of a persistent conception, conventional roles and pooled standards, often involuntarily. The present study intends to explore cultivation theory by considering Indian commercials aired on television since 2001 till date and by critically examining and exploring marketing strategies employed by companies from the standpoint of gender-based portrayals and their consequent impact. The conclusion is that assigning particular traits to genders only restricts individuals from choosing who they want to be. It creates boxed expectations, and judges those who step outside them. Gender roles are nothing but an unrealistic expectation, which limits people from being their true selves, an aspect that needs realization by marketers.