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PurposeThe effectiveness of independent directors in making autonomous decisions for better corporate governance in organizations has often been questioned. This paper aims to investigate their role in company's decision making in India and the reasons behind their ineffectiveness.Design/methodology/approachThis paper examines the regulatory environment and ongoing reforms in which independent directors operate. It identifies crucial factors such as ownership patterns, the appointment and selection process that affect their autonomy. The analysis draws from newspaper articles, blogs, India's regulatory requirements, The Companies Act and relevant related literature.FindingsThe findings reveal that the independence of directors remains largely in form but not in function. This paper recommends a fair and more robust selection through an independent authority, and disclosure of the resignations of independent directors. Independent directors should be given more powers and their risk-reward scheme should be analyzed.Originality/valueThe paper emphasizes the need for independent directors to be truly independent from the senior management, promoters, and other existing directors. It calls for tighter and more transparent appointment procedures to ensure that independent directors are not influenced by senior management and can bring objectivity to the company board.

Despite a few gaps, Budget 2024 has incorporated various climate-focused interventions, offering hope for navigating the challenges of climate change with effective fiscal measures ...

The West is suffering from 'pessimism paralysis' – a despair towards the digital. This stands against the contagion of hope towards new technologies among young people, most of whom live in the Global South and have fast come online due to increasingly cheap mobile phones and data plans. The digital, despite the risks of surveillance and control, offers these young people with the possibility of a little more freedom to find pleasure, leisure, and spaces for self-actualization. While fears and concerns around new technology are legitimate, they become critically meaningful when they fairly account for the full spectrum of human sentiment driven by diverse lived experiences. Pessimism is a privilege for those who can afford to live with despair. It is our moral imperative to hope as this collective belief can be harnessed to align the digital with global social flourishing.

AbstractThe world is witnessing a rise in speech-enabled devices serving as epistemic informants to their users. Some philosophers take the view that because the utterances produced by such machines can be phenomenologically similar to an equivalent human speech, and they may deliver the same function in terms of delivering content to their audience, such machine utterances should be conceptualized as "assertions". This paper argues against this view and highlights the theoretical and pragmatic challenges faced by such a conceptualization which seems to be based on a "functionalist" account of assertion. Instead, the paper argues that the view that some such machine utterances can be "proxy assertions", made on behalf of the designers and/or deployers of such machines is more tenable. Existing accounts of such a view, however, need further refinement, which is provided here. The paper then discusses implications of this view for design of such machines, particularly those enabled and equipped with machine learning capabilities.

This paper aims to examine the access to higher education for students with disabilities (SWDs) and identify the factors affecting their access and academic performance with special reference to Panjab University (PU). The statistical analysis was carried out using measures of central tendency (mean and median) and measures of dispersion (standard deviation), Kruskal–Wallis test (for more than two groups). Nonparametric Spearman's rho correlations were used for the relationship. Growth rate was calculated with the log-lin and lin-log regression models. All statistical tests were seen at a two-tailed level of significance (p ≤ 0.01 and p ≤ 0.05). The study highlighted that students in higher education were heterogeneous on many accounts including on the basis of abilities. The enrolment rate of SWDs is increasing at 5.89%. However, access to SWDs is abysmally low (2%) in India against the norms of 5% reservation. The analysis of data revealed that not only were SWDs facing barriers such as physical infrastructure, academic and financial, but they were also prone to the indifferent behaviour of teachers and fellow students in a few instances. With a view to improve the access and academic performance of SWDs, speedy implementation of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPWD) Act, 2016, introducing infrastructure accessibility as a parameter to rank universities in the national ranking survey and providing accessible academic resources are the need of the hour.