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The paper highlights that in low and middle-income democracies citizens largely depend on the state for provisions of basic services like health, infrastructure, education etc. At the same time, it has been observed that such countries face problems of dismissal performance of service delivery due to absenteeism among service providers like doctors, teacher etc. There are also other factors like public fund leakages, red-tapism that obstructs public service delivery. All this has led to an idea of citizens contributing to better public service delivery by holding policymakers and service providers accountable. This phenomenon is where citizens ensure accountability of service providers. The paper highlights various social accountability tools like citizens charters, RTI, Right to Service Acts, Social Audit, Public Hearing etc. that aim to inform citizens about their rights, the standard of service delivery they should expect and actual performance, along with grievance redressal mechanism. NGOs, civic societies have been experimenting with various social accountability tools to improve public service delivery. The paper reviews how citizens individually and collectively can influence service delivery through access to information and opportunities to use it to hold providers both frontline service providers and programme managers accountable. The paper focuses on social accountability measures that increase transparency in public services. The paper also takes stock of international evidence and analyses how social accountability has changed the governance structure worldwide. The paper concludes by highlighting measures needed to strengthen social accountability to bring about a vibrant and effective public service delivery system. Paper also talks about that there is ample space for future experiments to test how to make social accountability work at the country level. DOI:10.5958/2347-6869.2020.00004.7

The SCO is one of the biggest geopolitical groupings in the world. It has provided a forum for its members, particularly, Russia and China, to cooperate on the set goals of the Eurasian re-integration. In contrast, SAARC cannot be termed as a successful organization, given the arch–rivalries between India and Pakistan. However, optimists believe that the geopolitical expansion, having India and Pakistan on board, the SCO would have the potential for economic and strategic cooperation. On the other hand, the evolving Sino-Pak axis vis-à-vis India has generated a view that China has offered an SCO platform to make its South Asia Policy a reality. Hence, an attempt has been made to assess the evolving speculations; will the geopolitical expansion of SCO unfold new opportunities or merely make SCO as another SAARC?

The article offers an assessment of Iran's role in India's foreign policy calculations vis-à-vis Sino-Pak axis. The changing geopolitical and geostrategic dynamics in the post-Cold War era have brought about new possibilities and opportunities in the Eurasian space. Given the geographical conditions and re-emergence of geopolitical competition, regional connectivity through ports has taken a pivotal position in bilateral and multilateral engagements. Therefore, the port geopolitics has become a buzzword in the regional connectivity. India has many geopolitical, geostrategic and geo-economic interests in the Eurasian region. However, the potential has not been realized yet due to the lack of geographical connectivity. In the backdrop of emerging Sino-Pak axis, their moves and countermoves have been limiting India's multilateral interests including the connectivity across the Eurasian region. In these matrices, Iran's Chabahar Port due to its strategic location has become a crucial enabler for India. However, Iran has offered investment opportunities even to China and Pakistan in the same project. The existing enmities/competition between India and China-Pakistan has made it difficult for New Delhi to convert the proposed project of Chabahar Port into reality. Against this background, the article would try to give answers to these questions; what are the regional dynamics regarding the Sino-Pak axis to block India's connectivity with the Eurasian region? And how Iran's Chabahar Port can be a helping factor in India's counterbalancing strategy for Sino-Pak axis?

The reach of the financial sector in Turkey is wide - as measured by account penetration, use of electronic payments, and credit card ownership - relative to both developing and high-income countries. The gender gap in Turkey for account ownership is 49 percentage points, the highest rate among all middle-income countries. This paper discusses environmental factors that may help explain the significantly low use of financial services by women in Turkey. The authors explore reasons for the large gender gap in financial inclusion in Turkey and find that female workplace participation is an important factor in explaining financial inclusion among women. Men are more than three times as likely as women to report using an account to receive money from work and or the government. This paper is organized as follows: section one gives introduction. Section two summarizes account ownership and usage in Turkey. Section three analyzes formal and informal saving rates, section four discusses the use of formal and informal credit and the high use of store credit cards. Section five examines gender differences in enterprise financing.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to design a consortium-blockchain based framework for cross-organizational business process mining complying with privacy requirements.Design/methodology/approachBusiness process modeling in a cross-organizational setting is complicated due to privacy concerns. The process mining in this situation occurs through trusted third parties (TTPs). It uses a special class of Petri-nets called workflow nets (WF-nets) to represent the formal specifications of event logs in a blockchain-enabled cross-organization.FindingsUsing a smart contract algorithm, the proposed framework discovers the organization-specific business process models (BPM) without a TTP. The discovered BPMs are formally represented using WF-nets with a message factor to support the authors' claim. Finally, the applicability and suitability of the proposed framework is demonstrated using a case study of multimodal transportation.Originality/valueThe proposed framework complies with privacy requirements. It shows how to represent the formal specifications of event logs in a blockchain using a special class of Petri-nets called WF-nets. It also presents a smart contract algorithm to discover organization-specific business process models (BPM) without a TTP.

AbstractIntegrating social and environmental considerations into business strategies has become imperative for companies seeking competitive advantage in today's dynamic and complex business environment. This study explored the effect of Shared Value Creation Practices on Competitive Advantage within banks. The study focused on how banks can achieve competitive advantage by creating shared value that addresses business goals and social needs. Data were collected from 463 customers of selected commercial banks in Ethiopia. The self‐administrative questionnaire was given to the customers selected by convenience sampling method. The study used the Structural Equation Model to test relationship between variables. The Study findings reveal that Shared Value Creation Practices significantly enhance banks' competitive advantage. The study suggests that banks can strategically leverage Shared Value Creation practices to gain a sustained advantage in a competitive market. Banks should continuously innovate and adapt strategies to address evolving stakeholders' needs. The banks should consider shared value creation integral to their strategic planning.

The present study aims to explore the perceived role of the government during this pandemic situation. The study, through the perception of general masses examine the government's role during the COVID‐19 pandemic. It is believed that this is the first empirical study conducted on this issue. The study was conducted on general masses in the northern part of India. The data was collected from two states, namely, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh having different geographical and cultural base. It confirms preventive and supportive role of the government during this pandemic. The study provides a validated scale for future research on the issue under investigation. The results of this study obtained through newly validated scale can be generalised for evaluating the real performance of the government during this pandemic. Further, the government can also assess its role played at the time of this pandemic.

1. Theoretical Underpinnings of Energy Security and Energy Diplomacy in Global Context: Reconnoitring India's Position -- 2. Identifying and Addressing India's Energy Challenges: A Policy Assessment -- 3. India's Quest for Energy Security in Eurasia: A Conceptual Assessment of Energy Diplomacy -- 4. Eurasia Factor in India's Energy Diplomacy: Paradigmatic Shifts in Corridor Approach to Connectivity -- 5. India and Eurasia Economic Cooperation: Analyses of Trends and Potentials -- 6. Energy Economics of Indo-Eurasian Relations: An Assessment -- 7. Energy Geopolitics of Eurasia: Challenges and Options for India's Energy Diplomacy.

The evolution of the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease took a toll on the social, healthcare, economic, and psychological prosperity of human beings. In the past couple of months, many organizations, individuals, and governments have adopted Twitter to convey their sentiments on COVID-19, the lockdown, the pandemic, and hashtags. This paper aims to analyze the psychological reactions and discourse of Twitter users related to COVID-19. In this experiment, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) has been used for topic modeling. In addition, a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model and various classification techniques such as random forest, support vector machine, logistic regression, naive Bayes, decision tree, logistic regression with stochastic gradient descent optimizer, and majority voting classifier have been adapted for analyzing the polarity of sentiment. The effectiveness of the aforesaid approaches along with LDA modeling has been tested, validated, and compared with several benchmark datasets and on a newly generated dataset for analysis. To achieve better results, a dual dataset approach has been incorporated to determine the frequency of positive and negative tweets and word clouds, which helps to identify the most effective model for analyzing the corpora. The experimental result shows that the BiLSTM approach outperforms the other approaches with an accuracy of 96.7%.

In recent years, India has established itself as the world's 'pharmacy hub', and this claim was proven once again when it delivered COVID-19 vaccines to its citizens, neighbouring nations and across the globe. Following the philosophy of humanitarianism through the principle of 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam', India has decided to provide the COVID-19 health assistance to its immediate neighbouring countries. India's immediate neighbourhood refers to the countries that are geographically adjacent to it. In addition, India's vaccine diplomacy has exposed geopolitical fault lines in South Asia as China's vaccine diplomacy aims to outpace India in the region. Against this background, the main objective of this paper is to explain and examine India's vaccine diplomacy as an instrument of its 'Neighbourhood First' policy during the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that India's health-focused approach has proved effective and aligned with its national interests. This review demonstrates that India's health diplomacy has had an impact on medical and humanitarian assistance reciprocation at the regional and international levels. As a result of this strategy, during the second wave of the pandemic, India received medical devices and vaccines from other countries in dealing with COVID-19.

Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine relationship between numerous factors (fashion orientation, conspicuous consumption and environmental consciousness) that influence fast fashion (FF) purchase intention and their impact on FF purchase behavior and exploring the moderating effect of sustainable clothing consumption attitude.


Design/methodology/approach
This study uses quantitative analysis approach, wherein data have been collected from 571 college students by using non-probability snowball sampling. Partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) has been applied to analyze the relationships among variables.


Findings
Determinants fashion orientation and conspicuous consumption have substantial impact on the desire to buy FF, which has strong association with FF purchasing behavior. Environmental awareness, contrarily, has detrimental impact on FF purchasing intentions. Furthermore, sustainable clothing consumption attitude significantly moderates FF intention–behavior relationship.


Practical implications
Findings may be viewed as a driving course in textile and garment sector for entrepreneurs as they represent customers' intents and behavior in connection to the adoption of FF. Strategists can understand the product's lifecycle; marketers can define innovative ways of marketing, advertising and promotion; start-ups can look for opportunities in sustainable fashion industry by innovating, manufacturing and dealing in eco-friendly sustainable products; and policymakers can make suitable policies to create awareness regarding sustainable fashion.


Originality/value
To the best of the authors' knowledge, there is no study that comprehensively deals with defining, structuring and validating factors affecting purchase intention and behavior in case of fashion industry, accompanied by the role of sustainable consumption attitude as a moderator between FF intention and behavior, in a single model.