Purpose: This paper aims to identify the dimensions of the political empowerment of Indian women and assess the factors responsible for the lacunas that hold women back in their potential.Design/methodology/approach: The research was based on primary data collected through a personal interview method from a sample of 68 women managers working in five different sectors of the Indian economy, namely; IT, education, telecom, banking, and hospitality sector. Further, data on the five factors from a sample of 423 women employees from the above-mentioned sectors have been collected and analyzed using a multiple regression model with control variables (marital status and generation gap).Findings: The major factors churned out that are needed for the political empowerment of women are namely, information or awareness, family support or family environment, legal environment, political environment, and personal ambitions or internal motivation.Originality/value: The present study has presented new insight into the field of women and politics by providing a case study into the dimensions of political empowerment among Indian women. The pilot model developed in this study can be initiated and replicated across the land on being successful.

India and other developing economies are receiving more attention in the context of climate change due to their rapid rates of economic expansion and large populations. In terms of absolute emissions, India surpassed China and the U.S. in 2018 to become the third-largest emitter. Solving this wicked problem calls for climate action across the stakeholder spectrum involving governments, business communities, and citizens. While extant literature has focused significantly on the role of governments and individual perceptions, the business sector needs to be more represented. In this study, we consider business news media as a platform that reflects the industry engagement in climate change and as a source of information on climate change for business decision-makers. Hence, understanding the topic and themes in the nexus of climate and business is important to evaluate the business sector’s stance towards climate change and how it has evolved. This work explores business news related to climate change using natural language techniques. We first experiment with three topic-modeling techniques, such as LDA, NMF, and BERTopic, on the business news and two more benchmark news datasets. Our test data is derived from digital news archives of ’The Economic Times – India’s leading business news daily. We evaluate the performance based on quantitative metrics commonly used for topic models. We choose the algorithm that provides the highest precision for climate-specific information represented by the test dataset. We then apply the algorithm with the best performance, as evaluated by the experiment, to a large corpus of Indian climate news from E.T. spanning from 2008 - 2021. We present how different themes, including industry engagement, evolved over the last two decades. The results suggest that climate cooperation has the highest contribution in the corpus, with other themes on resource management, energy and business gaining traction in recent years.

This study employs a panel data model to examine the impact of sustainable business practices on profitability in the Indian market, focusing on 49 companies listed in the S&P BSE ESG 100 index from 2015 to 2022. Sustainable business practices are measured by ESG composite scores and individual environmental, social, and governance scores. Profitability is represented by return on equity and return on assets. Utilizing the Panel Corrected Standard Error technique to address data issues like autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity, the study finds that sustainable business practices insignificantly impact profitability. However, the social pillar has a significantly positive correlation with return on assets, with each unit improvement in the social score resulting in a 0.1323 increase in return. Conversely, the governance pillar negatively impacts return on assets, with each unit increase in governance score resulting in a decrease of 0.1527 units in profitability. Interestingly, larger companies experienced reduced returns on both assets and equity, as financial risk also lowered returns. These findings emphasize the relevance of companies’ socially responsible behavior, suggesting that managers and investors should prioritize sustainable practices for long-term benefits. Additionally, the findings advocate for robust regulatory frameworks focused on sustainability.