A Note from the Editor

Vikalpa has accumulated a commendable intellectual legacy over 43 years of its existence. Under the thoughtful guidance of the Editorial Advisory Boards and the stewardship of my predecessors, Vikalpa has evolved rapidly and meaningfully. Today, it attracts a much wider spectrum of contributors across all the management streams, has a substantially wide readership, and more importantly, the published articles often assume the center-stage of the thought provoking debates on contemporary issues. I eagerly look forward to strengthening the reputation and reach of Vikalpa in the near future with valuable guidance and support from the partners and stakeholders.

As we move forward, I would like to wholeheartedly thank all the members of the Editorial Advisory Board, for their continued thought leadership and support to Vikalpa. It was reassuring to receive the consent of continued support to Vikalpa from all the Advisory Board members for another three years. I would also like to take this opportunity to profusely thank the outgoing Chief Editor and colleague, Prof. Rama Mohana Turaga for his exemplary mentorship of Vikalpa over the last three years. During his term, Vikalpa has seamlessly migrated to a new publisher (Sage) while retaining the editorial control; become an open-access journal and has considerably expanded its international presence. Prof. Turaga had involved me extensively in the editorial and operational decisions during my term as an Associate Editor, which has significantly eased my transition to the current role.

The new editorial team would continue its unstinted effort to further strengthen the reputation of Vikalpa as an eminent journal in management with a worldwide readership. Prof. Turaga continues to be involved with Vikalpa as an Associate Editor. Prof. Amit Karna, Prof. George Kandathil and Prof. Viswanath Pingali of Institute of Management Ahmedabad, continue to serve as Associate Editors along with Dr. Ramanathan Subramaniam. We also welcome several new members to our editorial team, Prof. Sujoy Chakravarty, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi; Prof. Sanket Mohpatra, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad; Prof. Soumya Mukhopadhyay, Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad; Prof. Kannan Raghunandan, College of Business, Florida International University, Miami, USA, Prof. Dasaratha Rama, College of Business, Florida International University, Miami, USA; Prof. M S Sriram, Visiting Faculty, Centre for Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, and Prof. Shankar Venkataraman, Georgia Institute of Technology, Scheller College of Business, Atlanta.

Looking ahead to 2019 and beyond, we are excited to share that Vikalpa plans to undertake several activities to increase the impact and visibility of the journal among both the academia and practitioner audience. A number of renowned scholars will be invited to contribute to the Perspectives feature of Vikalpa. Perspectives articles present a synthesis of the knowledge in a specific sub-field of management and offer valuable lessons to management practitioners and policy makers. A range of contemporary management issues have been identified for the Colloquia feature of Vikalpa. Colloquium presents an intense debate on a topic among various stakeholders, where each of the stakeholders presents their view. We also plan to publish a few special issues on several topical subjects in management and allied disciplines. Already underway is a special issue devoted to the fourth PAN IIM World Management Conference held in December, 2016. The special issue is scheduled for release in December 2018. We plan to roll out a special issue on the theme of Financial Inclusion in India in 2019. Other special issue topics are under discussion.

We expect the on-going indexing of Vikalpa with SCOPUS to be completed by the end of the current year. We also hope to appear prominently in popular worldwide journal classification lists soon. We have initiated several activities to augment the reach of Vikalpa significantly in the near future. Vikalpa is bolstering its social media presence through an actively managed Facebook page.

We constantly strive to provide timely and constructive feedback on every manuscript submitted to Vikalpa. Lately, we have averaged about fifty days from submission to the first round of decision. We aim to shorten the interval between submission and final decision further through a set of concrete steps. As a lot submitted articles do not match the objectives and rigor of the journal, the average acceptance rate had been only about seven percent. Over the next few months, we intend to provide more detailed submission guidelines on the Vikalpa website. We hope that it would help the authors to improve upon the suitability of the submitted manuscripts and improve the acceptance rate for publication in Vikalpa.

I look forward to editing the future issues of Vikalpa with many more thought provoking articles. Thank you for your continued interest in and support to Vikalpa: The Journal for Decision Makers. Your feedback and inputs would be valued as always. Please continue to send them to [e-mail].