Author: Ram Kumar

​Sathyanarayanan R writes in The Hindu BusinessLine

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight

Sathyanarayanan R, Sundram Fasteners Associate Professor, Marketing, IFMR GSB has penned an article in The Hindu BusinessLine titled Supply Resilience: From Sea Lanes to Store Shelves.

​In this article Sathya Ram examines how blockade-induced supply crunches can affect brands, not merely as operational disruptions but as potential marketing and reputation challenges. It draws historical parallels from the fall of Constantinople in the 15th century to Napoleon Bonaparte’s Continental System and its consequences. It also looks at the issue through a marketing lens, with industry lessons from Toyota’s response to the 2011 earthquake and Nokia’s agility during a supply disruption in 2000, which helped protect critical product launches. The article concludes with two important questions that can help managers prevent a supply chain issue from escalating into a brand crisis.

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​Professor Madhuri Saripalle speaks at the ‘Luigi Einaudi’ School of Advanced Studies’ Summer School

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight

Professor Madhuri Saripalle, Professor, Economics, IFMR GSB, has been invited as a keynote speaker at the Summer School being organised by the ‘Luigi Einaudi’ School of Advanced Studies, at the University of Catania – Syracusa, Italy from 4-7 June 2026.
She will be speaking on ‘Institutions, supply chains and farmer agency, with particular reference to economic freedom in agricultural livelihoods.’

Dr Lakshmi Narayanan’s seminar at UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight

Dr Lakshmi Narayanan, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, SIAS, delivered a seminar on ‘Tsunamis of the Mesosphere – Observations from OH Airglow and Sodium Layer in the Upper Mesosphere’ during his visit to UiT The Arctic University of Norway as part of ongoing efforts to strengthen research collaborations on 21 May 2026. Dr Narayanan also presented observations from a low-cost OH airglow camera developed at Krea University. The seminar was also attended online by colleagues from other Scandinavian countries.

Dr Aejaz Ahmad Wani authors an article in South Asia @ LSE

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight

Dr Aejaz Ahmad Wani, Postdoctoral Fellow, Humanities and Social Sciences, Moturi Satyanarayana Centre of Advanced Study, has authored an article titled The Spectacle of Wealth as Cultural (Re)production in India, published on the South Asia @ LSE, the research blog of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

The unabashed display of wealth by the superrich, powered by social media, is the credo of global affluence nowadays. In this article, Dr Wani argues that ‘wealth porn’ in India operates on a different scale and with a social cadence hitherto unknown to India’s social psyche. Wealth porn is not just a reflection of changing material culture but a latent social process with sensationally dangerous implications, as it normalises inequality, legitimises superrich norms and holds the potential to trigger civil discord.

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DyscalcBattery- India’s first free psychophysical battery for developmental dyscalculia

Ram Kumar News

In a few government schools spread across the urban and rural mandals in Warangal, a slow and steady change is underway. An open source, single-file, browser-based psychophysical battery named DyscalcBattery is assessing the cognitive substrates of developmental dyscalculia in school-age children.  Dyscalculia is a learning disorder that disrupts a person’s ability to understand numbers and math-related concepts. This tool empowers researchers to ask questions that no existing open instrument can answer, bridging the gap between basic-science research and accessible clinical screening.

Developed by Dr Rakesh Sengupta, Assistant Professor, Psychology, SIAS, Krea University and Usha Padmini, SR University, Warangal, DyscalcBattery is changing the way dyscalculia screeners work in the country. This battery is designed for field deployment in low-resource and multilingual settings, schools without reliable internet, laptops without admin privileges, researchers without licensing budgets. This project addresses a major gap in learning disability research, where most widely used dyscalculia screeners are proprietary commercial products that require expensive licenses or certified training to use. DyscalcBattery has been built to be completely free, browser-based, and capable of running offline on low-end tablets and laptops.

The Spark and the Genesis

The inspiration to build DyscalcBattery arose from the evident gap between advanced computational cognitive science and the everyday tools available for clinical screening. Over years, Dr Sengupta’s computational modelling and experimental work in the field of numerical cognition has refined how we understand numerosity perception, but conventional screeners simply aren’t designed to capture the detailed, trial-by-trial behavioural data needed for this kind of mechanistic modelling.

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First of its Kind

DyscalcBattery is novel in the way that existing normative screening instruments are overwhelmingly calibrated using data from European and North American children. Current proprietary tools are not adapted for non-Western, non-English-medium populations, which usually forces researchers here to rely on fragmented, unpublished local adaptations. DyscalcBattery provides a standardised platform specifically designed to handle the multilingual and culturally variable contexts of Indian classrooms, and it is driving the first dyscalculia prevalence study of its kind in a South Indian population.

Speaking on the need of such a tool for democratised data access and impact, Dr Sengupta added, “Commercial paywalls make the tools essentially unavailable for research groups or educators operating in low-resource settings. By releasing DyscalcBattery under a highly permissive open-source MIT license, the team allows anyone globally to use, modify, and distribute the tool entirely for free. Furthermore, its offline, browser-based architecture completely bypasses the deployment failures usually caused by the intermittent network connectivity found in rural field settings.”

Inside the Lab

The team built DyscalcBattery using JavaScript and the jsPsych framework to run entirely within a standard web browser. The lab engineered it as a single, self-contained HTML file that requires zero installation, no server backend, and no internet connection after the initial load. The team programmed seven distinct psychophysical tasks into the software, ranging from simple reaction times to complex non-symbolic quantity comparisons involving dots, objects, and shapes. The lab also developed custom stimulus generation algorithms, such as canvas drawing routines that dynamically prevent objects from overlapping on the screen, ensuring clean data collection.

DyscalcBattery also prioritises privacy and data security by securely exporting trial-level data directly to the user’s local machine, ensuring that no participant data ever leaves the local computer.

Future Forward

As part of the pilot, the fieldwork in Warangal is being conducted collaboratively with Dr Sengupta’s PhD student Usha Padmini from SR University, with the cooperation of participating school principals. The team is testing children directly on low-end laptops and tablets to prove the efficacy of the offline architecture in real-world, low-resource environments. In the near future, it will serve as the core foundational instrument for a multi-site Registered Report looking at the cognitive phenotype of dyscalculia specifically in Indian children.

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Professor Jayaram Ramakrishnan delivers a lecture at TAFE

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight

Professor Jayaram Ramakrishnan, Professor of Practice, Finance, IFMR GSB, was invited by the senior Finance team of TAFE (Tractors and Farm Equipment Limited) to deliver a lecture on ‘Enterprise Performance Management for Cost Reduction’ at the Sivasailam Learning Centre (SLC), their state-of-the-art Learning & Development centre, at Sembiam, Chennai. The lecture was in hybrid mode with participants from the team joining from across the country.

Sathyanarayanan R’s article in ET Brand Equity

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight

Another article titled Melody Moments and a Taste of Earned Media by Sathyanarayanan R, Sundram Fasteners Associate Professor, Marketing, IFMR GSB has been published in ET Brand Equity from The Economic Times.

Sathyanarayanan examines the recent “Melody moment” involving Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Parle’s Melody toffee as a compelling case of earned media in action. He places the incident in a broader context by drawing on notable precedents such as Michelle Obama’s J Crew appearance, Princess Diana’s association with Lady Dior, Kate Middleton’s “Duchess effect,” and Pope Francis’ Fiat 500L moment.

The article also connects these examples with academic insights on earned media, online virality, consumer commitment, and the coordination of paid, owned, and earned media. It offers practical guidance for brand managers on how to respond when an unexpected cultural or celebrity-linked moment places a brand in the public spotlight.

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Professor Anil Srinivasan pens an article in Hindustan Times

Ram Kumar Faculty & Staff Spotlight

Professor Anil Srinivasan, Visiting Professor of Practice, Literature and the Arts, SIAS has authored an article in Hindustan Times titled Rethinking learning in the age of AI. The article poses a query around the gap between what we say about the future and what we actually build for it. It sheds light on how world is moving faster than our institutions and asking questions our curricula were not designed to answer. The piece anchors the suggestion that the question is not how we teach students to use AI, but to question what remains irreducibly human when AI can do everything we have been measuring.

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