On behalf of the Editorial Board of Decision, I am glad to inform that our journal has been included in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). The indexing is done by Thomson Reuter (Clarivate Analytics). We shall now proceed toward obtaining impact factor for the journal.

In our constant endeavor to engage with contemporary debates and issues, the June 2017 Special Issue focuses on “Urban Management in Developing Economies: Challenges for Public Policy.” The Guest Editors were able to put together an impressive set of research articles, which brought together academic contributions that offered unconventional perspectives on some of the salient problems of urban management which, though well-known, remain largely unaddressed and even invisible in formal and official discourses on urban development and governance.

The September 2017 issue (Issue 3) brings you a bouquet of research articles analyzing and addressing different aspects of management problems. The research article by Singh and Hira titled “Exploring notion of Spirituality using Grounded Theory: Young adult’s perspective” attempts to capture the notion of spirituality based on the assumption that one’s formative stage of understanding impacts a person’s value system. Data have been coded and categorized to understand the notion of “Spirituality” from the perspective of young adults—budding future corporate managers. Bharadwaj and Mehta’s paper on “Annihilating or perpetuating the gender stereotype? An analysis of Indian television advertisements” examines the construction of gender roles in recent Indian television commercials that depict Indian woman essaying supervisory roles in their corporate jobs. Through in-depth interviews of young corporate women, the study attempts to find out whether these advertisements really act as harbingers of mutation in gender discourse or reinforce the same archetypal gender roles under the garb of liberatory postmodernist feminist mediations.

The paper by Manjula and Gopi “Universal access to clean cooking energy and the need for an inclusive policy” maps the existing Indian policies on clean cooking fuel and emphasizes the need to go beyond the “price” and “income” criteria in targeting universal access to clean fuel for cooking. Through a comparative analysis of cooking fuel use patterns across Odisha and Tamil Nadu, the authors highlight the need to pay attention to social groups, gender and location (rural/urban) to make clean cooking fuel policies more inclusive in order to realize the target of universal access to clean cooking energy.

Saji and Nair’s paper titled “Investor-centric strategies for Indian mutual fund industry: inferring from the behavior of individual investors” proposes a roadmap for investor-centric strategies to mutual fund firms in India. Based on the responses of 800 investors, the study works out a sustainable marketing mix variable that impels innovation in product design and distribution for Indian mutual fund industry. The paper by Panda titled “Impact assessment of group-based credit–lending projects with controlled project placement bias and self-selection bias” discusses some of the important impact assessment models focusing on unit of analysis, selection of impact variables, selection of comparison group and control of self-selection bias and project placement bias. The study finds that a methodical analysis of counterfactual would help in avoiding self-selection bias and project placement bias.

I take this opportunity to also announce Call for Paper for the 2018 June Special Issue of Decision on “Managing Indian Economy” which aims at providing a series of articles that are reflections on the current state of economic policy-making in some of the areas and attempts to capture a deep understanding of the various contours of the Indian economy. You will find the call for paper and more information at http://www.springer.com/journal/40622.