Case Study Rails of the Future: A Comparative Analysis of Railway Production and Design in India and Japan Abstract Railway systems play a critical role in national economic development, urban mobility, and sustainable transportation. In Asia, India and Japan represent two distinct yet influential models of railway modernization. While Indian Railways is rapidly upgrading through indigenous semi-high-speed trains such as Vande Bharat under the “Make in India” initiative, Japanese Railways continue to lead globally with the Shinkansen system, emphasizing safety, punctuality, and technological precision. This comparative case study analyzes emerging trends in railway production and design in both countries, focusing on Industry 4.0 adoption, sustainability, safety engineering, and system integration. Using a qualitative comparative framework, the study highlights strengths, limitations, and strategic complementarities between the two models. The findings suggest that India’s ...
Chapter 9: Digital Darshan: Managing Online Religious Experiences as a Service Operation Pilgrimage in India is one of the world’s largest recurring service operations. In the last few years—accelerated by COVID-19 and sustained by rising smartphone use—major temples have quietly rebuilt their “front stage” and “back stage” around digital rails: virtual queues, timed entry slots, QR-coded passes, online donations, and 24×7 livestreams. “Digital darshan” doesn’t replace the sacred journey; it orchestrates it. In operations language, temples are applying demand shaping, capacity rationing, and flow control to a setting where variability (festival peaks, lunar calendars, school holidays) collides with finite service capacity (sanctum throughput, security, crowd safety). At the front stage, devotees now discover, book, and pay before they travel. Slotting converts an uncertain wait into a promised service time , shrinking balking and reneging. Virtual queues decouple arrival time...