Case studies

The Battle for the Bottle: Defining ORS in the Indian Market

IIM Ahmedabad Case IIMA/ECO0371.

This case examines a dilemma faced by a public official at the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI). The protagonist, “Dr Ravinder Sharma, Director of Quality Assurance at FSSAI,” has to decide how to respond to a court order staying coercive action against manufacturers of ready-to-drink sugary beverages marketed using the term “ORS”. Although classified as food products, these beverages are widely perceived as equivalent to the WHO-recommended oral rehydration solution (ORS), a life-saving medical therapy for acute diarrhoeal dehydration. The central question is how to balance competing concerns: public health, particularly risks to children highlighted by the medical community, information asymmetry in healthcare markets (where consumers may not fully understand labels), economic consequences for industry, and legal constraints, including regulatory credibility and procedural fairness, in determining the appropriate regulatory approach to such beverages.

Dr. Lal PathLabs: Sustaining Growth in a Changing Diagnostics Landscape

IIM Ahmedabad Case IIMA/ECO0372, with Om Manchanda and Shreya Sam.

Dr Lal PathLabs (DLPL) became one of India’s largest diagnostic service providers, building scale through a hub-and-spoke model, a broad franchise network and sustained investments in quality, automation and professional management. Over time, it evolved from a family-led laboratory into a publicly listed company with strong financial performance and regional dominance in north and east India. However, the diagnostics industry was changing. Demand was increasingly shaped by self-initiated and preventive testing, while digital platforms, hospitals and wellness ecosystems altered how consumers accessed diagnostic services. At the same time, expansion into western and southern India posed structural challenges. The case examines how the DLPL should approach future growth and scope decisions while preserving the operating discipline and trust that underpinned its success.

Air India 171: Gujarat Health System Response to an Air Disaster

IIM Ahmedabad Case IIMA/CMHS0050, with Viswanath Pingali and Veda V.R.

This case examines the multilayered emergency response to the Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad on June 12, 2025, which resulted in 260 fatalities. The narrative follows the initial hours through the subsequent weeks, centring on Civil Hospital as the operational hub for trauma care, mass fatality management, family assistance and public communication. It traces how the system moved from rescue and triage to identification and dignified handover of the dead bodies. Through interviews with 20 officials and responders, the case illustrates the gap between preparedness on paper and performance under real-time constraints, the importance of inter-agency coordination and the challenges of crisis response in an age of real-time public visibility.

Ayushman Bharat - The Promise of Healthcare For All

IIM Ahmedabad Case IIMA/ECO0370, with Mohammad Irfan T., Yash Kamath and Veda V.R.

The case describes the evolution, design, implementation challenges and policy dilemmas of India’s Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY), the world’s largest publicly financed health insurance programme. Through the narratives of Rani, a beneficiary struggling to access care, and Nisha Kumari, a policymaker preparing recommendations for a meeting, the case examines tensions associated with cost sustainability, provider participation, accessibility inequities, fraud and the prospective expansion of the scheme, particularly the debate on inclusion of outpatient coverage and enhancement of quality oversight. The case also reveals that demographic pressures, shifting disease burdens and difference in federal implementation can play a role in the strategic decisions made for the future of the programme.

Learning from EdTech

IIM Ahmedabad Case IIMA/RJMC0048, with Ambrish Dongre.

The case summarises several EdTech implementations and the lessons learnt from their evaluation. It describes the challenges of traditional mode of teaching–learning when students in the same classroom have vastly differing learning levels of learning among students in a classroom. In such a situation, technology offers the promise of customising education at the individual level. The case discusses the implementation of personalised learning platforms such as I Can Learn in the United States, and Mindspark and ThinkZone in India for low-tech environments, as well as distribution of tablets to school students in Uttarakhand, India. Drawing on these implementations, the case further analyses how well the promise of EdTech holds today and what challenges remain for the sector.

Fee Regulation in Private Schooling: The Case of Gujarat

IIM Ahmedabad Case IIMA/ECO366EX, with Vertika Bansal, Shivam Kumar and Priyanka Sarda.

The case analyses the impact of introducing fee caps on education services in the Indian state of Gujarat. Prior to 2017, tuition for private sector education in Gujarat was unregulated. The fee charged by these schools was contentious for two reasons – information asymmetry faced by parents and a huge year-on-year increase in the tuition fee. When parents opposed this, the Gujarat government introduced the Fee Regulation Act, 2017 (FRA) to regulate the fee charged by private schools by fixing an upper ceiling on the annual tuition fee at INR 15,000, INR 25,000, and INR 27,000 for the primary, secondary, and higher secondary classes, respectively. The case discusses the impact of this policy on several stakeholders – schools, teachers, parents and students.

Deworming

IIM Ahmedabad Case IIMA/CMHS0046TEC, with Pallavi Wats.

India has the highest burden of soil-transmitted helminth infections globally, with 430 million children at risk of parasitic intestinal worms. This note analyses the impact of the Primary School Deworming Project (PSDP) in Kenya from 1998 to 2020. In the first follow-up, students were healthier and stayed in school longer. Twenty years later, participants who received the deworming treatment in the early years of PSDP experienced a substantial increase in adult consumption, hourly earnings and nonfarm employment. These significant adult outcomes make deworming an incredibly cost-effective solution for a pill costing about USD 0.45 per child per year. The COVID-19 pandemic confronts policymakers with a challenge: Since educational institutions are closed, how will the government deliver the deworming treatment?

Malaria eradication

IIM Ahmedabad Case IIMA/CMHS0045TEC, with Pallavi Wats.

Malaria is one of the most significant public health challenges facing India and other tropical countries. The technical note documents the effectiveness of policy responses to Malaria in India. It is valuable to understand how malaria eradication might help a generation of kids grow up without any serious threats to their long-term education, health and labour market outcomes. Large-scale disease eradication and development have a clear relationship. Thus, policymakers should consider these investments as critical components for improved health and economic growth. The note also highlights the evolving challenges around new malaria eradication programmes and strategies.

Teacher incentives

Harvard Business Case ISB096-PDF-ENG, with Kalyani Chaudhuri.

Every manager faces the problem of motivating employees to show up to work, focus on the assigned task, and work hard. In the absence of strong motivations to work or close monitoring by managers, employees tend to shirk, a phenomenon that economists call 'moral hazard'. In view of this problem, the worker's employment contract should be designed so that a part of the payoff (both monetary and non-monetary) is conditional on performance. In tasks where the manager can directly observe and monitor the worker's effort, designing such a conditional contract is easy. For example, a salesperson is offered a bonus directly depending upon the number of items he sells. However, when the effort is not so easily observable, overcoming potential moral hazard becomes harder. Using different policy experiments conducted with teachers in India, Kenya and United States, this case study explores how to motivate school teachers to turn up for class, teach well and put in maximum effort towards educating their students.

Search costs and market efficiency in emerging economies

Harvard Business Case ISB059-PDF-ENG, with Rohini Ray.

This note summarizes recent research on how information technology (such as mobile phones or internet) can be used to reduce costs associated with searching for prices, as well as the associated increases in social welfare.

Course allocation methods

Harvard Business Case ISB033-PDF-ENG, with Priyanka Sarda.

Why is allocating courses to students in universities a challenging task? How difficult is it for institutions to strike a balance between the students' preferences over courses and what they can make available given the feasibility and other constraints? What are the plausible short-term and long-term effects of this demand-supply mismatch on students' university experiences and career aspirations? What are the relative pros and cons of allocation mechanisms such as course auctions, rank-order lists and random serial dictatorship used by academic administrators? Can universities design better systems that are simpler, fairer and cannot be gamed yet put students in courses they want? This case attempts to answer these questions by primarily examining the course allocation problem as a two-sided matching issue.

A class divided

Harvard Business Case ISB032-PDF-ENG.

Does discrimination on the basis of gender, religion or ethnic origin exist in the job market? Why do employers use these factors in hiring decisions? Is discrimination equally prevalent in different sectors and in the presence of countervailing information? Are reasons for job market discrimination justified? What are possible strategies for combating job market discrimination? This case examines these questions in the context of hiring in the entry level white collar job market in an emerging economy.