Editorial

It gives me immense satisfaction to bring out the 12th volume of this research journal. The contemporary discourse on development is increasingly shaped by the urgency of environmental sustainability. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the rapidly expanding domains of tourism, hospitality, and associated infrastructure. This volume brings together a collection of scholarly contributions that critically examine material environmental issues alongside the growth of homestays, hotels, and the adoption of green technologies—offering a timely and multidimensional perspective on a sector at a crossroads.

Material environmental concerns—ranging from resource depletion and waste generation to land-use changes and ecological fragility—form the foundation of this discussion. Tourism-driven construction, particularly in ecologically sensitive regions such as hill areas and coastal zones, has intensified pressure on natural systems. Unregulated building practices, excessive reliance on non-renewable materials, and the proliferation of poorly planned accommodations have contributed to soil instability,
biodiversity loss, and increased vulnerability to climate-induced hazards. Within this broader framework, the rise of homestays represents both an opportunity and a challenge. On one hand, homestays democratize tourism by enabling local communities to participate directly in economic gains, fostering cultural exchange and livelihood diversification. On the other hand, their unplanned expansion—particularly in fragile environments—raises concerns about carrying capacity, infrastructure strain, and environmental degradation. Several contributions in this issue critically assess whether homestay growth is aligned with sustainable practices or whether it risks replicating the ecological footprint of conventional hospitality models.

The role of hotels, especially large-scale and luxury establishments, is equally significant. As major consumers of energy, water, and materials, hotels have a substantial environmental footprint. However, they also possess the institutional capacity and financial resources to lead the transition toward sustainability. The adoption of green technologies—such as renewable energy systems, water recycling mechanisms, waste management innovations, and energy-efficient designs—emerges as a key theme in this volume.
This volume contains six research articles and one book review. Trikal Kumar Paul and Dr. Soumitra Sarkar attempted to identify the environmental issues that pharmaceutical companies perceive as material to them. Their study also examined the differences in the proportion of the issues among companies and across years. In addition, the perspective with which pharmaceutical companies view these material issues were also described in this study. With semantic clustering, the study identified eight clusters of material environment issues.

Dr. Joy Sarkar, Raju Paul and Abhijit Lahiri explored the long-range memory dependency in the Indian asset market. Using data for 1-minute, 15-minute, and 60-minute closing prices of the Nifty 50 index have been used for the year 2025 they have used the Rescaled Range Analysis of the Hurst Exponent to reveal the presence of a wacky behaviour in the Indian asset
market.

Pragya Basnet and Dr. Gangotree Ghosh examined how guests’ narrative align with SERVQUAL dimensions. A qualitative content analysis approach was adopted using 2,007 online reviews from Booking.com and Agoda. Their findings show that the guest satisfaction is primarily influenced by location and accessibility, staff behaviour, and room quality and cleanliness, whereas dissatisfaction mainly arises from poor room conditions, service failures, and unresponsive staff behaviour.

Dr. Tarun Mandal and Dr. Nirmalendu Nath considered three moribund rivers of district Nadia, West Bengal i.e., Anjana, Morali, Buriganga and found that both Anjana and Morali remains a spectre of the former itself causing displacement of occupation of several thousand fishermen and migration from adjoining villages. As against this Buriganga offers a blue-print for successful restoration.

Pema Kesheb Yolmo and Dr. Sumit Pradhan examined the effect of the Big Five personality traits, namely agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience, on the homestay entrepreneurship intention of the homestay owners. They suggest that homestay entrepreneurs cannot be considered in line with other
entrepreneurs.

Chhyodup Lepcha and Kriti Shakya iterated that though Homestays, are perceived as environmentally friendly, their owners lack technical knowledge, financial capacity and institutional support to systematically adopt and implement various green technologies in their operations. Challenges related to high operational costs, institutional constraints and compliance-driven sustainability measures hinder genuine environmental commitment.

Dr. Pintu Prasad Jaiswal made a comprehensive review of a book titled How Does Financial Literacy and Resilience Build Up Financial Well Being of Women and recommended that the book be used by researchers and policy makers.

As editors, we hope that this journal will serve as a valuable resource for researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and students. We invite readers to engage critically with the complexities of ideas presented and to interact with the authors to make a responsible and informed discourse.

Prof. Samirendra Nath Dhar
Chief Editor