INTERNATIONAL of Production Technology and Management (IJPTM), ISSN 0976 6383 International Journal JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY AND

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GREEN SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT EMPIRICAL STUDY FOR CLOSING THE LOOP
AJAY VERMA*, DR. ANSHUL GANGELE** * [Research Scholar] Department of Mechanical Engineering, Suresh Gyan Vihar University, Jaipur (Raj.) 302025 E-mail: vajay9@yahoo.co.in **Institute of Technology & Management, Gwalior (M.P.) 474001 E-mail: anshulgangele@gmail.com ABSTRACT In this paper we report on results from a cross-sectional survey with pharmaceuticals manufacturers in Indian industries. Pharmaceuticals to evaluate the green supply chain management (GSCM) practices and relate them to closing the supply chain loop. Our findings provide insights into the capabilities of Indian organizations on the adoption of GSCM practices in pharmaceuticals industrial contexts and that these practices are not considered equitably across the industries. Keywords: Green supply chain management; Closed-loop supply chains; Empirical study 1. INTRODUCTION Many industries have experienced increasing globalization and a shifting focus to competition among networks of companies. Supply chain management (SCM) has become an important competitive approach for organizations in this environment. Multinational enterprises have established global networks of suppliers that take advantage of countryindustry specific characteristics to build this competitive advantage. [16] Logistics and supply chain managers have to balance efforts to reduce costs and innovate while maintaining good environmental (ecological) performance. [31] Green supply chain management (GSCM) has emerged as an approach to balance these competitive requirements. [30] GSCM and logistics efforts have caused organizations to consider closing the supply chain loop (closed loop supply chains (CLSC)). [6] Within CLSC and GSCM practices, recoverable product environments, and the design of these products and materials, have become an increasingly important segment of the overall push in industry towards environmentally conscious manufacturing and logistics. [22] Even though CLSC has significant environmental motivations, regulatory, competitive and economic pressures also
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play roles in its adoption across industries. [18] Here, we specifically investigate the role of environmentally based practices and pressures and what they mean to the management of CLSC. Indian enterprises have initiated implementation of a number of environmental practices due to motivational drivers such as exports and sales to foreign customers, legislative and stakeholder institutional pressures, many of which relate to institutional and stakeholder theories. [11] Joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) has provided Indian enterprises with additional opportunities to establish relationships with foreign enterprises further integrating them into their supply chain. [52] This inclusion has also brought significant challenges to Indian enterprises such as overcoming green barriers and increasing their international competitive ability. [33] Indian suppliers to develop environmental management systems in compliance with ISO 14001, International laws in other regions such as the Restrict of hazard substances (RoHS), Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) have led India to increase organizational efforts for product recovery. [1] In this study, we aim to examine the adoption levels of GSCM practices in India and to determine pharmaceuticals industries in the GSCM practices with an emphasis on their specific implications for CLSC management. Previous investigations completed an exploratory analysis that identified factors of GSCM practices and performance. [1] These factors were then examined for relationships between adoption of GSCM practices and eventual performance outcomes incorporating moderating effects of quality management and just-in-time practices. [54] In additional research, using similar data, an investigation comparing quality management and environmental management was completed for pharmaceuticals organizations. [55] Within these studies an industry effect seemed to exist for the adoption of GSCM practices. In this paper, we advance this line of study to logistics and supply chain management research through a more in-depth comparative analysis of pharmaceuticals industries, determining the implications on these industries and their enterprises to CLSC. While studies investigating environmental management exist for pharmaceuticals industries, we contribute to the body of knowledge by further investigating GSCM practices in a developing economy and the determination of industry GSCM practices. Our study findings provide managerial and theoretical approaching for industries in India focusing on a resource based capabilities through knowledge transfer and inter-organizational/inter-industry learning to improve their GSCM/CLSC practices adoption. [46] The findings also provide policy implications for the Indian government in supporting GSCM/CLSC practices among different industries. The results of this investigation are also useful for developed country organizations that have invested or plan to invest in India, especially in the pharmaceuticals industries examined by this study. We will begin with a literature review in Section 2, introducing the relationship between CLSC and GSCM as well as defining the study elements. It is followed by additional research background of GSCM in India in Section 3, in which we will explain our selection of industries and the theoretical grounding of our investigation in contingency resource based, institutional, and stakeholder theory that help to further develop insights into these industry. Section 4 describes the research design and measures developed for this study. Data analysis and results are presented in Section 5. Section 6 discusses the results with an evaluation of GSCM implementation in Indian manufacturing industries. Section 7 concludes the paper by providing managerial implications and identifying areas for future research in GSCM.
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2. GSCM DIMENSIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS TO CLSC The GSCM practices investigated in this study include internal environmental management, green purchasing, customer cooperation with environmental concerns, investment recovery, and eco-design dimensions. [54] Internal environmental management is central to improving enterprises environmental performance. [8, 28] It is generally believed that senior managers support is necessary and, often, a key driver for successful adoption and implementation of most innovations, technology, programs and activities that senior managements confidence is the most influential factor for the development of their quality management system. Similarly, cross functional programs encompassing GSCM and CLSC practices are not for the faint of heart and require managements support for successful implementation. [21, 26, 36, 49] To ensure progress for environmental management, top management must be fully committed. [35, 58] Support needs to also exist from mid-level managers for successful implementation of environmental practices. [7, 8] GSCM crosses all departmental boundaries within and between organizations, and this cooperation and communication is important to successful environmental practices. [52] External GSCM practices have become increasingly important for manufacturers. The first external GSCM practice, green purchasing, is an emerging approach in Indian enterprises, which focuses on the inbound or upstream segment of a products and organizations supply chain in a multinational investigation identified key factors for green purchasing including providing design specification to suppliers that include environmental requirements for purchased items, cooperation with suppliers for environmental objectives, environmental audits for suppliers internal management, and suppliers ISO14001 certification.[34,47,53,57] Put forward ten top environmental supplier evaluation criteria, among these, second-tier supplier environmentally friendly practice evaluation was viewed as the second most important criterion. In addition, large customers have exerted pressure on their suppliers for better environmental performance, which results in greater motivation for suppliers to cooperate with customers for environmental objectives. [34] Customer cooperation and green purchasing fit process perspective, which concerns types of customer relationships that occur in CLSC. [45] In India, research has also shown that customer pressure is a primary driver for enterprises to improve their environmental image and practices. [11] Without green purchasing and customer cooperation practices, product take-back and other product reintroduction markets may not become as developed. [44] Investment recovery typically occurs at the back end of the supply chain cycle or as a method to close the loop. Investment recovery fits process perspective which concerns the different types of recovery processes that occur in CLSC. [45] Concerns for the end of life products are motivated by legislation. Even in non-regulated markets, some manufacturers have engaged in product recovery to reduce production costs, enhance brand image, meet changing customer expectations, protect after markets, and preempt pending legislation or regulations. [43] Sale of excess inventories and capital equipments are also aspects of investment recovery. As an example, many firms, as part of their reverse logistics operations, have started selling unwanted products in online sale. [42] In India, investment recovery continues to grow; where pressures from the government have shifted focus from resource subsidies to levying taxes. [1, 53] The other set of practices defining the back-end of the supply chain includes the relationship with customers on environmental issues. In many cases, international companies are now emphasizing the need for their suppliers to maintain an environmentally benign position and requiring their many
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Indian suppliers to comply so that these Indian organizations products are not boycotted due to environmental reasons. [1, 33] Most of the environmental influence of any product or material is locked into the product at the design stage of a product, when materials and processes are selected and product environmental performance is largely determined. [25] Pioneering firms have learned that making product returns profitable relies on good product design. [23] It has been argued that for effective product stewardship and reverse logistics practices, eco-design is necessary. [44] Thus, eco-design or Design for Environment (DfE) is an important and emerging GSCM practice to improve companies CLSC. Eco-design practices best fit product perspective, which concerns types of product oriented relationships that occur in CLSC. [45] In our description here, eco-design is meant to address product functionality while simultaneously minimizing life-cycle environmental impacts. The success of eco-design requires internal cross-functional cooperation within the company and the external cooperation with other partners throughout the supply chain. In developed countries, organizations have put significant effort in optimizing their forward SCM and logistics practices and are paying increasingly substantial attention to their reverse logistics functions. [23] Though manufacturers in developing countries such as India have made some progress on GSCM, both their forward and reverse SCM practices are generally at early adoption stages. [54] This study represents one of few investigations on elements of both forward and reverse SCM and the adoption of GSCM practices in developing countries such as India. We also examine if industry types matter in the adoption of GSCM practices across industries in India. 3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT Due to heterogeneous pressures from various stakeholder groups, industries have variations, though commonalties may exist, in their adoption of GSCM and CLSC practices. An explanation of similarities and differences may be derived from three theoretical perspectives, i.e., the contingent resource based view, institutional theory, and stakeholder theory. First we will provide some reasoning for the industries selected in this study, and then we will explain why we may theoretically expect differences in our investigation. 3.1. Emerging industrial issues in Indian supply chains We focus on the pharmaceuticals industrial supply chains: Indian pharmaceuticals supply chain enterprises companies are traditional polluters and have experienced higher environmental regulatory pressure. [51] The pharmaceuticals industry has experienced some of the highest regulatory pressures. On the other hand, the pharmaceuticals industry in India has a long-term history of international business through export of products or as suppliers to multinational companies. Pharmaceuticals industry in India seems to have adopted more environmental management practices including CLSC. Experiences in this industry can be disseminated to other industries in India. Even though Indias burgeoning pharmaceuticals industry may lag on such activities it has started to experience such pressures. In addition, the Indian government has specific stricter environmental regulations on air, water, pollution with the rapidly increasing India pharmaceuticals companies have started to learn from experiences improve their environmental image. [33]

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International Journal of Production Technology and Management (IJPTM), ISSN 0976 6383 (Print), ISSN 0976 6391 (Online) Volume 3, Issue 1, January- December (2012), IAEME 3.2. Theoretical characterizations of industrial variations The industrial GSCM practices may be accounted for by contingency resource based, institutional, and stakeholder theories. The practical differences were presented in our previous section. We now use various theories that support why these differences exist amongst industries. Incident resource based theory, argues that industry uncertainty, complexity and munificence are three key task environment factors which may affect the implementation of proactive environmental strategies, e.g. GSCM and CLSC practices, enabling firms to build up their resource capacities. [2] Managers facing uncertain business environments tend to be more proactive, take greater risks, and use more innovative strategies than managers in less turbulent environments. [29, 32] Pharmaceuticals industries face significant risks and uncertainties due to increasing and evolving regulatory pressure, e.g. greenhouse gas emissions and hazardous waste regulations. Thus, we argue that these two industries may have experienced more pressure to implement proactive environmental strategies such as GSCM and CLSC practices anticipating these pressures persist in the future. However, the supply uncertainty sometimes does not result in proactive environmental practices such as establishing an alliance with suppliers because organizations prefer to minimize the need due to scarce managerial resource allocation. Complexity in the business environment is generally defined as production and diversity of factors and issues in that environment. [8, 15, 38, 40] Less complexity can result in more proactive environmental practices. [2] The pharmaceuticals industry may be more complicated, having less incentive to implement GSCM and CLSC. Munificence is the degree to which the general business environment can support a sustained rate of organizational growth or sales growth. [12, 39] We can also find that various industry forces may exist in a single industry causing conflicting pressures. Institutional theory provides another theoretical lens to account for the differences in GSCM practices pharmaceuticals industries. The institutional process occurs through coercive, mimetic, and normative mechanisms, and structural isomorphism is the consequence. [13] In this process, environmental concerns driving early adoption will be replaced by a different set of determinants from later adopters. Given the differences in the extent of regulatory and consumer pressures, the schedule for the implementation of GSCM and CLSC practices may vary in industrial contexts. Stakeholder theory places shareholders as one of the multiple stakeholder groups managers must consider in their decision making process. [14] As a result of the supply chain complexity, the adoption levels for GSCM and CLSC practices are expected to industries. The above discussion industrial practices theoretical reasons to account for the adoption of GSCM across the industries in India. Therefore, we hypothesize that: Hypothesis: The adoption of the five GSCM practices is pharmaceuticals industries in India. 4. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY The five dimensions of GSCM practices in this study where the twenty-two measurement items were developed on the basis of opinions from industrial experts and the literature. [10, 54, 57, 47] Data collection occurred in three phases including a pilot test, convenience surveys and a random survey, whose results were eventually aggregated. (1) Pilot test: We initially completed a pilot test to validate and refine the measurement instrument, i.e., a survey questionnaire. A pilot test was conducted the largest and the second largest industrial zones in India according to gross domestic product. Based on the suggestions from 28 respondents, we made minor modifications to the survey questionnaire. (2) Convenience surveys: The second stage involved the application of convenience surveys. To minimize the possibility of misunderstanding the questionnaire items by respondents. To ensure respondents proper understanding of questionnaire items, a presentation about GSCM at each training workshop was made. All the respondents during the site visits were also interviewed. Within this stage, a total of 38 usable manufacturing enterprises responses were received.

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(3) Random survey: The third stage of data acquisition was an administration of the survey via postal mail with follow-up telephone calls. We carried out a random survey in this stage. Due to the difficulties in data collection from all regions within India, the random survey was conducted in pharmaceuticals, a typical pharmaceuticals industrial number of manufacturers belonging to the four targeted industries of our study. The targeted respondent companies were drawn from the list of pharmaceuticals Manufacturers identified earlier. Out of a total of 500 questionnaires mailed, 128 usable organizational responses were received from manufacturing enterprises. (4) Sample aggregation: Overall, a total of 284 responses were received. Multiple responses from the same manufacturer were aggregated into one usable organizational response. The targeted samples and respondents of this study possess managerial experience at the middle and upper management levels (e.g. managers, directors, executives). There are advantages of using this three step approach in data collection. First, the respondents in our convenience samples are key informants on the environmental management practices that are being planned or adopted in their companies. These groups of respondents are knowledgeable on the topic of GSCM practices under investigation and help to ensure the quality of the data collected in this study. Second, the random survey contributed to triangulation for helping confirm the quality of the responses in our convenience samples allowing for more generalizebility to the wider Indian pharmaceuticals manufacturing context. We performed a Chi-square test to compare organizational characteristics of the two groups of respondent manufacturers, i.e., the convenience samples and the mail survey samples to test the potential respondent bias. The test results indicate that no difference, at a 5% level of significance, exists between the two groups on ownership, firm size and questionnaire responses on the items for measuring GSCM. It is therefore reasonable to combine the samples collected from the three stages for data analysis. Our next step is to ensure the data quality. To evaluate the potential non-respondent bias of the data collected, we divided the 128 returned organizational responses collected from the random survey into two groups representing the theoretical respondents and non-respondents, respectively. Before proceeding to data analyses, we eliminated those organizational responses with missing values on any of the 22 measurement items for the adoption of GSCM. After taking out the responses with incomplete data, 171 usable organizational responses collected from the pharmaceuticals industries remained for our subsequent data analyses. The demographic profile of the usable organizational responses in this study is shown in Table 1. Table 1 Demographic characteristics of the respondent firms Industry Pharmaceuticals Size (employees) >3000 11 10003000 6 5001000 12 <500 9 Total 38 (22.22%) Ownership State-owned 29 Private 5 Joint ventures 4 Total 38 (22.22%)

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5. DATA ANALYSIS AND RESULTS Table 2 provides the descriptive statistics, Cronbachs alpha values, and item-total correlations for the five GSCM factors amongst Indian pharmaceuticals manufacturers. The high values of Cronbachs alpha (>0.70) and of the item total correlation coefficients (>0.40) for the five factors underlying GSCM suggest that all five latent GSCM factors fit the data reasonably well. Table 2 Descriptive statistics, alpha values and item-total correction coefficients Construct/factors No. of Mean SD Cronbachs Range of itemitems alpha total correlation GSCM 3.41 0.78 0.82 Internal EM (IEM) 7 3.65 1.05 0.95 0.780.91 Green purchasing 5 3.05 1.07 0.87 0.680.74 (GP) Customer 4 3.07 1.05 0.87 0.620.82 cooperation (CC) Investment 3 3.49 1.03 0.83 0.660.69 recovery (IR) Eco-design (ECO) 3 3.53 1.09 0.90 0.780.80 Note. Scales: 1 = not considering it, 2 = planning to consider it, 3 = considering it currently, 4 = initiate implementation, 5 = implementing successfully. To validate the measurement scales for GSCM, a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is performed, hypothesizing that the five underlying GSCM factors, i.e., internal environmental management, green purchasing, customer cooperation, investment recovery and eco-design, would adequately fit the data collected. The results in Table 3 show that a five-factor measurement model fits the data acceptably. All of the measurement items significantly loaded on the constructs on which they were hypothesized to load. These results gave us confidence that the measures are indeed valid and reliable. After obtaining satisfactory results in both the reliability and validity tests, we calculated the mean value for each of the five GSCM factors. As is apparent from Table 2, manufacturers in our samples have on average initiated three GSCM practices, namely, internal environmental management, investment recovery and eco-design with mean values of 3.65, 3.49 and, 3.53, respectively. However, the sample manufacturers have on average only started to consider green purchasing and customer cooperation practices with mean values of 3.05 and 3.07, respectively, a bias to favor more internally focused practices in their adoption of GSCM. Table 4 provides a summary of the means and standard deviations for all 22 measurement items on the adoption of GSCM practices as reported by the sample companies in the pharmaceuticals industries. It should be noted that all items on internal environmental management have attained mean values over or close to 4.00 except for those sample companies. In addition, all mean values of the GSCM practices, i.e., investment recovery and eco-design, are between 3.00 and 4.00 for the pharmaceuticals industries. We performed a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to determine if any significant differences exist in the adoption of the GSCM practices, as perceived by the respondent companies in the four industries. The F-test results in Table 5 show that GSCM and two underlying factors, internal environmental management and green purchasing are significantly different (at the 5% level) across the Indian pharmaceuticals industry.
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Table 3 Results of confirmatory factor analysis

Measurement items Commitment of GSCM from senior managers (IEM1) Support for GSCM from mid-level managers (IEM2) Cross-functional cooperation for environmental improvements (IEM3) Total quality environmental management (IEM4) Environmental compliance and auditing programs (IEM5) ISO 14001 certification (IEM6) Environmental Management Systems exist (IEM7) Providing design specification to suppliers that include environmental requirements for purchased item (GP1) Cooperation with suppliers for environmental objectives (GP2) Environmental audit for suppliers internal management (GP3) Suppliers ISO14000 certification (GP4) Second-tier supplier environmentally friendly practice evaluation (GP5) Cooperation with customer for eco-design (CC1) Cooperation with customers for cleaner production (CC2) Cooperation with customers for green packaging (CC3) Cooperation with customers for using less energy during product transportation (CC4 ) Investment recovery (sale) of excess inventories/materials (IR1) Sale of scrap and used materials (IR2) Sale of excess capital equipment (IR3) Design of products for reduced consumption of material/energy (ECO1) Design of products for reuse, recycle, recovery of material, component parts (ECO 2) Design of products to avoid or reduce use of hazardous of products and/or their manufacturing process (ECO3) Alpha IE 0.869a 0.876 0.830 0.883 0.822 0.678 0.787 0.746a GP Constructs CC IR

ECO

0.795 0.765 0.677 0.777 0.796a 0.861 0.837 0.701 0.803a 0.772 0.878 0.815a 0.824 0.688

0.95

0.87

0.87

0.83

0.90

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a. Initially fixed at 1.0 for the purpose of estimation. However, no significant difference exists in the other three GSCM factors, namely, customer cooperation for environmental objectives, investment recovery, and eco-design. The hypothesis that pharmaceuticals industries vary in the extent of their adoption of GSCM is partially supported. 6. DISCUSSION Due to depleting resources and serious environmental problems, Indias governmental bodies have introduced increasingly strict environmental regulations. With globalization, especially after Indias entry into the Table 4 Means and standard deviations of the GSCM factors in the four industries Measurement items Pharmaceuticals (n = 38) Mean SD IEM1 4.00 0.943 IEM2 3.76 0.863 IEM3 3.73 0.932 IEM4 4.00 1.042 IEM5 4.00 1.095 IEM6 3.65 1.252 IEM7 3.81 1.175 GP1 3.65 1.152 GP2 3.22 1.250 GP3 2.75 1.381 GP4 3.27 1.305 GP5 2.65 1.274 CC1 2.61 1.178 CC2 3.00 1.265 CC3 2.94 1.218 CC4 3.22 1.174 IR1 3.46 1.325 IR2 3.38 1.089 IR3 3.36 1.125 ECO1 3.59 1.257 ECO2 3.38 1.163 ECO3 3.54 1.145 Note. Scales: 1 = not considering it, 2 = planning to consider it, 3 = considering it currently, 4 = initiate implementation, 5 = implementing successfully. Indian manufacturers have started to experience green barriers. Because of these two main pressures, GSCM has become an emerging management approach for Indian manufacturers to improve both their environmental and logistics performance, much of it directly motivated by economic gains. We have posited that due to extant issues facing various industrial sectors, which can be generalized under contingent resource based, institutional, and stakeholder theories, the adoption of these practices will tend to vary. Others have also argued for these indirect
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environmental effects by emissions (toxic, harmful, and ozone depleting) and resources used (electricity and fuels). Differing drivers and pressures as well as potential improvements that companies can make has caused manufacturers in pharmaceuticals industrial sectors to adopt GSCM practices at varying levels. In our general findings we see that the adoption of GSCM practices based on contingency resource based theory and a larger number of stakeholders based on the stakeholder theory. Table 5 shows that the pharmaceuticals supply chain companies have considered and initiated GSCM practices with mean values of 3.43, which may result from the high regulatory pressures they have experienced. In India pharmaceuticals companies have international business experiences, and many of them are joint ventures. According to institutional theory, we can argue that pharmaceuticals supply chain companies have implemented GSCM based on pressures Table 5 Means on the adoption of GSCM and its underlying factors in the Pharmaceuticals industries Construct/factors GSCM IEM GP CC IR ECO Pharmaceuticals (n = 38) Mean SD F Significance 3.43 0.564 5.02 0.003 3.88 0.836 7.06 0.000 3.16 0.917 4.24 0.007 2.94 0.943 1.41 0.243 3.39 0.974 0.15 0.928 3.50 1.076 0.55 0.646

Note. Scales: 1 = not considering it, 2 = planning to consider it, 3 = considering it currently, 4 = initiate implementation, 5 = implementing successfully. These differences point to the capabilities or motivation for furthering the CLSC practices of GSCM in India. Clearly, with covering GSCM practices, the pharmaceuticals industry may see the barriers, due to lack of knowledge, systems, markets, technology, for closing the supply chain loop. Implement these GSCM and CLSC practices in India pharmaceuticals industry by finding early possible success stories should seek exemplary imitative processes and practices. The pharmaceuticals industry has the potential to adopt these practices. Since the pharmaceuticals industry is a growing sunrise industry, closing the loop in this industry will eventually become a very important. 6.1. Internal environmental management Internal environmental management is one of the most important GSCM practices organizations must adopt to improve their environmental performance. Table 5 indicates that most of our respondent companies in India, except in the pharmaceuticals industry, attain a high mean value for this specific practice, namely, 3.88. The pharmaceuticals industry adoption of GSCM practices on internal environmental management. Many of these pharmaceuticals companies also require suppliers, divisions, and partners to be ISO 14001 certified or have appropriate environmental management systems in place. It is likely that internal environmental management in the pharmaceuticals industry will be influenced through partner relationships demonstrated that quality management. [55]
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6.2. External GSCM (supplier/customer relationship) Cooperation with both suppliers and customers has become extremely important for closing the supply chain loop for organizations and products. Nevertheless, Table 5 shows that all mean values of the GSCM factors on green purchasing and customer cooperation for environmental objectives are the lowest compared to the other three GSCM factors in each of the pharmaceuticals industries. The pharmaceuticals industry had a mean value for green purchasing (3.16). This industry also indicated a relatively mean value for customer cooperation (2.94), which is attributable to their long-term international experiences and more advanced closed-loop supply chain practices, leading these companies to face greater institutional pressures especially from direct competitors (mimetic) and supply chain partners and the market (normative) isomorphic pressures. Another reason may be that most of the respondents in this industry are joint ventures or private companies, rather than state-owned facilities, which may allow them to more easily, develop relationships without the additional weight of government organization. These relationship characteristics support the contingent resource based perspective of industrial influences, which include the complexity of these joint venture relationships and lower uncertainty levels (having stronger relationships with a broad knowledge of practices), implying greater adoption of green purchasing. As international competition increases in the Indian market, it is expected that development of other types of industry ownership, as is evident in the pharmaceuticals industry, will bring about greater partnership opportunities. This evolving situation presents significant opportunity for Indian automobile companies to learn from their international partners, as they further develop supplier and customer collaborative relationships. 6.3. Investment recovery Table 2 showed that the mean value on investment recovery across pharmaceuticals industries is relatively higher than the external supply chain practices with a mean value of 3.49 on investment recovery, higher than that of green purchasing (3.05) and customer cooperation for environmental objectives (3.07). The implication is that investment recovery seems to be completed internally, or for internal environmental reasons, than for supply chain reasons. Even though investment recovery is more mature in India than other practices, it does not mean that closing the loop across industries in India is actually occurring. Internally, the investment recovery practices that we focused upon were for supply of these products for the closed loop supply chain. Yet, Indian organizations have not fully developed the systems to pull these products back into their system, which implies that normative and mimetic institutional pressures are not as prevalent and would not cause industries to learn or require changes in this GSCM practice. Our results also indicate that the pharmaceuticals industries do not show a significant difference in this GSCM practice. To attract more investment, industrial zones in India provide subsidies for enterprises to cover solid waste disposal. Since treatment for waste recovery can be expensive, many Indian enterprises consider investment recovery such as material recycling and recovery as costly. [54] Moreover, recycling and recovery sometimes are difficult in India due to the lack of recycling systems and relevant technologies. Yet, the markets for such resource recovery can be substantially larger since many of the resource recovery operations such as remanufacturing, reuse, and reclamation, even in developed countries can be mainly manual operations, which require significantly more labor costs. India, which has these lower labor

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costs, may find that resource recovery across the supply chain may provide its industries with a better competitive advantage. Thus, potentially, we see this investment recovery across the supply chain as one that will emerge and dominate, especially for internationally. 6.4. Eco-design Eco-design or design for environment (DfE) is a helpful, emerging tool to improve companies environmental performance and help organizations close the supply chain loop by addressing product functionality while simultaneously minimizing life-cycle environmental impacts. One of key aspects for eco-design is to facilitate reuse, recycling and recovery through smart design such as easy to disassemble used products, a critical design characteristic for closed-loop supply chain management. The success of eco-design requires internal cross functional cooperation among the entire company and the external cooperation with other partners throughout the supply chain. Results in Table 2 show that eco-design has received slightly more attention, across our investigated industries, than investment recovery. Similar to investment recovery, all three activities are being considered or initiated with mean values between 3.00 and 4.00 (Table 4). Table 5 indicates no significant difference of this GSCM practice among the four industries. Lagging eco-design practices continue to bring challenges to closing the supply chain loop in India. Without further indications of the adoption of these eco-design practices, it will be unlikely that this path will be altered. Moreover, none of pharmaceuticals industries has shown significant initiative to implement better eco-design practices. Thus, it will probably be through foreign knowledge infusion, normative and mimetic institutional pressures, from international partners or counterparts for these practices to become more prevalent. The issue of where in the supply chain these organizations fit, e.g. parts suppliers, original equipment manufacturers, distributors, etc., may also influence the rate of adoption of the eco-design practice. Incorporating Indian industrial culture and characteristics into the eco-design aspects of international partners may make closing the loop easier. Designing products and materials such that an average worker in India can understand how to recover materials quickly and accurately should be an objective for products that flow through or back into Indian markets and organizations. Another emergent pressure is increasing scarcity of resources in India, where materials and energy tend to be more expensive. As a result, products consuming less materials and/or energy tend to be more profitable market share in India, which is consistent with conclusions from our interviews. 7. SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH An increasing number of organizations in Asia engage in voluntary or mandatory endof-life product management. Moreover, since developments in product take-back are driven by a mixture of environmental concerns and economic opportunities, the most promising corporate end-of-life strategies create both economic and environmental values. [19] Many opportunities still exist in many of the emerging countries, with no greater opportunities than those that exist within India. We have argued and observed how many GSCM practices have implications for effectively closing the supply chain loop. Adoption of these practices is fundamental to Indias involvement in this critical industrial practice. We have seen that adoption of many of these practices is in the initial stages in most of the industries we investigated. Under pressure from foreign customers and partners and
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increasingly strict domestic environmental regulations, Indian manufacturers will probably further their adoption of the five major categories of GSCM practices. There is evidence in the literature of significant environmental and economic benefits (win-wins) that can be accrued from the adoption of these practices. However, Indian manufacturers are still lacking the knowledge, experience and tools to effectively and efficiently improve their environmental performance from the adoption of these principles. With a relatively longhistory of international business experience, the pharmaceuticals industry in India has the adoption of GSCM and seems best positioned to most rapidly innovate to close the manufacturing supply chain loop there. This positioning is most evident in this industrys internal environmental management and external cooperation with suppliers and customers practices. Given increasingly high regulatory pressures and governmental scrutiny, pharmaceuticals supply chain companies have also started adoption consideration of hopeful GSCM practices, while their external GSCM implementation is still relatively weak. But, this lack of external linkages and the necessity to close the manufacturing supply chain loop may not be seen as necessary by management due to product and market characteristics. Internal manufacturing and process emphasis on closing the little loop of manufacturing may gain priority, with such practices as recovery of energy, chemicals and fuels within the manufacturing process. Yet, elements of these industries, e.g. the plastics divisions, will more likely be feeling the brunt of pressures from customers and suppliers. These industry heterogeneity characteristics and where these organizations operate within the supply chain will require further investigation. To gain and keep their competitiveness within the international business arena and to avoid green barriers, it is important for Indian manufacturers to improve their environmental image through environmental tools such as the adoption of GSCM. Again, depending on the role within the pharmaceuticals supply chain the level of adoption may vary. Arriving at the diffusion of these GSCM practices throughout such supply chains needs investigation for this industry as well. In terms of all practices, investment recovery seemed to gain less attention in India, especially when compared to developed countries. However, more Indian manufacturers have realized the importance of GSCM including investment recovery due to potential regulatory pressure in India as well as pending marketing pressure. Overall, lagging eco-design practices seem to be one of the big challenges to close the supply chains in India and this is true for pharmaceuticals industries. This overall lag may require further promotion by the Indian government and related professional societies, as well as collaborative involvement and incentive. There are several academic contributions of this study to the logistics literature. First, we extend the green perspective research in logistics management. While there are studies on measuring supply chain performance, the environmental aspect of supply chain management, which is an important part of supply chain performance in contemporary business logistics, has received less research attention. This study widens the avenue for further research in this area with an empirical investigation of the adoption of GSCM in pharmaceuticals industries in India. [24] Second, we examined the adoption of logistics practices, i.e., GSCM and CLSC related practices. We found that contextual pharmaceuticals industries would lead firms to embrace logistics practices at differing levels. Pharmaceuticals industry investigation in India provide theoretical insights to logistics researchers on how and why the adoption of logistics practices may vary in pharmaceuticals industrial. This study contributes to theory development in logistics research on the adoption of logistics practices. For instance, under
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what situations would companies in pharmaceuticals industries take GSCM or CLSC as a way to pursue supply chain performance, or to meet the institutional or stakeholder pressures? Will certain GSCM factors be more or less important in pharmaceuticals industries circumstances? Answers to such questions are critical for advancing the knowledge in logistics management research. Furthermore, we have introduced to the logistics literature the varying aspects of GSCM and a validated scale for measuring the five different factors of the GSCM construct. Our discussion on the construct of GSCM and its measurement provide logistics researchers a useful conceptual and methodological reference to pursue further studies in this under-explored logistics management research area. Along this line of academic contributions, there are several limitations in our study and we leave them for future research. First, motivations and barriers on why organizations do or do not implement typical GSCM practices, and closing the supply chain loop, have to be explored. Understanding such reasons can help governments to establish suitable regulations to promote environmental practices in industries and aid industrial organizations to address barriers they may face internally or through their supply chains. Second, relationships between the adoption of individual GSCM practices and performance can be examined. With such results, we can provide suggestions for pharmaceuticals industry on how to improve their environmental performance and gain economic benefits as well through the adoption of certain GSCM practices. Other limitations are methodological. For example larger random samples that are broadly dispersed throughout India will be required to get a more accurate representation of the adoption of these GSCM practices. Replication and cross-cultural/multi-national investigations can also support the generalization of these findings. Questions on whether Indian pharmaceuticals industry is truly lagging other countries throughout the world need to be answered with replications of this study. The dynamic nature of these GSCM practices and their early stages of adoption also call for a longitudinal analysis of the results to truly determine whether these general GSCM practices truly contribute to further adoption of explicit CLSC practices such as reverse logistics throughout India. Investigation in a multinational setting (incorporating countries with more advanced closed-loop systems), can help us to further investigate this relationship between the adoption of GSCM and CLSC. REFERENCES 1. Ashish Kumar Bhateja, Rajesh Babbar, Sarbjit Singh, Anish Sachdeva Study of Green Supply Chain Management in the Indian Manufacturing Industries: A Literature Review cum an Analytical Approach for the measurement of performance International Journal of Computational Engineering & Management, ISSN (Online): 2230-7893Vol. 13, July 2011 pp. 84 - 99 2. Aragon-Correa, A., Sharma, S., 2003. A contingent natural-resource based view of the firm. Academy of Management Review 28 (1), 117. 3. Armstrong, J., Overton, T.S., 1977. Estimating non response bias in mail surveys. Journal of Marketing Research 14 (3), 396402. 4. Aspan, H., 2000. Running in non concentric circles: why environmental management isnt being integrated into business management. Environmental Quality Management 9 (4), 6975.

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