Change and Development in Industrial Society

This is Chapter 5 of Social Change and Development in India. Chapter 4 showed agriculture changing; this chapter turns to industry and services: how industrialisation in India differs from the West, how liberalisation changed work, how people find jobs, how work is organised and controlled, what conditions workers face, and how they resist. It runs 11 pages (60–70) with seven sections (5.1–5.7), one box, three activities, two charts and two questions. Its opening point: who produces what, who works where and who sells to whom are not individual choices but social patterns — for example, why more women are nurses and teachers than engineers, or why Indian coffee packs show two cups.

• Builds on Chapter 1 (colonial deindustrialisation; state-led industry after 1947) and Chapter 4 (migrant labour); leads into Chapter 6 (globalisation) and Chapter 8 (workers' movements).
• Pairs with live chapters: Indian Economic Development, Chapter 6 Employment: Growth, Informalisation and Other Issues (keec106) and Chapter 3 Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation (keec103); India: People and Economy, Chapter 2 Human Settlements (legy202 — IT cities); Contemporary World Politics, Chapter 7 Globalisation (leps107).
• UPSC: GS1 has asked about IT cities (2017, 2021), work from home and the family (2022) and young women's urban migration under globalisation (2024); GS3 about formal-sector decline and informalisation (2016) and liberalisation and Indian firms (2013). Prelims asked about capital-intensive industry and unemployment (1982) and Datta Samant (1983).

• Classical images: urbanisation, anonymity, detailed division of labour; Marx's alienation. Industry brings some equality, but discrimination and income inequality persist.
• India 2018–19 (NCERT): ~43% primary; employment status 52.1% self-employed, 23.8% regular, 24.1% casual; over 90% of work unorganised.
• Small organised sector → few mixed workplaces, few secure jobs (two-thirds with government), few unions.
• Liberalisation (1990s): Parle → Coca-Cola, disinvestment (Modern Foods), outsourcing and contract labour; land acquisition — adivasis ≈ 40% of the displaced (NCERT).
• Finding work: contacts; mistris (jobbers) in Kanpur mills; badli workers; contractors' advances. Work: Maruti 45 minutes' rest, just-in-time; IT ‘time slavery’ (Upadhya); Braverman: machines deskill.
• Conditions: Mines Act 1952 → OSH Code 2020; fish-processing migrant women; bidi home-work on piece rates; 1982 Bombay textile strike (Datta Samant) — ~1 lakh jobs lost.

Many classics of sociology were written when industry was new. Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim linked industry to urbanisation and to the loss of face-to-face relationships of village life, replaced by anonymous professional relations in factories and offices. Industrialisation involves a detailed division of labour: people often produce only a small part of a product and never see the end result; work is repetitive and exhausting — though better than unemployment. Marx called this alienation: work not enjoyed, done only to survive, and even survival depending on whether technology leaves room for human labour.

Industrialisation brings greater equality in some spheres — caste distinctions do not matter on trains, buses or in cyber cafes — but older discrimination may persist in new workplaces, and while some social inequalities fall, income inequality is growing worldwide. The two often overlap: upper-caste men dominate well-paid professions such as medicine, law and journalism; women are often paid less than men for similar work.

India's industrialisation is in many ways similar to the West's and in many ways different; there is no standard model of industrial capitalism. In developed countries most people work in services, then industry, and under 10% in agriculture (ILO figures). In India in 2018–19, NCERT says, nearly 43% worked in the primary sector (agriculture and mining), 17% in the secondary sector (manufacturing, construction, utilities) and 32% in the tertiary sector. Yet agriculture's share of output has fallen sharply, and services contribute more than half — so the sector employing the most people generates little income for them. NCERT's detailed 2018–19 shares: agriculture 42.5%, mining and quarrying 0.4%, manufacturing 12.1%, trade, hotels and restaurants 12.6%, transport, storage and communication 5.9%, community, social and personal services 13.8%.

A second difference: regular salaried employment. In developed countries most are formally employed; in India over 52% of workers are self-employed, about 24% are regular salaried and about 24% are casual labour.

Economists distinguish the organised (formal) and unorganised (informal) sectors; definitions are debated. By one definition the organised sector covers units employing ten or more people throughout the year, registered with the government so that employees get proper wages, pensions and other benefits. In India over 90% of work — in agriculture, industry and services — is unorganised.

NCERT draws three social implications. First, few Indians work in large firms where they meet people of other regions and backgrounds; most work in small workplaces where personal relationships decide pay and job security, unlike large organisations with transparent recruitment and grievance procedures. Second, few have secure jobs with benefits; of those who do, two-thirds work for the government — hence the scramble for government jobs; the rest must depend on their children in old age. Government employment has helped overcome boundaries of caste, religion and region — one sociologist argues that Bhilai has never had communal riots because its public-sector steel plant brings together workers from all over India, though ‘others may question this’. Third, few workers are in unions, so informal workers rarely experience collective action; laws exist but are left to the whims of employers or contractors.

Since the 1990s the government has followed liberalisation: private and foreign firms may invest in sectors once reserved for the state (telecom, civil aviation, power); licences are no longer needed to open industries; foreign goods are freely available. Many Indian firms were bought by multinationals while some Indian firms became multinationals. Example: Parle drinks was bought by Coca-Cola; Parle's annual turnover was ₹250 crore while Coca-Cola's advertising budget alone was ₹400 crore — and heavy advertising spread cola consumption, displacing traditional drinks. Retail is the next frontier: will neighbourhood shops survive department stores?

The government is selling shares in public sector companies — disinvestment; many workers fear job losses. In Modern Foods, set up to provide cheap, healthy bread and the first company to be privatised, 60% of workers were forced to retire within five years. Companies cut permanent staff and outsource to smaller firms or homes — and multinationals outsource across the globe, using cheap labour in countries like India. Small firms, competing for orders, keep wages low and conditions poor, and unions struggle to organise them. Almost all firms, even government ones, now use contracting, especially in the private sector. NCERT's summary: India is still largely agricultural; services and the urban middle class are growing; few have secure jobs, and even regular jobs are becoming insecure; government employment is shrinking; and ‘some economists debate this, but’ liberalisation and privatisation worldwide appear associated with rising income inequality. Meanwhile, land acquisition for industry often brings pollution but few local jobs; farmers, especially adivasis — about 40% of those displaced — protest low compensation and the prospect of casual work on city footpaths.

Only a small share of people get jobs through advertisements or employment exchanges. The self-employed — plumbers, electricians, carpenters at one end, tutors, architects and freelance photographers at the other — rely on personal contacts and reputation; mobile phones widen their reach. Factory recruitment differed: in the Kanpur textile mills, jobbers called mistris — themselves workers from the same regions and communities, backed by owners — bossed over workers and used community pressure. The jobber's role has declined; management and unions now recruit their own people, and many workers expect to pass jobs to their children. Factories use badli workers to stand in for absent permanent workers — often for years, without the same status and security: contract work within the organised sector. NCERT also lists employment schemes — MUDRA, Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Make in India — aimed at employment and self-employment, including for SCs, STs and OBCs.

The contractor system is most visible in casual labour at construction sites and brickyards. The contractor visits villages and lends money, including travel costs; the loan is an advance on wages, and the worker works unpaid until it is repaid. Agricultural labourers were once tied to landlords by debt; casual industrial workers are still in debt but not bound by other social obligations — in that sense freer: they can break the contract and find another employer. Sometimes whole families migrate and children help their parents.

A manager's basic task, NCERT says, is to control workers and get more work out of them: by extending hours or by increasing output per hour. Machinery raises production but threatens to replace workers; both Marx and Mahatma Gandhi saw mechanisation as a danger to employment. Textile workers described themselves as extensions of the machine: Ramcharan, a Kanpur weaver since the 1940s, spoke of eyes, neck, legs and hands all moving under a continuous gaze, four machines running together (Chitra Joshi, 2003).

The more mechanised the industry, the fewer the workers — who must keep the machine's pace. At Maruti Udyog, two cars roll off the line every minute; workers get 45 minutes of rest a day (two 7.5-minute tea breaks and a 30-minute lunch); most are exhausted by about 40 and take voluntary retirement. Output has risen while permanent jobs have fallen; cleaning, security and parts are outsourced, and suppliers deliver just-in-time every two hours — cheap for the company, tense for workers who must wait, then race.

Services too. Software professionals are middle-class, educated and supposedly self-motivated, yet their work is subject to Taylorist control (Box 5.1). Their hours have changed cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Gurugram: shops and restaurants open late; with both parents working, children go to crèches, and the joint family — supposed to vanish with industry — reappears as grandparents help. A key debate: does the shift to services and ‘knowledge economy’ raise skills? A farmer who knows hundreds of crops, soils and seeds is skilled differently from a software engineer. Harry Braverman argues machinery actually deskills workers — architects and engineers once had to be skilled draughtsmen; now computers do much of that work.

Goods reach us through others' labour, often in very bad conditions. Laws regulate working conditions. Mining employs many — coal mines alone 5.5 lakh workers. The Mines Act, 1952, now included in the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, sets maximum weekly hours, overtime pay and safety rules. Big companies may follow them; smaller mines and quarries often do not; sub-contracting is widespread, and contractors avoid registers to escape responsibility for accidents and benefits; companies fail to fill pits and restore land. Underground miners face flooding, fire, roof falls, gas and ventilation failures, and diseases such as tuberculosis and silicosis; open-cast miners face sun, rain, blasting and falling objects. India's mining accident rate is very high compared with other countries.

Many industries use migrants. Fish-processing plants along the coast employ mostly single young women from Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, ten or twelve housed in small rooms, sometimes sharing beds by shift; young women are seen as ‘submissive’ workers. Many men also migrate alone. With little time or money to spare, migrants socialise mostly with each other. ‘From a nation of interfering joint families’, NCERT writes, globalised work is taking people towards loneliness and vulnerability — yet for many young women it also means some independence and economic autonomy.

Home-based work is an important part of the economy: lace, zari or brocade, carpets, bidis, agarbattis and more, mainly by women and children. An agent brings raw materials and collects finished goods; workers are paid on a piece-rate basis. The bidi chain: villagers in forested areas pluck tendu leaves (about 100 bundles of 50 leaves a day) and sell to the forest department or a contractor; the government auctions the leaves to bidi factory owners, who pass them to contractors; contractors supply leaves and tobacco to home-based workers, mostly women, who dampen and cut leaves, fill tobacco and tie each bidi; contractors collect them for the manufacturer, who roasts them and adds his brand; distributors and wholesalers carry them to the neighbourhood pan shop.

Workers sometimes respond to harsh conditions by striking. In a strike, workers stay away; in a lockout, management shuts them out. Striking is hard: managers may hire substitutes and workers struggle without wages. The Bombay textile strike of 1982, led by the trade unionist Dr Datta Samant, affected nearly a quarter of a million workers and their families and lasted nearly two years. Workers wanted better wages and the right to form their own union. After two years, desperate, they drifted back; nearly one lakh lost their jobs and returned to villages or casual labour, or moved to powerloom towns such as Bhiwandi, Malegaon and Ichalkaranji. Mill owners did not invest in modernisation; they are now selling mill land for luxury housing — a battle over who defines Mumbai's future: the workers who built it, or mill owners and real-estate interests.

Numbers

One-liners

• Who works where and how is a social pattern, not just an individual choice.
• Marx: alienation — work endured only to survive.
• India: the sector employing most people earns least.
• Over 90% of Indian work is informal; secure jobs are mostly government jobs.
• Liberalisation brought takeovers, disinvestment, outsourcing and contract labour.
• Jobs travel through contacts, jobbers and contractors, not advertisements.
• Managers raise output by longer hours or faster pace.
• IT work is creative yet Taylorised — ‘time slavery’.
• Braverman: machines deskill.
• Home-based workers are paid by the piece and invisible to law.
• The 1982 Bombay strike ended in job losses and mill land sold for real estate.

Traps to avoid

• NCERT's sector shares (43 + 17 + 32) add to 92%; its detailed list omits construction.
• Use 52.1 / 23.8 / 24.1 for self-employed / regular / casual (2018–19).
• Two-thirds of secure jobs — not of all jobs — are with the government.
• Mistris were jobbers in the Kanpur mills; badli workers are substitutes.
• Braverman argues deskilling, not upskilling.
• ‘Hind Swaraj 1924’ is a slip: Hind Swaraj is 1909; the 1924 passage is from Young India.
• Kerr's Industrialism and Industrial Man was first published in 1960, not 1973.
• Datta Samant led the 1982 Bombay textile strike.
• The Mines Act 1952 is now in the OSH Code 2020.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Concepts: capital-intensive industries increase unemployment (1982) — NCERT's mechanisation argument (Marx, Gandhi, Maruti).
• People: Datta Samant and the Bombay textile strike (1983 match). Keep the four labour codes and their years, the Mines Act and the OSH Code ready as bare facts.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 Society: IT hubs' new opportunities and problems (2017) and socio-economic implications of IT industries in cities (2021) — Box 5.1, late-opening cities, crèches, grandparents; work from home and family relationships (2022) — Activity 5.3 and the IT family; young women's urban migration under globalisation (2024) — fish-processing women: autonomy and vulnerability.
• GS3 Economy: globalisation, formal-sector decline and informalisation (2016) — outsourcing, contract labour, >90% informal, unions; liberalisation and Indian firms versus MNCs (2013) — Parle and Coca-Cola, Indian firms going multinational.
• Present labour laws and codes as dated facts and evaluations as attributed positions (flexibility vs informalisation critique); avoid present-day commentary.

Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.

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