Globalisation and Social Change

This is Chapter 6 of Social Change and Development in India. Globalisation has already appeared in Chapter 4 (rural society) and Chapter 5 (industry); here NCERT asks what globalisation is, what is new about it, and what it does to economy, politics, labour and culture. The chapter runs 17 pages (72–88) with two numbered sections (6.1 on whether global interconnections are new; 6.2 on understanding globalisation), six boxes, seven activities, two full-page collages and four questions. It uses the sociological imagination — the link between the micro and the macro, the personal and the public (C. Wright Mills, as in Indian Society, Chapter 1).

• Builds on Chapters 4 and 5 (contract farming, liberalisation, outsourcing) and Chapter 2 (debates on tradition); leads into Chapter 7 (media, ‘the most visible effect of globalisation’) and Chapter 8 (social movements, including global ones).
• Pairs with live chapters: Contemporary World Politics, Chapter 7 Globalisation (leps107 — political and economic debates); Indian Economic Development, Chapter 3 Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation (keec103 — the 1991 reforms); Indian Society, Chapter 1 (lesy101 — Mills).
• UPSC: GS1 repeatedly asks about globalisation and Indian society — women (2015), cultural diversity (2016), homogenisation versus specificity (2018), diversity and pluralism (2020), new technology (2022), Tier-2 cities and consumption (2022), consumer culture (2025) and youth (2026). Prelims asked what a multinational is (1982), interdependence (1979) and what MSF is (2006).

• Globalisation = growing interdependence of people, regions and countries; driven above all by ICT; it has economic, political and cultural sides.
• It affects us all differently: consumers gain choice; Bihar silk spinners, women fish workers, Gujarat gum collectors and rag pickers lose work.
• Interconnection is old (Silk Route, Panini, kupamanduka warning; colonialism) — today's scale and intensity are new.
• Economic drivers: liberalisation (July 1991; IMF loans, structural adjustment; WTO), TNCs, electronic economy, weightless/knowledge economy, global finance; all QRs on imports removed 1 April 2001.
• Labour: new international division of labour — Nike's moves; Fordism → post-Fordism; Reich's $20,000 car with only $7,600 to Americans; uneven jobs (ILO 2005).
• Politics: collapse of the socialist world, neo-liberalism, regional bodies, IGOs and INGOs. Culture: homogenisation vs glocalisation, gender, culture of consumption, corporate culture, threats to crafts and traditional knowledge.

There is no single definition: economics may focus on capital flows, political science on governments, but globalisation is so far-reaching that disciplines borrow from one another. Sociology uses the sociological imagination to connect individual and society, micro and macro, local and global: how a remote peasant, the middle class, big Indian firms becoming transnationals, the neighbourhood grocer or young people's leisure are affected. Since 1 April 2001 all quantitative restrictions on imports have been withdrawn; Chinese pears, Australian apples and orange juice and frozen snacks appear in local shops. What means more choice for the affluent urban consumer may mean a crisis of livelihood for a farmer. Such changes are personal, yet linked to public policy and India's agreements with the WTO; and instead of one television channel there are scores. Society cannot be studied as an isolated entity: the ‘compression of space and time’ means villages, families, movements, work and caste must be studied in their global connections.

Effects are uneven. Women silk spinners and twisters in Bihar lost work when cheaper, shinier Chinese and Korean yarn arrived. Large fishing vessels took fish once caught by Indian boats, hurting women fish sorters, dryers, vendors and net makers. In Gujarat, women who collected gum from julifera (babul) trees lost work to cheaper gum from Sudan. Rag pickers in almost all cities lost some work to imported waste paper. Hence sharply divided views: some believe globalisation heralds a better world; others fear the privileged gain while the excluded grow worse off; still others argue it is not new at all.

India was never isolated. The Silk Route linked India to China, Persia, Egypt and Rome; people came as traders, conquerors and migrants; villagers often ‘recall’ ancestors who came from elsewhere. Box 6.1 (Amartya Sen) adds that Panini, the great Sanskrit grammarian of around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin; that the 7th-century Chinese scholar Yi Jing learnt Sanskrit in Shri Vijaya on his way to India; that Asian languages show these interactions; and that Sanskrit texts warn against isolation through the parable of the kupamanduka, the well-frog that distrusts everything outside.

Colonialism was part of a capitalism global from its start, needing capital, raw materials, energy and markets; it involved huge movements of people — Europeans settling the Americas and Australia, indentured Indian labourers, and the slave trade from Africa. Independent India kept a global outlook from the national movement — support for liberation struggles, migration for education and work, trade in goods and technology, foreign firms in India. So the question is whether today's change is radically different.

Western capitalism was built on global control of resources (colonialism). But is globalisation only interconnection, or a set of significant changes in capitalist production and communication, the organisation of labour and capital, technology, culture, governance and social movements? NCERT defines globalisation as the growing interdependence between different people, regions and countries as social and economic relationships come to stretch world-wide. Economic forces are integral, but not alone: it has been driven above all by information and communication technologies, which intensified the speed and scope of interaction, and it grew within a political context. NCERT discusses economic, political and cultural aspects separately but stresses their interconnection.

a. Liberalisation. Liberalisation and globalisation are related but not the same. The term refers to policy decisions the Indian state took since 1991 to open the economy to the world market — a break from the earlier policy of protecting Indian business, based on the assumption that an ex-colony would be disadvantaged in a free market. Since July 1991 reforms covered agriculture, industry, trade, foreign investment and technology, the public sector and finance, assuming greater integration would benefit India. It also involved IMF loans with conditions — structural adjustment, usually cuts in social-sector spending on health, education and social security — and a greater say for bodies such as the WTO.

b. Transnational corporations (TNCs) produce goods or market services in more than one country — from small firms with a factory or two abroad to giants such as Coca-Cola, General Motors, Colgate-Palmolive, Kodak and Mitsubishi — oriented to global markets and profits though they have a national base; some Indian firms are becoming transnational, and NCERT says it is not yet clear what this will mean for Indians as a whole. c. The electronic economy: banks, firms, fund managers and individuals move money internationally with a click — with great risks; in India, stock markets rise and dip as foreign investors buy, take profits and sell. d. The weightless or knowledge economy: products based on information (software, media and entertainment, internet services); a workforce engaged in design, development, technology, marketing, sale and servicing; new occupations such as event managers. e. Globalisation of finance: integrated markets move billions of dollars in seconds; 24-hour trading; New York, Tokyo and London as key centres; Mumbai as India's financial capital.

Advances in technology and telecommunications have revolutionised communication: landlines and mobiles, fax, digital and cable television, e-mail and the internet. Some homes and offices have many links; many do not — the digital divide. Still, technology ‘compresses’ time and space: someone in Bengaluru and someone in New York can talk and exchange documents by satellite. Globalisation is giving rise to a ‘network and media society’. NCERT notes the government's Digital India programme, aiming at a ‘digitally empowered society’ and ‘knowledge economy’. Cell phones have become part of the self for urban middle-class youth, and attitudes to them changed rapidly.

A new international division of labour has emerged: more routine manufacturing is done in Third World cities. NCERT's example is Nike: founder Phil Knight began by importing shoes from Japan and selling them at athletics meets; the company, headquartered near Portland, Oregon, became a transnational. Only two US factories ever made Nike shoes; production was in Japan in the 1960s, moved to South Korea in the mid-1970s as costs rose, widened to Thailand and Indonesia in the 1980s, and reached India from the 1990s — and will move again if labour is cheaper elsewhere. This makes workers vulnerable and insecure; flexibility favours producers. The shift is from Fordism (mass production at a centralised location) to post-Fordism (flexible production at dispersed locations).

Employment effects are uneven too. For urban middle-class youth, globalisation and IT opened new careers — computer courses, call centres and BPOs, sales jobs in malls, new restaurants. But broader employment trends are disappointing (Box 6.5).

A major political change — the collapse of the erstwhile socialist world — hastened globalisation and gave it a particular approach, often called neo-liberal: a vision of free enterprise in which free rein to market forces is held to be both efficient and fair, critical of state regulation and subsidies. Globalisation thus has a political vision as much as an economic one — but a different globalisation is possible: an inclusive globalisation that includes all sections of society. Globalisation also brought growth of regional mechanisms such as the EU, ASEAN and SAARC; of intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) set up by governments to regulate a transnational domain — the WTO increasingly sets trade rules; and of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), independent of governments — Greenpeace, the Red Cross, Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières.

Globalisation affects culture in many ways. India's long openness enriched it, yet the last decade brought fears that local cultures would be overtaken. Recalling the kupamanduka, NCERT says India retains an open-ended attitude, with heated debates about clothes, styles, music, films, languages and body language — as 19th-century reformers and nationalists debated culture (Chapters 1–2). What differs is the scale and intensity of change.

A central contention is that all cultures will become homogeneous; others argue for glocalisation — the mixing of the global with the local. It is neither wholly spontaneous nor delinked from commercial interests: it is often a strategy of foreign firms to enhance marketability. Foreign channels — Star, MTV, Channel V, Cartoon Network — use Indian languages; McDonald's sells only vegetarian and chicken products in India, not beef, and goes vegetarian during Navaratri; music sees ‘Bhangra pop’, ‘Indi pop’, fusion and remixes. Culture is not a fixed entity that either collapses or stays the same: globalisation is likely to create new local and global traditions.

Gender and culture. Defenders of a fixed idea of cultural identity often defend undemocratic and discriminatory practices against women in its name — from defending sati to excluding women from education and public life. Globalisation can then be used as a ‘bogey’ to defend unjust practices. NCERT says India has been able to retain and develop a democratic tradition that defines culture more inclusively.

Culture means a whole way of life. Two uses matter here: the culture of consumption and corporate culture. Till the 1970s, manufacturing drove the growth of cities; now cultural consumption — art, food, fashion, music, tourism — shapes them largely: shopping malls, multiplexes, amusement parks and ‘water worlds’ in every major city. Advertising and the media promote spending; ‘to be careful with money is no longer a virtue’, and shopping is an encouraged pastime. Indian wins at Miss Universe and Miss World boosted fashion, cosmetics and health industries — girls dream of being Aishwarya Rai or Sushmita Sen — and shows such as Kaun Banega Crorepati made sudden fortune seem possible.

Corporate culture is a branch of management theory seeking productivity and competitiveness through a unique organisational culture — company events, rituals and traditions meant to build loyalty and solidarity — and a way of promoting and packaging products. Multinationals and IT have created in the metros a class of upwardly mobile professionals in software, multinational banks, accountancy, stock markets, travel, fashion, entertainment and media: highly stressful schedules, very high salaries, and the main clientele of the consumer boom.

Indigenous craft and literary traditions and knowledge systems are threatened. Modern development made inroads even before globalisation, but the scale and intensity now are enormous. About 30 theatre groups in the mill areas of Parel and Girgaum in Mumbai became defunct as mill workers lost jobs (Chapter 5). Some years back there were reports of many suicides by traditional weavers in Sircilla (Karimnagar district) and Dubakka (Medak district), then in Andhra Pradesh — weavers unable to invest in technology or adapt to changing tastes and competition from power looms. Traditional knowledge in medicine and agriculture is passed down the generations; recent attempts by some multinationals to patent uses of tulsi, haldi (turmeric), rudraksha and basmati rice highlight the need to protect it.

Numbers

One-liners

• Globalisation affects us all, but differently.
• Interconnection is old; today's scale and intensity are new.
• ICT is the main driver; politics gave the context.
• Liberalisation is the policy; globalisation the process.
• Electronic money brings speed — and volatility.
• Production follows cheap labour: Fordism gives way to post-Fordism.
• A ‘national’ product is a global assembly (Reich).
• IGOs are made by governments; INGOs are independent.
• Glocalisation is partly a market strategy, partly cultural synthesis.
• ‘Culture’ can be used to defend injustice to women.
• Cities now grow around consumption, not just manufacturing.

Traps to avoid

• QRs on imports were removed on 1 April 2001, not in 1991.
• Box 6.4's percentages are of the $12,400 non-US share, not of $20,000.
• NCERT reverses chapters: contract farming is Chapter 4, outsourcing Chapter 5.
• SAARC is ‘Regional Cooperation’, not ‘Corporation’.
• Srivijaya (Box 6.1) is generally placed in Sumatra, not Java — disputed.
• Nike's headquarters are in Beaverton, Oregon.
• MSF, Red Cross, Amnesty and Greenpeace are INGOs; the WTO is an IGO.
• Sircilla and Dubbaka are now in Telangana, not Andhra Pradesh.
• Box 6.2's ‘700 million’ has no year or source.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Definitions: a multinational is a company operating in many countries (1982); economic interdependence of countries (1979, leps107).
• INGOs: Médecins Sans Frontières is a non-governmental organisation (2006). Keep IGO/INGO examples and founding dates handy, plus 1991, 1995 (WTO) and 2001 (QRs).

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 culture: homogenisation versus strengthened specificities (2018), cultural diversity (2016), diversity and pluralism under threat (2020) — NCERT's glocalisation examples, ‘culture is not fixed’, India's openness, plus attributed views (Ritzer, Robertson, Appadurai).
• GS1 society: women (2015) — lost livelihoods (spinners, fish workers, gum collectors) versus new jobs (BPOs), and the gender-and-culture argument; youth (2026) — careers, phones, consumption, uneven jobs; new technology (2022) — ICT as driver, digital divide, electronic economy.
• GS1 consumption: Tier-2 cities and the new middle class (2022) and ‘only an aggressive consumer culture?’ (2025) — consumption-led cities, professionals as clientele, advertising; balance with glocal creativity and opportunities.
• Keep views attributed and balanced (Bhagwati, Stiglitz, Held, Hirst and Thompson); 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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