Industries

This is Chapter 4 of Resources and Development (Class 8 Geography): 12 pages (32–43). It opens with the journey of a notebook, defines manufacturing and industry, classifies industries by raw material, size and ownership, lists the factors of location, describes the industrial system and industrial regions (a world map, Fig. 4.4, and eight Indian regions), has a box on industrial disasters (Bhopal 1984 and a gas-well blowout in China) with five risk-reduction measures, names the world's major industries, and studies iron and steel — its inputs, process, changing location, Indian centres and the case studies of Jamshedpur and Pittsburgh. It has 9 numbered figures (two of them world maps and one a town sketch), photographs, four activity boxes, a glossary, two ‘Do you know?’ boxes, three exercises and a site-choosing game on an imaginary island. Unlike earlier editions, this reprint has no cotton-textile or IT case study.

• Builds on hess403 (Agriculture: primary, secondary and tertiary activities; the farm as a system — this chapter's industrial system is its twin) and hess401 (Resources).
• Goes further in jess106 (Manufacturing Industries, Class 10: India's cotton, jute, sugar, steel, aluminium, chemicals, cement, IT and industrial pollution) and legy105 (Secondary Activities, Class 12: the world's manufacturing, its location and the world's industrial regions); legy106 for tertiary and quaternary activities; kegy106 for disaster management.
• Law and the Bhopal case: hess308 (Law and Social Justice, this year's civics book) studies Bhopal and the enforcement of safety laws.
• UPSC, honestly: Mains GS1 asked about the changing spatial pattern of world iron and steel (2014) and the localisation of agro-based food processing in north-west India (2019); Prelims asked the meaning of ‘sunrise industries’ (1988), what HAL, BHEL, SAIL and CIL make (1984), the basis of small-scale industry (1992) and a diary of chemical disasters including Bhopal (1993). We link 6. Questions on steel plants' foreign partners, the steel plants' coal sources and industrial pollution sit on jess106, legy105 and legy209.

• Manufacturing = secondary activity; adds value at each stage (pulp → paper → notebook). Industry = goods (iron and steel), extraction (coal mining) or services (tourism).
• By raw material: agro, mineral, marine, forest based. By size: cottage, small, large. By ownership: private, public (HAL, SAIL), joint (Maruti Udyog — book), co-operative (Anand Milk Union, Sudha).
• Location factors: raw material, land, water, labour, power, capital, transport, market (+ government incentives). Industrial system: inputs → processes (ginning, spinning, weaving, dyeing, printing) → outputs.
• World industrial regions: eastern North America, western and central Europe, eastern Europe, eastern Asia — temperate, near ports and coalfields. India: 8 regions, e.g. Mumbai–Pune, Hugli, Chotanagpur.
• Bhopal, 3 Dec 1984: MIC from Union Carbide; official toll 3,598 (1989). Sunrise industries: IT, wellness, hospitality, knowledge. Steel = backbone of modern industry; a feeder industry.
• Steel's best site: raw materials (before 1800) → coalfields (1800–1950) → ports (since 1950). TISCO, Sakchi, 1907: Jharia coal, Kalimati 32 km, Subarnarekha–Kharkai water, Kolkata market. Pittsburgh: local coal, Minnesota ore via the Great Lakes.

The book follows a notebook back to a tree: the tree is cut and taken to a pulp mill, the wood becomes pulp, the pulp is mixed with chemicals and turned into paper by machines, a press prints the lines with ink made from chemicals, and the pages are bound, packed and sent to market. Secondary activities or manufacturing change raw materials into products of more value to people — here in two stages (pulp → paper, paper → notebook). Paper from pulp and cloth from cotton have had value added at each stage, so the finished product has more value and utility than its raw material. Industry means an economic activity concerned with the production of goods (iron and steel industry), the extraction of minerals (coal mining industry) or the provision of services (tourism industry).

Raw materials. Agro-based industries use plant and animal products — food processing, vegetable oil, cotton textile, dairy products and leather. Mineral-based industries use mineral ores; their products feed other industries — iron from iron ore goes into heavy machinery, building materials and railway coaches. Marine-based industries use products of the sea — sea-food processing, fish oil. Forest-based industries use forest produce — pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals, furniture and buildings. Size means the capital invested, people employed and volume of production: small scale and large scale. Cottage or household industries, a type of small-scale industry, make products by hand — basket weaving, pottery, handicrafts. Small-scale industries use less capital and technology (silk weaving, food processing — Fig. 4.1); large-scale ones use more capital and superior technology (automobiles, heavy machinery). Ownership: private sector (owned and run by individuals or groups); public sector (owned and run by government — Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Steel Authority of India Limited); joint sector (state and individuals together — the book's example, Maruti Udyog Limited); co-operative sector (owned and run by producers or suppliers of raw materials, workers or both — Anand Milk Union Limited and Sudha Dairy).

The factors affecting the location of industries are the availability of raw material, land, water, labour, power, capital, transport and market. Industries are sited where some or all of these are easily available. Sometimes the government offers incentives — subsidised power, lower transport cost and other infrastructure — so that industries locate in backward areas. Industrialisation often leads to the growth of towns and cities. An industrial system has inputs (raw materials, labour and the costs of land, transport, power and other infrastructure), processes (the activities that turn raw material into finished products) and outputs (the end product and the income earned from it). In the textile industry the inputs may be cotton, human labour, factory and transport cost; the processes ginning, spinning, weaving, dyeing and printing; the output, the shirt you wear.

Industrial regions emerge when many industries locate close to each other and share the benefits of their closeness. The major industrial regions of the world are eastern North America, western and central Europe, eastern Europe and eastern Asia (Fig. 4.4). They tend to lie in temperate areas, near sea ports and especially near coal fields. India has several: the Mumbai–Pune cluster, the Bangalore–Tamil Nadu region, the Hugli region, the Ahmedabad–Baroda region, the Chotanagpur industrial belt, the Visakhapatnam–Guntur belt, the Gurgaon–Delhi–Meerut region and the Kollam–Thiruvananthapuram industrial cluster.

In industries, accidents and disasters mainly occur through technical failure or irresponsible handling of hazardous material. One of the worst industrial disasters of all time struck Bhopal on 3 December 1984, around 00:30 a.m.: highly poisonous methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas, with hydrogen cyanide and other reaction products, leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide factory. The official death toll was 3,598 in 1989; thousands of survivors still suffer blindness, impaired immunity, gastrointestinal disorders and other ailments. In another incident (the book says 23 December 2005), a gas-well blowout at Gao Qiao, Chongqing, China killed 243 people, injured 9,000 and forced 64,000 to be evacuated; many could not run after the explosion, and those who could not escape suffered burns to their eyes, skin and lungs. Risk reduction measures (book): (1) keep densely populated residential areas far away from industrial areas; (2) people near industries should know about stored toxins and their possible effects; (3) improve fire warning and fighting systems; (4) limit storage of toxic substances; (5) improve pollution dispersion in industries.

The world's major industries, says the book, are iron and steel, textiles and information technology: the first two are older, IT is emerging. Iron and steel is located in Germany, USA, China, Japan and Russia; textiles are concentrated in India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan; the major IT hubs are Silicon Valley (the book: ‘of Central California’) and the Bangalore region of India. A ‘Do you know?’ box calls emerging industries ‘sunrise industries’ — information technology, wellness, hospitality and knowledge.

Iron and steel is a feeder industry: its products are raw materials for others. Its inputs are iron ore, coal and limestone, with labour, capital, site and infrastructure (Fig. 4.5: 8 t coal + 4 t iron ore + 1 t limestone = 1 t steel). The raw material goes into a blast furnace where it undergoes smelting — extracting metal from ore by heating beyond the melting point (glossary) — and is then refined; the output is steel. Steel is tough and can be shaped, cut or drawn into wire; alloys made by adding small amounts of other metals such as aluminium, nickel and copper give it unusual hardness, toughness or rust resistance. Steel is often called the backbone of modern industry: ships, trains, trucks and cars, safety pins and needles, oil-drilling machinery and pipelines, mining equipment, farm machines and the frames of large buildings all depend on it. Location changed over time: before 1800, works sat where raw materials, power supply and running water were easily available; later the ideal site was near coal fields and close to canals and railways; after 1950, on large areas of flat land near sea ports, because works had become very large and iron ore had to be imported (Fig. 4.7).

In India, iron and steel has grown by using raw materials, cheap labour, transport and market. The important centres — Bhilai, Durgapur, Burnpur, Jamshedpur, Rourkela and Bokaro — lie in a region spread over West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh. Bhadravati and Vijay Nagar (Karnataka), Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) and Salem (Tamil Nadu) are other centres using local resources. The industry includes large integrated steel plants, mini steel mills, secondary producers, rolling mills and ancillary industries; almost every sector depends on it for basic infrastructure, and its growth ‘opened the doors’ to rapid industrial development.

Jamshedpur. Before 1947 there was only one iron and steel plant in the country — the privately owned Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO); after Independence the government set up several more. TISCO started in 1907 at Sakchi, near the confluence of the Subarnarekha and Kharkai rivers in Jharkhand; Sakchi was later renamed Jamshedpur, which the book calls the most conveniently situated steel centre in the country. Sakchi was chosen because it was only 32 km from Kalimati station on the Bengal–Nagpur railway; close to iron ore, coal and manganese; and close to Kolkata, a large market. TISCO gets coal from Jharia and iron ore, limestone, dolomite and manganese from Odisha and Chhattisgarh; the two rivers supply water; government initiatives later provided capital. Other plants followed — chemicals, locomotive parts, agricultural equipment, machinery, tinplate, cable and wire.

Pittsburgh is an important steel city of the USA. Coal is available locally; iron ore comes from the mines of Minnesota, about 1,500 km away, along one of the world's best routes for shipping ore cheaply — the Great Lakes waterway — and then by train. The Ohio, Monongahela and Allegheny rivers supply water. Today very few large mills are in Pittsburgh itself; they lie in the valleys of the Monongahela and Allegheny above the city and along the Ohio below it. Finished steel moves by land and water, and many factories in the area use steel to make railroad equipment, heavy machinery and rails. A ‘Do you know?’ box names the Great Lakes — Superior, Huron, Ontario, Michigan and Erie — Superior being the largest and highest upstream.

Four activity boxes in the text and the Developen Dweep siting activity (Exercise 4).

Three short answers, two distinctions and six pairs of examples. Try first, then open.

Numbers

One-liners

• Manufacturing adds value to raw materials at each stage.
• An industry may produce goods, extract minerals or provide services.
• Industries are classified by raw material, size and ownership.
• Industries locate where raw material, power, water, labour, capital, transport and market come together.
• An industrial system turns inputs through processes into products and income.
• Industries cluster into regions to share the benefits of closeness.
• Most industrial disasters come from technical failure or careless handling of hazardous material.
• Steel is the backbone of modern industry because nearly everything is made of it or with it.
• Steel moved from raw-material sites to coalfields to ports as works grew and ore was imported.
• Jamshedpur grew where coal, ore, water, a railway and the Kolkata market met.

Traps to avoid

• Mineral-based industries are manufacturing (secondary); the book's ‘primary’ means basic.
• Maruti Udyog was joint sector; the government sold out in 2007.
• Fig. 4.5 gives coal : ore 8 : 4; Class 10 gives ore : coal 4 : 2; modern plants use more ore than coal.
• A blast furnace makes iron, not steel.
• Bhopal's gas was methyl isocyanate, not dioxin.
• The Gao Qiao (Kaixian) blowout was in December 2003, not 2005.
• India is the world's second-largest steel producer, though the book's list omits it.
• Silicon Valley is in northern California.
• Fig. 4.3 shows seven factors; the text lists eight (water).
• Fig. 4.8's dots resemble steel centres; Australia and Brazil lead iron-ore mining.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• From this chapter: sunrise industries (1988), public-sector companies and what they make — HAL, SAIL (1984), the basis of ‘small scale’ (1992), chemical disasters and Bhopal's MIC (1993).
• Elsewhere: steel plants' foreign partners (1980 on jess106; 2005 on leps101); steel-industry pollutants (2014) on legy209; small-industry definitions on jess106 and keec102.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• From this chapter: GS1 2014 (change in the spatial pattern of iron and steel in the world) — the three eras of Fig. 4.7 with Pittsburgh and Jamshedpur; GS1 2019 (localisation of agro-based food processing in north-west India) — agro-based industries and the eight location factors.
• Elsewhere: iron and steel away from raw materials (GS1 2020) on jess106 and legy105; industrial corridors (GS1 2018) and regional-resource-based manufacturing (GS1 2019) on legy105; disaster management (GS3) on kegy106.
• Keep answers neutral: public versus private ownership and the Bhopal settlement are debates — give each position with its author, and figures with source and year.

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

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