Model answer & approach
- Bring out various factors responsible for declining of village Industries in India. (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
Village industry declined because mechanised production took its market while the artisan had no capital and no way to reach buyers.
Body
1. What they were: Household production, handloom, pottery, oil pressing, leather, smithy, basketry, by occupational castes, from local material, with demand guaranteed by jajmani obligation.
2. The factors behind the decline: Machine-made goods destroyed the weaver's market first: the power loom displacing the handloom, the expeller the ghani, plastic the pot. Forest law cut off free access to bamboo, cane and tanning material. Without working capital the artisan depends on the trader or master weaver, who supplies material, takes the product and keeps the margin. Design and market reach have not been renewed, the collapse of jajmani removed assured local demand, and low returns send the young to migrate.
3. Which weigh heaviest: Mechanised competition joined to the artisan's lack of capital; the rest follow from these two.
Conclusion
It failed not as craft but as enterprise, and only as enterprise can it be revived.
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