Discuss the role of geographical factors in social change and development. (Answer in 150 words)

- Discuss the role of geographical factors in social change and development. (Answer in 150 words)
Introduction
Geography sets the conditions under which societies change and develop; it does not decide what they become.

Body

1. How geography acts on social change: Irrigation and river valleys favour dense settlement and centralised administration — Wittfogel's hydraulic society. In India the monsoon orders the agrarian calendar and the credit cycle, and recurrent drought in Bundelkhand converts scarcity into migration.
2. How they act on development: Endowment and location decide where growth lands. The Green Revolution took hold in canal-irrigated Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh and bypassed the rain-fed east, widening regional inequality.
3. The limits of their influence: Similar environments have produced very different societies, and possibilism holds that nature offers options culture selects. Sen showed the Bengal famine of 1943 to be a failure of entitlements, not of rainfall.
4. A weighing: Geography explains the terrain of change and little of its direction; technology and institutions decide what is made of it.

Conclusion
It is a condition rather than an agent — though climate change is making it one again.