Read the following passage and answer question based on the concept.
Considered from an urban point of view, the rapid growth in urbanization shows that the town or city has been acting as a magnet for the rural population. Those who cannot find work (or sufficient work) in the rural areas go to the city in search of work. This flow of rural-to-urban migration has also been accelerated by the continuous decline of common property resources like ponds, forests and grazing land. These common resources enabled poor people to survive in the villages although they owned little or no land. Now, these resources have been turned into private property, or they are exhausted. (Ponds may run dry and no longer provide enough fish; forests may have been cut down and have vanished. If people no longer have access to these resources, but on the other hand have to buy many things in the market that they used to get free (like fuel, fodder or supplementary food items), then their hardship increases. This hardship is worsened by the fact that opportunities for cash income are limited in the villages.
The emergence of machine production, based on the use of inanimate power resources like steam or electricity is known as:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → Industrialisation
Option (1) Globalisation — Incorrect. Globalisation refers to the growing interdependence between different people, regions and countries of the world, as social and economic relationships come to stretch world-wide. It is about links across the globe, not about machines replacing human and animal labour.
Option (2) Modernisation — Incorrect. Modernisation is a much wider term. In its early years it meant improvement in technology and production processes, but it came to mean the path of development taken by west Europe and North America, which other societies were expected to follow. The precise name for the rise of machine production is industrialisation.
Option (3) Industrialisation — Correct. Industrialisation refers to the emergence of machine production, based on the use of inanimate power resources like steam or electricity. ‘Inanimate’ means non-living: the power comes from steam or electricity, not from human or animal muscle. In industrial societies a large majority of the employed population works in factories rather than on the land.
Option (4) Glocalisation — Incorrect. Glocalisation refers to the mixing of the global with the local in culture, a strategy often adopted by foreign firms to suit local traditions. It has nothing to do with the coming of machine production.
Note 1: This passage is taken from the section on the rural-urban differences in the chapter ‘The Demographic Structure of the Indian Society’ of NCERT. NTA set five questions on one paragraph of the book, so read every paragraph of the chapters closely.
Note 2: The case study is taken from the chapter ‘The Demographic Structure of the Indian Society’, but this question is based on the chapter ‘Structural Change’. However, since it is a case-study based question, all the questions on this case study are tagged to the chapter the case study is taken from.
NCERT (2025-26): “1.2 Urbanisation and Industrialisation … Industrialisation refers to the emergence of machine production, based on the use of inanimate power resources like steam or electricity. In most standard western textbook of sociology, we learn that in even the most advanced of traditional civilizations, most people were engaged in working on the land. The relatively low level of technological development did not permit more than a small minority to be freed from the chores of agricultural production. By contrast, a prime feature of industrial societies today is that a large majority of the employed population work in factories…” |