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Chapter 18: Industries

In the dry hills of Khetri, in the Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan’s Shekhawati region, a heavy industrial complex rises where a traveller might expect only scrub and grazing cattle. There is no great city close by, no coalfield, no river port. Yet copper is mined, crushed and concentrated here — a mineral industry planted in a thinly peopled corner of a semi-desert.

Why here? The answer is locked in the rock itself. Copper ore is lean: a tonne of it often holds around one per cent copper, sometimes less. The rest — some ninety-nine parts in a hundred — is waste. To haul that ore to a distant factory would mean paying, wagon after wagon, to move rock that must simply be thrown away at the other end. So the industry does the sensible thing. It goes to the ore, strips out the waste on the spot, and sends only the concentrate onward.

That one decision — sit near the raw material, sit near the market, or settle somewhere between — is the question this whole chapter turns on. A sugar mill, a cotton mill, a steel plant and an oil refinery each answer it differently, because each is pulled by a different mix of raw material, power, labour, transport and market. Some answers are fixed by geography. Others are fixed by a government’s pen. And an answer that was right in 1900 can be wrong by 2000 — the map of Indian industry is always quietly redrawing itself.

Diagram

Fig. 18.0-1 Caption: Because most of the ore is waste, the factory goes to the ore and sends only the concentrate onward. Brief: A left-to-right conceptual diagram. Left: an ore body in hills, with a fat block arrow of ‘lean ore (about 99 parts waste, 1 part metal)’ feeding into a ‘concentrator’ at the mine site. From the concentrator, a large arrow of ‘waste (tailings)’ points down and stays on site; a thin arrow of ‘concentrate’ points right, travelling a long distance to a far-off ‘market / smelter’. Emphasise the contrast between the fat incoming-ore arrow and the thin outgoing-concentrate arrow. All arrows left-to-right except the waste arrow, which points down to a tailings pile. No map, no real place names beyond the labels given.

NoteCuriosity Corner

Q1. Why does industry huddle into a handful of pockets of India rather than spreading evenly across the country? Q2. A sugar mill and a cotton mill both live off a farm crop, yet one stays out in the cane fields while the other drifts towards cities and ports — why the difference? Q3. Why is iron and steel called the ‘key industry’ when most of us rarely handle a piece of steel in a day? Q4. What made Jamshedpur so well suited to India’s oldest steel plant that its raw materials seem to have fallen into place around it? Q5. If tourism produces nothing you can hold in your hand, how can it be counted as an ‘industry’ at all?

This chapter follows industry across India — where it settles, why, and how the answer keeps shifting — and by its end each of these questions will have an answer.

18.1 Industry and Its Classification

Every factory is an answer to a question of place. Later sections ask where industries sit, and why they gather where they do. First, though, we need to be clear about two simpler things: what an industry actually does to the materials that pass through it, and how geographers sort a bewildering variety of factories into a few workable groups.

18.1.1 Manufacturing as Value Addition

Manufacturing is the processing of raw or primary materials into more refined and usable goods. A cotton boll is not cloth, and crude oil is not a plastic bucket; a factory stands between them and does the converting.

At every step of that conversion the material becomes more valuable and more useful. Raw cotton becomes yarn, yarn becomes cloth, cloth becomes a shirt — and the price rises at each stage. This rising worth, added by processing, is called value addition, and it is the whole economic point of manufacturing.

This is why the strength of an economy is so often read from its industries. A country that only grows and digs out raw materials tends to sell them cheap and buy the finished goods back dear. A country that processes its own materials keeps the added value at home. Industrialisation, in short, is one of the main routes out of that dependence, which is why every planned economy of the twentieth century, India included, treated it as a national priority.

Flowchart

Fig. 18.1-1 Caption: Each processing step adds value, turning a cheap raw material into a costlier, more usable good. Nodes: Raw cotton (lowest value) → ginning: seed removed → spinning: fibre becomes yarn → weaving: yarn becomes grey cloth → dyeing and finishing → finished cloth (highest value); the material gains worth at every step.

18.1.2 The Bases of Classification

There are thousands of kinds of factory, so no single list can hold them all. Instead, geographers classify industries by asking different questions of them, and each question sorts the same set a different way.

The first question is: where does the raw material come from? Industries that draw their raw material from farms are agro-based industries — cotton textiles, sugar, jute and edible oil among them. Those that draw it from minerals are mineral-based industries, such as iron and steel, cement and aluminium. Forest-based industries use forest produce such as paper, lac and resin, while pastoral-based industries depend on animals, giving us leather, wool and dairy.

The second question is: who uses the product? Basic industries, also called key industries, make goods that other industries depend on — iron and steel above all, and power. Consumer industries make goods that reach the household directly, such as cloth, bread and soap.

Two further questions matter especially in India. By ownership — a division that dates from the start of planned development in 1951 — an industry may lie in the public sector (state-owned), the private sector, or the joint sector (state and private together). By size, industries are large-, medium- or small-scale, a distinction we meet again as integrated versus mini steel plants in 18.6.

The important caution is that these bases cut across one another. A single cotton mill is agro-based, a consumer industry, privately owned and large-scale all at once. The categories are lenses for looking at an industry, not sealed boxes to file it in.

Flowchart

Fig. 18.1-2 Caption: The same set of industries can be sorted several ways; the branches overlap rather than exclude one another. Nodes: Industries → by source of raw material → agro-based / mineral-based / forest-based / pastoral-based; Industries → by role of output → basic (key) / consumer; Industries → by ownership → public sector / private sector / joint sector; Industries → by size → large-scale / medium-scale / small-scale (mini, for steel)

Fig. 18.1-2 The tree branches by the question you ask — source of raw material, role of the output, ownership, size. Follow any one branch down to its members. What it shows: each base sorts the same industries a different way. What it does not show: the branches are not exclusive — one real factory, a private cotton mill say, sits on several at once, so no single label ever describes it fully.

18.1.3 Key and Footloose Industries

Two of these labels deserve a closer look, because more than the others they predict where a factory will end up.

A key industry, as we have seen, is one whose output feeds a great many others, so that a country’s entire industrial structure rests on it. Iron and steel is the clearest case: machines, tools, rails and buildings all need it, which is why 18.6 calls it the backbone of industry.

A footloose industry, by contrast, is one whose location is pinned by no single factor, so it can be set up across a wide range of places. Its raw materials are light and widely available, and no one input dominates the cost of transport. Electronics, watches and many light assembly units are footloose in this sense.

Set the two side by side and the real difference is weight. A steel plant is chained to bulky, heavy minerals and must go where they are. A footloose industry, carrying only light parts, is free instead to chase skilled labour, a good market or cheap land. Whether an industry is tied down or free to roam turns on the weight and bulk of what it must move — the very theme the next section, on the location of industry, is built around.

A Watch Assembly Unit Factors: light components, skilled labour, power and a market — all of them available in many places. The decisive one: trained labour and nearness to a market; the parts weigh so little that transport hardly counts. Move it: shift the unit to any other city with skilled workers and it runs just as well — and that freedom is exactly what ‘footloose’ means.

18.2 The Location of Industry

A factory does not settle where it pleases. It is pulled in several directions at once — towards its raw material, its power, its labour and its market — and it comes to rest where these pulls balance. For most of industrial history the strongest pulls were geographical, fixed by the land itself. Increasingly, though, factors of a political and economic kind decide the site instead. Geographers therefore split the forces on a factory into two groups.

18.2.1 Geographical Factors

The first pull is the raw material. Industries that use heavy, bulky material tend to sit close to its source, especially when that material is a weight-losing raw material — one that sheds much of its weight during manufacture, so that carrying it far would mean paying to transport waste. Sugarcane, which yields only about a tenth of its weight as sugar, is the classic case. A pure raw material, by contrast, keeps almost its full weight through processing; cotton is nearly pure, which frees a cotton mill to locate near its market instead. Limestone-hungry cement plants cling to the quarry for the same weight-losing reason that sugar mills cling to the cane.

The second pull is power. A steady supply is a precondition for any factory. Iron and steel, needing large amounts of coking coal — coal baked into coke to smelt the ore — is drawn to the coalfields. Industries that live on cheap electricity, such as aluminium and electro-chemicals, gather where hydro-power is generated. Because petroleum can be piped and electricity carried long distances by cable, power today travels to the factory more easily than it once did, which lets industry spread more widely.

Labour is the third pull. Some industries need workers in great numbers, and find them easily in large towns; others need skilled or technical hands that only certain places supply. A labour-intensive industry — one in which labour matters more than capital, such as shoe-making or bidi rolling — must sit where plentiful labour is available.

Transport ties the whole system together, since raw materials must be assembled and finished goods marketed. It is no accident that industry gathered around Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai, the three ports that railways first linked to their inland hinterlands.

The market exerts the opposite pull to raw material. Nearness to the market speeds the sale of goods and cuts the cost of carrying them, and it matters most for perishable products, for heavy finished goods, and for the market-oriented industries that use pure or light raw materials.

Two further conditions shape the site. Factories need large areas of cheap land, which is now pushing many of them out of costly city centres into rural land, and they need water — iron and steel, textiles and chemicals all consume it in bulk. Finally, climate plays a quiet part: a humid climate suits cotton spinning, because thread snaps in dry air, and the moderate weather of the western coast has long been counted among the reasons industry concentrated there.

Diagram

Fig. 18.2-1 Caption: A factory settles where the competing pulls of its inputs and its market balance out. Brief: A central factory symbol with four labelled tension arrows pulling outward, tug-of-war style, toward ‘raw material source’, ‘market’, ‘power source’ and ‘labour / cheap land’. Draw the raw-material arrow noticeably thicker than the others and annotate that a heavy, weight-losing raw material pulls hardest. Arrows point from the factory outward to each factor. No map.

Fig. 18.2-1 Each arrow is a pull on the factory — toward its raw material, market, power and labour — and the factory ends up where the pulls balance. What it shows: location is a compromise, not a single cause. What it does not show: how strong each pull really is. That strength differs by industry — for steel the raw-material pull dominates, while for a soft-drink plant the market pull wins.

18.2.2 Non-Geographical Factors

As power grids and railways have spread the geographical advantages more evenly, factors of a historical, political and economic kind have grown stronger. These are the non-geographical factors, and they can override geography entirely.

The first is capital. Modern industry is capital-intensive, meaning it demands heavy investment, and the people and institutions with capital cluster in the big cities. Industry tends to follow the money to Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi and Chennai, whatever the local geography.

Government policy is often the decisive hand. Wishing to reduce regional disparity, curb pollution and relieve crowded cities, the state can plant a factory where geography never called for one. A coach factory at Kapurthala in Punjab and an oil refinery at Mathura, far from any oilfield, are located by policy rather than by advantage; the same intent lies behind the industrial estates — serviced plots with ready power and roads — set up across the country and behind the public-sector plants sited in backward areas.

Industrial inertia is a subtler force: an industry tends to stay at the place where it first grew, even after the original reason for being there has vanished. The lock industry of Aligarh and the bidi industry of Jabalpur remain where they are less because of any present advantage than because of the skills, suppliers and reputation that have piled up over the years.

Three quieter conditions complete the list. Banking facilities are needed because a factory settles large sums every day; insurance guards against loss of machinery and life; and industrialists prefer areas of political stability, where an investment is unlikely to be disturbed. Taken together, these non-geographical factors are why the location of a modern industry can no longer be read off a map of raw materials alone.

Industrial Inertia At Aligarh Aligarh became known for locks → the original locational reason faded away → but a pool of skilled workers, suppliers and buyers had already gathered there → moving elsewhere would mean rebuilding all of it → so the industry stays put, held by inertia, not by any present advantage.

18.3 Industrial Clusters and India’s Industrial Regions

Industry follows an uneven geography, and nowhere is that plainer than in India. Its factories are not scattered evenly across the map; they bunch together in a few crowded pockets, leaving vast stretches almost bare. This section asks what makes those pockets, how geographers measure them, and where India’s stand.

18.3.1 What a Cluster Is, and How It Is Measured

A pocket with a high concentration of industry is called an industrial cluster. Clusters form because the factors that favour industry — minerals, power, ports, labour, capital and markets — are themselves unevenly spread, and where several of them coincide, factory draws factory until a dense knot builds up.

Geographers gauge the strength of a cluster in several ways: by the number of industrial workers, the number of industrial units, the quantum of power consumed for industry, the total industrial output, and the value added by manufacturing. Of these, the average daily factory employment — the number of workers a cluster’s factories keep busy each day — is taken as the single best measure, because it captures the scale of activity most directly.

Q1. Why does industry huddle into a handful of pockets of India rather than spreading evenly across the country?

A. Because the factors that favour industry — minerals, power, ports, labour, capital and markets — are themselves unevenly spread, and they reinforce one another. Where several coincide, industry concentrates into a cluster; where they are thin, little grows. Industry mirrors the uneven geography beneath it.

18.3.2 Major Regions, Minor Regions and Manufacturing Districts

On the basis of that daily workforce, India’s industrial pockets fall into three tiers. A major industrial region is one with a daily factory workforce of at least 1.5 lakh — that is, 150,000 workers. A minor industrial region has at least 25,000. A manufacturing district has fewer than 25,000. India has seven major industrial regions, along with a number of minor regions and manufacturing districts besides.

Flowchart

Fig. 18.3-1 Caption: The size of a cluster’s daily factory workforce places it in one of three tiers. Nodes: Count the average daily factory workers in the pocket → is it 1.5 lakh or more? yes → Major Industrial Region; no → is it 25,000 or more? yes → Minor Industrial Region; no → Manufacturing District

18.3.3 The Seven Major Industrial Regions

Map 18.1 sets out these regions. Read it and a pattern jumps out: the major regions cling to the coasts, the coalfields and the great river routes, while the interior and the north-east stay largely blank.

Map

Map 18.1 Caption: India’s major and minor industrial regions and manufacturing districts. Brief: Outline political map of India showing the full official extent of the country, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with all international boundaries as recognised by the Government of India. Shade the seven major industrial regions in the darkest tone and label each — Mumbai-Pune, Hooghly, Bengaluru-Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Chota Nagpur, Vishakhapatnam-Guntur, Gurgaon-Delhi-Meerut. Shade minor industrial regions in a lighter tone and mark manufacturing districts as dots. Include a key distinguishing the three tiers and a scale bar. No part of India is to be shown as disputed or ceded.

The seven major regions are these:

  1. Mumbai-Pune, which grew from the port of Mumbai under British rule. Cotton textiles, feeding on the black-cotton soil of the Deccan and worked by cheap hinterland labour, were the seed; hydro-power from the Western Ghats made up for distant coal. Chemicals, engineering, petrochemicals — after the Mumbai High oilfield came in — and films followed, spreading the region out to Pune, Nashik and Solapur. Its chief problem now is a want of space in Mumbai itself.

  2. Hooghly, a narrow belt along the Hooghly river in West Bengal, seeded by the processing of deltaic Bengal’s jute. The port of Kolkata, its rich Ganga-Brahmaputra hinterland — the inland tract a port serves and draws upon — Damodar valley coal and cheap labour from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh built it up under British capital. Cotton, paper, engineering and, later, the Haldia refinery diversified it. Silting of the Hooghly and the decline of jute have since slowed its growth.

  3. Bengaluru-Tamil Nadu, the fastest-growing region after independence, spread across Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Lacking coal, it runs on cheap hydro-electricity from Mettur, Sivasamudram, Sharavati and Pykara. Cotton textiles took root first — Coimbatore is called the ‘Manchester of Tamil Nadu’ — and public-sector engineering and electronics later clustered at Bengaluru, alongside silk, sugar, leather and a range of light industry.

  4. Gujarat, centred on Ahmedabad and Vadodara, which grew as cotton textiles declined in Mumbai. It lies near the cotton belt and the markets of the northern plains, with cheap land and labour to hand. The oilfields of the Gulf of Khambhat then gave rise to petrochemicals, and Kandla port opened it to trade, making it one of the country’s most diversified regions.

  5. Chota Nagpur, the ‘Ruhr of India’, spread over Jharkhand, northern Odisha and the western part of West Bengal. Its strength is the meeting, in one mineral belt, of Damodar valley coal and the iron ore of the Jharkhand-Odisha belt, backed by power from the Damodar Valley Corporation and cheap labour from the states around. It is India’s great home of iron and steel and heavy engineering, with the Kolkata region as its market.

  6. Vishakhapatnam-Guntur, a coastal region in Andhra Pradesh, resting on the ports of Vishakhapatnam and Machilipatnam and the coal of the Godavari basin. Rich agriculture and minerals in the ports’ hinterlands support it. Shipbuilding began here in 1941, and the region carries India’s only coastal steel plant, along with petrochemicals and light engineering.

  7. Gurgaon-Delhi-Meerut, a post-independence, market-oriented region in two belts around Delhi — one through Agra, Mathura, Meerut and Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, the other through Faridabad, Gurgaon and Ambala in Haryana. Far from minerals, it leans on hydro-power from the Bhakra-Nangal complex and nearby thermal stations, and on the huge Delhi market. Its industries are light and varied — engineering, electronics, cycles, sugar, cars at Gurgaon and, more recently, software.

Notice how differently the seven were made. Chota Nagpur and Vishakhapatnam-Guntur were pulled into being by minerals; Hooghly and Mumbai-Pune by a farm crop and a port; Gurgaon-Delhi-Meerut chiefly by a market. Read the shaded blocks of Map 18.1 together and the message is one of concentration — but the shading also hides the empty countryside inside each block, so a ‘region’ is never as solidly industrial as its tone suggests.

The Chota Nagpur Cluster Factors: coal, iron ore, power from the Damodar Valley, cheap labour, and the Kolkata market and port. The decisive one: coal and iron ore lying side by side in the same mineral belt, so a heavy, weight-losing pair of raw materials need barely be moved. Move it: take that shared belt away and the ferrous-metal cluster has no reason to exist — which is why it could not simply be built somewhere else.

18.3.4 Regional Disparities in Industrial Development

India’s industrial map is also a map of inequality. A few states — Maharashtra, Gujarat, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh — carry a heavy share of the country’s industry, while Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Rajasthan, Odisha and most of the north-east lag far behind. Maharashtra leads on almost every industrial indicator.

The reasons are the location factors of 18.2, working together and reinforcing one another. The advanced states hold the raw materials, the power, the cheap and efficient transport, the labour and the markets. Where these gather, industry grows, and the very growth attracts still more. The backward states lack one or more of these advantages, and so fall further behind — a gap that decades of planning have narrowed only slowly.

One caution about these figures: they are drawn at the state scale, and a state average hides the district beneath it. An ‘industrialised’ state may hold a bare handful of factory towns amid a wide farming countryside, while a ‘backward’ state may have one busy industrial pocket lost in the average. The pattern is real, but it is coarse.

Who Gains From Industrial Concentration? The industrialised state: every new factory joins an existing pool of skills, suppliers and infrastructure, so growth feeds growth. The village left behind: its workers migrate towards the clusters, so it loses labour and gains little industry of its own. Both agree: industry brings jobs and income wherever it settles. What would you need to know to decide? Whether concentrating industry, or spreading it out, yields more jobs and income for the country as a whole.

18.4 Sugar: An Agro-Based Industry

Sugar is India’s second-largest agro-based industry after cotton textiles, and the country is one of the world’s two largest producers of both sugarcane and sugar. India has a long village tradition of making gur (jaggery) and khandsari (raw sugar); the modern mill industry is younger, taking shape in the early twentieth century and expanding fast after it won tariff protection in 1931. Yet the whole geography of the industry flows from a single stubborn fact: cane cannot travel. This section follows that fact through the industry’s location, its spread across India, its slow shift southward and its problems.

18.4.1 Why Sugar Mills Sit in the Cane Fields

Sugarcane is a weight-losing raw material of the most demanding kind. It not only sheds most of its weight in milling; it also spoils quickly, losing sucrose from the moment it is cut. A mill must therefore reach the cane while it is fresh, which means the mill goes to the fields rather than the fields to the mill.

Worked Case 18.1 — Why the Sugar Mill Goes to the Cane The situation: Sugarcane is weight-losing and perishable — its sucrose begins to fall as soon as it is harvested. The working: About 100 tonnes of cane yield only 10 to 12 tonnes of sugar, so close to nine-tenths of what is carried is water and fibre thrown away in milling. Cane also makes up roughly half the cost of the sugar produced. Hauled far, it both loses sucrose and adds freight, so quality and profit fall together. By bullock cart cane can travel only about 20-25 km before this becomes ruinous; by truck and rail, about 70-75 km. Beyond that, milling on the spot is the only sensible course.

This is why a sugar mill is planted among the cane fields and not in a distant city — the raw material simply cannot afford the journey. It also means the geography of the industry is really the geography of where cane grows well, which decides both its distribution and its drift southward. Because the mill can run only while cane is being harvested, its working year is confined to a crushing season — the few months when fresh cane is available — and it falls silent the rest of the year.

18.4.2 The Distribution of the Industry

Sugar production in India falls into two broad belts. The northern belt runs across the plains, where Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are the old producers, joined by Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat. The peninsular belt, newer and now the stronger, is led by Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, with Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh alongside.

Maharashtra is today the country’s largest producer, and the reason is as much organisational as natural: its cane growing and its mills are knit together in the co-operative sector, so growers and millers share one enterprise. Its mills form a belt from Manmad in the north to Kolhapur in the south, with Ahmednagar the largest centre and Pune, Sangli, Solapur, Satara and Nashik important besides.

Uttar Pradesh, long the leader, now runs second. Its production splits into two districts of its own: the Ganga-Yamuna doab of the west, where Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar and Meerut are the chief producers, and the Tarai belt of the east, around Gorakhpur and Deoria. Farther south, Tamil Nadu, helped by high yields and a long season, has risen to become a major producer, ahead of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

18.4.3 The Southward Shift

For all Uttar Pradesh’s history, the industry has been sliding steadily out of the northern plains and into the peninsula. The reason is climate. The tropical south grows cane that yields more per hectare and carries more sucrose, so its mills enjoy a higher recovery rate — the share of a mill’s crushed cane that emerges as sugar. Southern mills also crush for seven or eight months against the north’s four, and being newer they are better equipped and, in Maharashtra, better run.

The result is a decisive rebalancing. Where northern India once made around nine-tenths of the country’s sugar, it now makes little more than a third, and the peninsula carries the rest. The industry has, in effect, followed its own logic: it goes where the cane is best, and the cane is best in the tropical south.

Southward Shift Of The Sugar Industry The tropical south is warmer → cane there gives a higher yield and richer sucrose → mills recover more sugar and crush for seven to eight months rather than four → new, well-run co-operative mills multiply across the peninsula → and the industry’s centre of gravity slides from the northern plains to the south.

18.4.4 Problems of the Sugar Industry

The industry carries several linked weaknesses. India’s cane yield per hectare is low by world standards, and its recovery rate, around a tenth, is well below the fourteen to sixteen per cent of places like Java. The crushing season is short, so mills and their workers sit idle for much of the year, straining the finances of the whole enterprise. Cane also competes with other crops for land, so its supply — and the industry’s output — swings from year to year.

A peculiarly Indian problem is competition from gur and khandsari. Because these village products pay no excise, they can offer cane growers a better price, and a large share of the country’s cane is drawn away to them, starving the mills of raw material. Alongside this sit high production costs, many small and uneconomic mills, and old machinery, especially in the north.

The remedies point in three directions: better cane — high-yielding, early-maturing, high-sucrose, pest-resistant varieties; a longer working year, by staggering sowing and harvest around a mill so cane arrives over more months; and fuller use of by-products, since bagasse, the crushed cane fibre, can make paper and board, molasses, the residue left after the sugar is taken out, yields alcohol and chemicals, and even press-mud can be worked for wax. Turning waste into revenue is one of the surest ways to bring costs down.

The Mill And The Cane Grower The mill: cane is much of its cost, yet thin recovery leaves slim margins, so a high fixed cane price stings. The cane grower: cane is a whole season’s income, and payment is often delayed, so a fair, prompt price is a livelihood. Both agree: the cane must be cut and crushed quickly and close by, or it loses value for everyone. What would you need to know to decide a fair price? The mill’s true margin and the farmer’s real cost of growing cane.

18.5 Cotton Textiles: An Agro-Based Industry

Cotton textiles form India’s largest agro-based industry and one of its oldest. Hand-woven cotton cloth has been made here for thousands of years; the modern mill industry is far younger. The first modern mill, opened at Fort Gloster near Kolkata in 1818, failed, but the first successful mill began in Mumbai in 1854, and Ahmedabad’s mills followed in the 1860s. The industry survived even the shock of Partition, when much of the raw-cotton land passed to Pakistan, and India remains one of the world’s largest producers of both cotton and cloth. Its geography, though, is the mirror image of sugar’s.

18.5.1 A Pure Raw Material and the Pull of the Market

Where cane is weight-losing, cotton is a pure raw material: it loses almost none of its weight when spun into yarn and woven into cloth, and the slight loss is made up by the sizing added in weaving. Raw cotton and finished cloth therefore cost about the same to carry. Freed from the tyranny of transport, the cotton mill does not have to sit in the fields at all — it can leave them and settle wherever the market, the port and the power are best.

That freedom is why the industry became market-oriented. Three conditions shaped it above all: a vast home market, an abundant supply of raw cotton, and easy import of machinery and mill stores through a port. In its early days almost all raw cotton was routed to Mumbai for export, so the mills grew up there, beside the harbour. A humid climate helped too, since thread snaps in dry air — though artificial humidifiers have since loosened that tie.

Q2. A sugar mill and a cotton mill both live off a farm crop, yet one stays out in the cane fields while the other drifts towards cities and ports — why the difference?

A. Cane is a weight-losing, perishable raw material, so the sugar mill must sit in the fields to reach it fresh. Cotton is a pure raw material — it loses almost no weight in spinning and does not spoil — so the cotton mill is free to leave the fields and settle near its market, port and power instead.

18.5.2 Mills, Powerlooms and Handlooms

Cloth in India is woven in three different sectors, and the balance between them has been transformed. The organised mill sector — large factories that spin and weave under one roof — once wove most of the country’s cloth. The powerloom sector runs machine looms in small, scattered workshops. The handloom sector weaves by hand.

The mill sector’s dominance has collapsed. In 1950-51 it made about four-fifths of India’s cloth; today it makes only a few per cent. Weaving did not disappear, though — it migrated. The powerloom sector, cheaper to set up and run and lightly taxed, now makes the bulk of the country’s cloth and supplies most of the fabric for readymade garments, though many of its looms are old and outdated.

Graph

Fig. 18.5-1 Caption: The mill sector’s share of India’s cloth output has collapsed as powerlooms took over (1950-51 and 2020-21). Brief: A simple two-bar bar graph. X-axis: two years, 1950-51 and 2020-21. Y-axis: ‘share of cloth production (%)’, scaled 0-100. Bars: about 81 per cent in 1950-51 and about 3-4 per cent in 2020-21. Values shown as approximate; source, Government of India textile and handloom data reported for those years.

Fig. 18.5-1 The two bars show the mill sector’s share of cloth output all but vanishing — from about four-fifths in 1950-51 to a few per cent today. What it shows: mills no longer weave most of India’s cloth. What it does not show: that total cloth output collapsed. It did not — the weaving simply shifted to the powerloom and handloom sectors, which now make the bulk of it.

The handloom sector, though it makes a smaller share, matters out of all proportion to its output. It employs several million weavers, needs little capital, and keeps whole villages in work; it also carries the heritage of khadi — hand-spun, hand-woven cloth — and earns valuable exports. For a country with labour to absorb, a sector that gives work to millions on modest investment is worth protecting, whatever its share of the cloth.

18.5.3 The Distribution of the Industry

Cotton mills are found in dozens of towns, but the industry concentrates in a broad zone across western and central India, anchored on Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Solapur, Nagpur and Indore. Maharashtra, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu lead, with West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka important besides.

Maharashtra excels all other states. Mumbai, with its humid air, its port for machinery and long-staple cotton — cotton with longer fibres that spin into finer thread — its black-cotton hinterland, cheap labour and early start, was once so dominant that it was called the ‘Cottonopolis of India’. Much of that lead has since been lost, as mills closed under labour unrest and rising costs, but Pune, Solapur, Nagpur and Kolhapur keep the industry alive in the state.

Gujarat is the second producer, with Ahmedabad its largest centre and Surat — now also a hub of synthetic fabric — beside it. Farther south, Tamil Nadu holds the greatest number of mills, most of them spinning yarn; Coimbatore there is the ‘Manchester of Tamil Nadu’. In the north, Kanpur is the ‘Manchester of Uttar Pradesh’, while Kolkata in West Bengal enjoys a port, coal and a humid climate but lies far from the cotton fields. The spread of the industry away from Mumbai, which began once railways pushed into the peninsula after 1921, is itself a sign of how freely a market-oriented industry can move.

Cotton Textiles At Ahmedabad Factors: nearness to the cotton belt, a humid climate, cheap hydro-power, cheap land and labour, and good rail and road links. The decisive one: cheap land and low living costs, together with a huge market for its low-priced cloth — advantages Mumbai lost as it grew crowded and dear. Move it: raise Ahmedabad’s land and labour costs to Mumbai’s and its edge would fade, since a pure raw material lets a cotton mill locate almost anywhere.

18.6 Iron and Steel: A Mineral-Based Industry

If cotton and sugar draw their raw material from the field, iron and steel draws its from the rock. It is the leading mineral-based industry, and in many ways the leading industry of all, because so much else depends upon it. This section asks why it is called the key industry, why it clings so tightly to its minerals, where its great plants stand in India, and how the huge integrated works differ from the small mini plants.

18.6.1 The Key Industry

Iron and steel is the backbone of industry. Nearly every other industry leans on it: the machines that weave cloth, the tools that build houses, the rails, ships and vehicles that move goods are all made of steel. We rarely handle raw steel ourselves, yet almost everything we use was shaped by it, which is why a country’s whole industrial structure is said to rest on this one industry.

India’s tradition of ironworking is very old — the rust-free iron pillar at Delhi, standing intact after some sixteen centuries, is proof of ancient skill. The modern industry began around 1870 in Bengal, but its real start came in 1907, when the Tata Iron and Steel Company was set up at Jamshedpur. The Indian Iron and Steel Company followed at Burnpur, and the Mysore works at Bhadravati in 1923. The industry then leapt ahead after independence, when the Second Five-Year Plan built the public-sector plants at Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur, with Bokaro to follow. India is today the world’s second-largest producer of crude steel, though its steel use per person remains low.

Q3. Why is iron and steel called the ‘key industry’ when most of us rarely handle a piece of steel in a day?

A. Because almost every other industry depends on it. The machines that weave cloth, the tools that build houses, the rails and trucks that carry goods are all made of steel. We seldom touch raw steel, but nearly everything we use was shaped by it — so a country’s whole industrial structure rests on this single industry.

18.6.2 Locational Factors

Iron and steel is a raw-material-oriented industry, because its raw materials are heavy, bulky and heavily weight-losing. Iron ore, coking coal and limestone all shed most of their bulk before they become metal, so the industry is drawn to the place where these minerals meet, not to the market.

Worked Case 18.2 — What One Tonne of Steel Must Move The situation: Iron and steel is made from heavy, weight-losing minerals — iron ore, coking coal and limestone — none of which becomes metal without shedding much of its bulk. The working: To make one tonne of pig iron — the crude, high-carbon iron tapped from a blast furnace — a plant needs roughly 1.6 tonnes of iron ore, about 0.8 tonnes of coke (and coke itself takes around 1.5 tonnes of coal to make), and about 0.5 tonnes of limestone and dolomite. Add these and several tonnes of raw material must be gathered and burnt down to yield a single tonne of iron. Since the finished metal weighs only a fraction of its inputs, the cheapest place to make it is where those bulky inputs come together.

This is why India’s steel plants stand at the minerals rather than the market. Most sit either near the coalfields, hauling ore in, or near the iron-ore fields, hauling coal in; a very few sit at the rare point where both lie close together; and one, on the coast, imports its coal by sea to make up for the distance. Every plant is tied into the trunk railways that bring the minerals and take the steel away.

Flowchart

Fig. 18.6-1 Caption: In an integrated plant, iron ore, coke and limestone go in at one end and finished steel comes out the other. Nodes: iron ore + coke (from coal) + limestone → blast furnace → molten pig iron (slag drawn off as waste) → steel-making furnace: carbon and impurities removed → molten steel → casting and rolling → finished steel (rails, sheets, bars)

18.6.3 The Major Steel Plants

The country’s steel plants can be read straight off the location principle of 18.6.2. One plant enjoys the ideal, or normative, site where almost all the raw materials lie close together: the Tata plant at Jamshedpur, the oldest and the only one in the private sector, which found its whole supply within easy reach.

Q4. What made Jamshedpur so well suited to India’s oldest steel plant that its raw materials seem to have fallen into place around it?

A. Jamshedpur sits at a rare meeting point. High-grade iron ore lies close by in the Singhbhum-Mayurbhanj belt, coal comes from the nearby Jharia and Raniganj fields, the Subarnarekha and Kharkai rivers give water, and Kolkata’s port and market are within reach. With almost every input near at hand, its transport cost was the lowest possible — an ideal, or ‘normative’, location.

A second group sits on or near the coalfields and brings the ore to them. Durgapur in West Bengal, built with British help, and Bokaro in Jharkhand, built with Soviet help and planned to be the largest, both stand on the coal of the Damodar valley, as does the older Indian Iron and Steel Company works at Burnpur.

A third group does the reverse, sitting near the iron ore and bringing coal in. Rourkela in Odisha, built with German help, draws on the ore of the Sundargarh belt and power from Hirakud; Bhilai in Chhattisgarh, built with Soviet help, works the ore of the Dalli-Rajhara range. Bhadravati in Karnataka — the Visvesvaraya works — is the classic plant far from any coalfield: it once smelted with charcoal and now runs on hydro-electric power from the Sharavati. Salem in Tamil Nadu, using local low-sulphur ore, specialises in stainless and special steel.

Finally comes the exception that proves the rule. Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh is India’s only coastal, shore-based steel plant. Cut off from the coalfields, it imports coking coal by sea and draws high-grade ore from Bailadila in Chhattisgarh, trading a poor position on coal for the advantage of a port. Map 18.2 shows how these plants gather in the eastern and central mineral belt, with only a few outliers in the south and one on the coast.

Map

Map 18.2 Caption: India’s major iron and steel plants. Brief: Outline political map of India showing the full official extent of the country, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with all international boundaries as recognised by the Government of India. Mark and label the major integrated plants: Jamshedpur, Burnpur, Durgapur and Bokaro in the east; Rourkela and Bhilai in the centre; Bhadravati and Salem in the south; and Vishakhapatnam on the east coast. Use one symbol for steel plants, with a key and a scale bar. No part of India is to be shown as disputed or ceded.

18.6.4 Integrated and Mini Steel Plants

All the plants above are integrated plants. An integrated steel plant carries out every stage under one roof, from raw ore through pig iron to finished steel, and because it handles those bulky minerals it must sit near them, run at a large scale, and make mild steel in bulk. Building one is slow and costly.

A mini steel plant works quite differently. Instead of ore it melts down steel scrap and sponge iron — iron reduced from ore without melting — in electric-arc or induction furnaces. Freed from the minerals, it can be small, built quickly and cheaply, and placed near its market or its scrap supply rather than the coalfields. It makes not only mild steel but alloy and stainless steel, and it serves local demand. Its weaknesses are the mirror of its strengths: it depends on a steady supply of scrap and on costly electricity, and it works at a modest scale. After steel-making was opened to private industry in 1991, mini plants spread widely across the country.

A New Steel Plant On Farmland The farmer: the land the plant needs is cultivated ground and a family’s living, lost the moment it is taken. The region: a large plant promises jobs, roads, power and a lift to a backward district. Both agree: the land is finite, and once built over it cannot return to farming. What would you need to know to decide? Whether the jobs and compensation truly outweigh the livelihoods and farmland given up.

18.7 Petrochemicals and Oil Refineries

Petroleum is not only a fuel. Refined and then split into simpler chemicals, it becomes the raw material for a whole family of industries — plastics, synthetic fibres, synthetic rubber, dyes and drugs among them. This section follows that chain, first through the petrochemical industry and then back to the refineries that feed it.

18.7.1 Petrochemicals, Polymers and Synthetic Fibres

Petrochemicals are chemicals derived from petroleum and natural gas. When crude oil is refined, it yields not just fuels but a set of chemical feedstocks — naphtha, ethylene and propylene, the simple building blocks from which the rest are made. From these come synthetic fibres, synthetic rubber, plastics, dyes, drugs, pesticides and fertilizers.

The industry took root in the 1960s. India’s first petrochemical complex came up at Trombay in 1966; the UDEX plant at the Koyali refinery followed in 1969, and the public-sector Indian Petrochemicals Corporation Limited (IPCL) built its great complex at Vadodara. Their location tells its own story: petrochemical plants sit beside oil refineries, because the refinery is where their feedstock is made. The industry is, in effect, tied to its raw material once more — only here the raw material is a stream of chemicals rather than a mineral.

Two large families of product come out of this chain. Polymers, made from ethylene and propylene, are the raw material of the plastics industry; plastic is so versatile and so fast-growing that it is often called a ‘sunrise’ industry — though its cost to the environment is now driving efforts to use less of it. Synthetic fibres, chiefly nylon and polyester, feed the textile industry, and their plants too gather near the refineries that supply them.

Flowchart

Fig. 18.7-1 Caption: A refinery splits crude oil into fuels and into the feedstocks that petrochemical plants build upon. Nodes: crude oil → oil refinery → fuels (petrol, diesel, kerosene, LPG) and feedstocks (naphtha, ethylene, propylene); feedstocks → petrochemical plant → polymers → plastics; and → synthetic fibres → nylon, polyester; and → synthetic rubber; and → dyes, drugs, fertilizers

18.7.2 Oil Refineries

Crude oil, as it comes from the well, is a dirty mixture of little direct use. An oil refinery cleans and separates it into petrol, diesel, kerosene, cooking gas, lubricants and bitumen, and into the feedstocks of 18.7.1. Where a refinery sits depends on how the crude reaches it, and India’s refineries fall into three kinds.

The first kind sits at the oilfield. Digboi in Assam, opened in 1901 and the oldest refinery in the country, refines oil found on the spot, and for half a century it stood alone. The second kind sits at a port, refining crude imported by sea; Mumbai, Vishakhapatnam, Kochi and the vast private refinery at Jamnagar are of this kind. The third kind sits inland, near the market, and is fed crude through a pipeline; Barauni in Bihar and the Gujarat refinery at Koyali belong here, along with Haldia near the port of Kolkata.

From a single refinery for fifty years, India has grown to more than twenty, most in the public sector — run largely by the Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL) and Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL) — with some in private and joint hands. Table 18.1 lists a few of the major ones.

Table 18.1 — Some Major Oil Refineries of India (operator and sector) | Refinery | Operator | Sector | State | |—|—|—|—| | Digboi | IOCL | Public | Assam | | Barauni | IOCL | Public | Bihar | | Haldia | IOCL | Public | West Bengal | | Koyali (Gujarat Refinery) | IOCL | Public | Gujarat | | Mumbai | HPCL | Public | Maharashtra | | Vishakhapatnam | HPCL | Public | Andhra Pradesh | | Jamnagar | Reliance | Private | Gujarat |

Table 18.1 The columns give each refinery’s operator, sector and state. What it shows: most Indian refineries are public-sector, run chiefly by IOCL and HPCL, while the largest — Jamnagar — is private. What it does not show: where the crude comes from. Digboi refines oil found beside it, the coastal refineries import theirs by sea, and the inland ones receive it by pipeline — a difference the location column alone cannot reveal.

Digboi Refinery Factors: crude oil found on the spot in Assam, and — at the time — no pipeline to carry it anywhere else. The decisive one: the oilfield itself; before pipelines existed, crude had to be refined where it was found. Move it: once pipelines could carry crude across the country, new refineries no longer had to sit at the oilfield — they could rise at ports and near markets instead.

18.8 The Tourism Industry

Not every industry has a chimney. Tourism makes no goods you can carry away, yet it ranks among the largest industries in the world — a reminder that an industry can sell a service just as it can sell a thing. India, rich in both natural beauty and cultural heritage, has an unusual amount to offer the traveller, and tourism has grown into a major earner and employer.

18.8.1 The Growth of Tourism in India

Tourism is travelling away from home for leisure, culture or pilgrimage, together with the whole web of services — transport, lodging, food, guiding — that makes such travel possible. It is a service industry: it produces experiences rather than objects, but around those experiences it builds hotels, airlines, restaurants, craft shops and guiding work that earn income and employ great numbers of people.

Q5. If tourism produces nothing you can hold in your hand, how can it be counted as an ‘industry’ at all?

A. Because an industry need not make a thing — it can provide a service. Tourism supplies experiences, transport, lodging, food and guiding, and in doing so it earns income and foreign exchange and employs millions. Its product is intangible, but the jobs and money it creates are as real as any factory’s.

Tourism has grown quickly, in India as across the world, carried by rising incomes, cheaper and faster travel, more leisure time, and the sheer draw of the country’s sights. Its advantages are wide. It creates work both directly, in hotels and transport, and indirectly, in the crafts and food trades that grow up around visitors; it earns valuable foreign exchange; it revives local handicrafts; and it can carry development, and money for conservation, into remote and scenic corners that little else would reach.

The movement of visitors from where they live to where they travel is called tourist flows, and in India these flows are strongly seasonal — hill stations fill in the summer, beaches and deserts in the cool winter — and they crowd upon a handful of famous places. Those places fall into two families, natural and cultural, set out in Map 18.3: the mountains, beaches, backwaters, deserts and wildlife parks on one hand, and the monuments, temples, forts and pilgrim cities on the other.

Map

Map 18.3 Caption: Some major natural and cultural tourist areas of India. Brief: Outline political map of India showing the full official extent of the country, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, with all international boundaries as recognised by the Government of India. Mark natural attractions with one symbol — the Himalayan hill areas (Shimla, Manali, Darjeeling), the Nilgiris, the beaches of Goa, the backwaters of Kerala, the Thar in Rajasthan, Ladakh, the Andaman Islands, and wildlife parks (Kaziranga, Gir, Sundarbans, Ranthambore). Mark cultural attractions with a second symbol — the Taj Mahal at Agra, Jaipur, Udaipur and Jaisalmer, Varanasi, Khajuraho, Konark, Hampi, the Ajanta and Ellora caves, and Mahabalipuram. Include a key separating natural and cultural sites and a scale bar. No part of India is to be shown as disputed or ceded.

18.8.2 Impacts and the Case for Eco-Tourism

Tourism’s gains — income, jobs and foreign exchange — are real, but they come with costs, and the costs fall hardest on the very places that draw the visitors. The environmental damage is the sharpest: crowds strain fragile mountains, coasts and wildlife parks, leaving litter, drinking water shortages and unchecked construction in their wake. There are cultural costs too, as living traditions harden into performances for sale, and economic ones, since a place that leans too heavily on a single season, or lets outside operators pocket most of the earnings, is left exposed.

Tourism In A Hill Town The shopkeeper: visitors bring custom, jobs and cash into a place with few other livelihoods. The long-time resident: crowds strain the water, the roads and the quiet, and prices rise for everyone. Both agree: the town’s beauty is what draws the visitors — and what the crowds can spoil. What would you need to know to decide how many visitors are too many? The town’s carrying capacity — the numbers its water, roads and land can bear without damage.

The answer most often proposed is eco-tourism — travel to natural places that is deliberately kept low in impact, small in scale, and shared in its benefits with the local community. Its central idea is respecting a place’s carrying capacity, the number of visitors its land, water and ecosystems can bear without being degraded. In practice this means capping visitor numbers in fragile zones, managing waste, and drawing local people into the trade through homestays and guiding, so that those who bear the crowds also share the rewards. Done this way, tourism can protect the beauty it depends on rather than wearing it away.

18.9 Summary

  1. Manufacturing adds value by processing raw materials into more usable, costlier goods, which is why a country’s industrial strength is read as a measure of its economic strength.

  2. Industries are classified by the source of their raw material (agro-, mineral-, forest- and pastoral-based), by the role of their output (basic or key versus consumer), by ownership (public, private or joint) and by size — but these categories overlap, so one factory sits on several at once.

  3. A key industry is one that many others depend upon, iron and steel above all; a footloose industry, carrying only light materials, can be set up almost anywhere.

  4. A factory settles where the competing pulls of raw material, power, labour, transport and market come to balance; for most of history the geographical pulls decided the site.

  5. A weight-losing raw material drags the industry to its source, while a pure raw material frees it to seek the market instead.

  6. Non-geographical factors — capital, government policy, industrial inertia, banking and political stability — increasingly override geography, so a modern factory’s site can no longer be read off a map of raw materials alone.

  7. Industry clusters where several favourable factors coincide, and the strength of a cluster is measured best by its average daily factory employment.

  8. Clusters are graded as major industrial regions (a daily workforce of 1.5 lakh or more), minor regions (25,000 or more) and manufacturing districts (fewer than 25,000).

  9. India has seven major industrial regions — Mumbai-Pune, Hooghly, Bengaluru-Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Chota Nagpur, Vishakhapatnam-Guntur and Gurgaon-Delhi-Meerut — each built by a different mix of minerals, ports, crops, power and market.

  10. Industry is spread unevenly, leaving a few advanced states and many backward ones; but state averages hide the busy pocket or empty countryside within each.

  11. Sugarcane is weight-losing and perishable — about 100 tonnes of cane yield only 10 to 12 tonnes of sugar — so sugar mills are planted in the cane fields.

  12. The sugar industry runs in two belts, the northern plains led by Uttar Pradesh and the peninsula led by Maharashtra’s co-operatives, and it is shifting south, where tropical cane gives higher yield, richer sucrose and a longer crushing season.

  13. Its problems — low yield and recovery, a short crushing season, competition from gur and khandsari, and high costs — are eased by better cane varieties and by turning by-products such as bagasse and molasses into revenue.

  14. Cotton is a pure raw material, so the cotton mill leaves the fields and becomes market-oriented; cloth is woven in mill, powerloom and handloom sectors, and the mill sector’s share has collapsed as powerlooms took over, though handlooms still employ millions.

  15. Iron and steel is the key industry and is raw-material oriented, because making one tonne of pig iron needs several tonnes of ore, coke and limestone; its plants sit near coal, near ore, at the ideal meeting point of Jamshedpur, or on the coast at Vishakhapatnam.

  16. Integrated plants carry ore through to steel near the minerals, while mini plants melt scrap and sponge iron near the market.

  17. Petrochemicals, drawn from petroleum, yield polymers, plastics, synthetic fibres and rubber, and their plants sit beside refineries; refineries themselves stand at the oilfield, at ports for imported crude, or inland by pipeline near the market.

  18. Tourism is a service industry, earning income, jobs and foreign exchange without making any physical good; it draws on India’s natural and cultural attractions, but its environmental and cultural costs make eco-tourism, respecting carrying capacity and sharing gains with local people, the proposed remedy.

Flowchart

Fig. 18.9-1 Caption: The whole chapter as one decision — the weight of the raw material decides where an industry sits, until other forces step in. Nodes: A new industry → is its raw material heavy and weight-losing? yes → locate at the raw material (sugar at the cane; iron and steel at coal and ore); no, it is pure or light → free to locate at the market, port or power (cotton textiles; footloose industries) → then non-geographical forces can override — capital, government policy, industrial inertia → where favourable factors coincide, industry clusters → clusters grow into India’s major industrial regions

What This Chapter Cannot Tell You

A national or state figure — a production share, a count of factories — hides the district and the town inside it, where the real crowding or emptiness lies. The location ‘rules’ describe strong tendencies, not certainties: inertia, a government’s decision or plain historical accident can plant an industry where geography never called for one. And the shares and rankings are snapshots of a moving picture — the sugar belt drifts south, the mill sector shrinks, and today’s leading state need not be tomorrow’s.

18.10 Key Terms

  1. Agro-based industries — industries that draw their raw material from agriculture, such as cotton textiles and sugar.

  2. Basic (key) industry — an industry whose products many other industries depend on, such as iron and steel.

  3. Capital-intensive industry — an industry that needs heavy investment, with capital mattering more than labour.

  4. Carrying capacity — the number of visitors a place can bear without its land, water and ecosystems being damaged.

  5. Consumer industries — industries whose products reach the household directly, such as cloth, bread and soap.

  6. Crushing season — the few months of the year when a sugar mill runs, set by the cane harvest.

  7. Eco-tourism — low-impact travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and shares its benefits with local people.

  8. Footloose industry — an industry tied to no single factor, so it can locate over a wide range of places.

  9. Forest-based industries — industries that use forest produce, such as paper, lac and resin.

  10. Handloom — cloth woven by hand, and the sector of hand weavers that produces it.

  11. Hinterland — the inland area that a port serves and draws its trade from.

  12. Industrial cluster — a pocket with a high concentration of industry.

  13. Industrial inertia — the tendency of an industry to stay at its original site even after the reason for being there has vanished.

  14. Integrated steel plant — a large plant that carries out every stage, from raw ore to finished steel, under one roof.

  15. Labour-intensive industry — an industry in which labour matters more than capital and a large workforce is needed.

  16. Major industrial region — a cluster with an average daily factory workforce of at least 1.5 lakh (150,000).

  17. Manufacturing — the processing of raw or primary materials into more refined and usable goods.

  18. Manufacturing district — a small cluster with a daily factory workforce of fewer than 25,000.

  19. Mill sector — the organised factories that spin and weave cloth under one roof.

  20. Mineral-based industries — industries that draw their raw material from minerals, such as iron and steel and cement.

  21. Mini steel plant — a small plant that makes steel by melting scrap and sponge iron, usually near its market.

  22. Minor industrial region — a cluster with an average daily factory workforce of at least 25,000.

  23. Oil refinery — a plant that cleans and separates crude oil into fuels and chemical feedstocks.

  24. Petrochemicals — chemicals derived from petroleum and natural gas, used to make plastics, fibres and much else.

  25. Pig iron — the crude, high-carbon iron tapped from a blast furnace before it is refined into steel.

  26. Polymers — long-chain compounds made from ethylene and propylene that form the raw material of plastics.

  27. Powerloom — a machine loom, and the decentralised sector of small workshops that now weaves most of India’s cloth.

  28. Pure raw material — a raw material that keeps almost all its weight through processing, freeing the industry to locate near its market.

  29. Recovery rate — the share of a sugar mill’s crushed cane that emerges as sugar.

  30. Synthetic fibres — man-made fibres such as nylon and polyester, spun from petrochemical feedstocks.

  31. Tourism — travel away from home for leisure, culture or pilgrimage, together with the services that support it.

  32. Tourist flows — the movement of visitors from where they live to where they travel.

  33. Value addition — the rise in a material’s worth as processing turns it into a more finished good.

  34. Weight-losing raw material — a raw material that sheds much of its weight in manufacture, pulling the industry to its source.

18.11 Points to Ponder

  1. Pipelines now carry crude oil across the country, and power lines carry electricity for hundreds of kilometres. If the pulls of raw material and power keep weakening this way, will any industry still be ‘raw-material oriented’ a century from now — or will nearly all of them drift towards the market?

  2. An industry can be perfectly placed in 1900 and badly placed by 2000, yet refuse to move. Is industrial inertia a failure to adapt, or a sensible unwillingness to abandon the skills, suppliers and reputation that have piled up around a place?

  3. Maharashtra overtook Uttar Pradesh in sugar through co-operative organisation as much as through tropical climate. When an industry shifts from one region to another, how would you tell whether nature or human arrangement did the moving?

  4. Industry clusters where advantages already exist, so growth tends to feed growth and the gap between advanced and backward states widens. Can a country narrow that gap without planting factories in places geography never chose — and what might that cost?

  5. The mill sector’s share of cloth output has collapsed, yet India weaves more cloth than ever. Is an industry that sheds its factories but keeps its output an industry in decline, or one being transformed?

  6. Tourism sells the beauty of a place, yet the crowds it draws can wear that beauty away. Can an industry survive in the long run if its own success consumes the very thing it depends on?

18.12 Objective Questions

  1. Which one of the following is a footloose industry? [1 mark]
    1. Iron and steel
    2. Sugar
    3. Electronics
    4. Cement
  2. Sugar mills are set up in the cane-growing areas mainly because sugarcane is: [1 mark]
    1. a pure raw material
    2. weight-losing and perishable
    3. light and cheap to carry
    4. mostly imported
  3. The industrial region known as the ‘Ruhr of India’ is: [1 mark]
    1. Mumbai-Pune
    2. Hooghly
    3. Chota Nagpur
    4. Gujarat
  4. India’s only coastal, shore-based integrated steel plant is at: [1 mark]
    1. Bhilai
    2. Rourkela
    3. Durgapur
    4. Vishakhapatnam
  5. For the following two statements, choose the correct option. [1 mark] Assertion (A): A cotton mill can be set up at a distance from the cotton fields. Reason (R): Cotton is a pure raw material and loses very little weight in manufacture.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true.
  6. For the following two statements, choose the correct option. [1 mark] Assertion (A): Iron and steel is called the key industry. Reason (R): The iron and steel industry uses heavy, weight-losing raw materials.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true.
  7. Match each nickname in Column A with the place it refers to in Column B. [1 mark]
Column A Column B
a. Cottonopolis of India i. Kanpur
b. Manchester of Tamil Nadu ii. Mumbai
c. Ruhr of India iii. Chota Nagpur
d. Manchester of Uttar Pradesh iv. Coimbatore

  1. Fill in the blank: The share of a sugar mill’s crushed cane that emerges as sugar is called its ______. [1 mark]

  2. State whether the following statement is true or false: Today the organised mill sector weaves most of India’s cloth. [1 mark]

18.13 Check Your Concepts

  1. Define a pure raw material and give one example. [2 marks]

  2. Name any four of India’s major industrial regions. [2 marks]

  3. State any two indices used to identify an industrial cluster. [2 marks]

  4. Differentiate between a key industry and a footloose industry. [3 marks]

  5. Differentiate between an integrated steel plant and a mini steel plant. [3 marks]

  6. Give three reasons why the sugar industry is shifting from northern India to the peninsula. [3 marks]

  7. Explain, with an example, why sugar mills are located in the cane-growing areas. [4 marks]

  8. ‘Cotton textile, once tied to raw cotton, is now largely market-oriented.’ Explain this claim with examples. [4 marks]

  9. Describe the locational factors that made Jamshedpur an ideal site for an integrated iron and steel plant. [4 marks]

  10. Describe the distribution of the iron and steel industry in India, and explain how the sources of raw material have shaped where its major plants stand. [6 marks]

  11. Discuss the main problems faced by the sugar industry in India, and suggest measures to overcome them. [6 marks]

  12. ‘Large industrial projects bring development to a region but can also displace people and strain the environment.’ Discuss this claim with reference to Indian examples, weighing the arguments on both sides. [6 marks]

18.14 Map, Diagram & Data Interpretation

  1. On the outline map of India provided, mark and label each of the following: [5 marks]

    1. the Chota Nagpur industrial region;
    2. the Mumbai-Pune industrial region;
    3. the iron and steel plant at Bhilai;
    4. the coastal iron and steel plant at Vishakhapatnam;
    5. the oldest oil refinery of India.

  2. A steel plant produces 500 tonnes of pig iron in a day. Using the figure given in the chapter that one tonne of pig iron needs about 1.6 tonnes of iron ore, calculate the iron ore required, showing your working. [3 marks]

  3. Study Fig. 18.5-1. (a) Describe how the mill sector’s share of cloth production changed between 1950-51 and 2020-21. (b) State one thing this graph does not tell you about India’s cloth industry. [3 marks]

  4. Study Table 18.1. (a) Name one oil refinery in the private sector and one in the public sector. (b) The table gives each refinery’s state but not where its crude oil comes from. Explain how crude reaches Digboi and how it reaches a coastal refinery such as Mumbai. [4 marks]

  5. With reference to the ‘locational pulls’ diagram (Fig. 18.2-1), explain why a sugar mill and a soft-drink bottling plant tend to settle in different kinds of place. [3 marks]