Manufacturing Industries: Class 10 Geography · Chapter 6

It is the first week of June and school reopens soon. Your family goes shopping: a geometry box, a steel water bottle, two school shirts, a dozen notebooks and, from a potter by the roadside, a clay gullak for saving coins. Every item in the bag began as something rough, such as iron ore, cotton bolls, wood pulp, crude oil or river clay. Somebody changed it into a thing worth buying. Some of these goods came off the lines of huge factories, some from a workshop with ten workers, and the gullak was shaped by one family at home.

Changing raw materials into goods of higher value, in large numbers, is called manufacturing (विनिर्माण). Sand and soda ash are melted into glass bottles. Milk is curdled and pressed into paneer at a dairy plant. Raw cotton is spun, woven and stitched into the shirt you are wearing. In each case the product is worth far more than the materials that went into it. Sometimes one factory's product is another factory's raw material: yarn from a spinning mill is the input of a weaving mill.

Economists sort work into three sectors. Farmers, fishers and miners work in the primary sector, taking things from nature. People who turn those things into finished goods belong to the secondary sector (द्वितीयक क्षेत्रक): the welder in a bicycle factory in Ludhiana, the baker in a biscuit unit, the operator at a cement kiln. Teachers, drivers and bank clerks provide services, which is the tertiary sector. This chapter is about the middle group, the manufacturing industries. How far a country's manufacturing has developed is often taken as a measure of its economic strength.

6.1 Importance of manufacturing

Why do planners call manufacturing the backbone of development, and of economic development above all? Four reasons stand out.

1. It lifts farming and offers other work. Factories make the tractors, pumps and fertilisers that modernise agriculture. They also create jobs in factories, shops and offices, so fewer families have to live on farm income alone.
2. It fights unemployment and poverty. Joblessness and poverty cannot be removed without industrial growth. After Independence, planners set up public-sector and joint-sector industries largely to create jobs and lift people out of poverty. They placed some plants in tribal and backward areas on purpose, so that poorer regions could catch up with richer ones.
3. It earns foreign exchange. Selling manufactured goods abroad widens trade and brings in the foreign currency that India needs to pay for its imports.
4. It makes nations prosperous. Selling iron ore abroad earns far less than selling the cars made from it. The richest countries are mostly those that turn their raw materials into a wide range of costly finished goods, so India gains by expanding and diversifying its factories fast.

Farms and factories are partners, not rivals. A sugar mill cannot run without cane, a cotton mill without raw cotton, or an oil mill without groundnut and mustard seed. In return, factories supply farmers with tractors and threshers, diesel pumps for irrigation, drip pipes, sprays and fertiliser. Such agro-based industries have raised farm output and made farm work faster and less wasteful (Fig. 6.1).

Walk into a shop today and a pressure cooker made in India may sit beside one made abroad. The buyer will pick whichever is better value. So making enough for ourselves is no longer the whole target. Indian goods must match the best in the world in quality and price, both at home and in export markets. That means our industries must keep becoming more efficient and competitive.

6.2 Classification of industries

Your class can be sorted in many ways: by height, by house team, or by the bus each student takes home. Industries too can be grouped by asking different questions, and each grouping tells us something useful (Fig. 6.2). Before reading on, list ten manufactured things you used this week, from an LED bulb to a bottle of cooking oil. Keep the list; you will sort it.

By source of raw material. Agro-based industries (कृषि आधारित उद्योग) process farm products: sugar, tea, coffee, edible oil, rubber, and cotton, woollen, jute and silk textiles. Mineral-based industries (खनिज आधारित उद्योग) process minerals and metals: cement, aluminium, iron and steel, petrochemicals and machine tools.

By main role. A basic or key industry makes products that other industries use as raw materials. Steel from a steel plant becomes car bodies, rails and pressure cookers in other factories; copper and aluminium smelting are basic industries too. A consumer industry makes things that people buy and use directly, such as toothpaste, biscuits, soap, ceiling fans and sewing machines.

By capital investment. An industry counts as small scale when the money invested in its assets stays below a ceiling fixed by the government. That ceiling is revised from time to time; your textbook gives it as one crore rupees.

By ownership. Who owns the factory and takes its profit or loss? Public-sector units belong to government agencies and private-sector units to individuals or companies. In the joint sector the government and private owners run a unit together. In the cooperative sector (सहकारी क्षेत्र) the farmers who supply the raw material, the workers, or both, own the unit; they pool their money and share profits or losses in proportion (Table 6.2).

By bulk and weight. Heavy industries handle heavy raw materials and turn out heavy goods; iron and steel is the standard example. Light industries use light materials and make light products, as the electrical goods industry does. Weight matters because it decides transport costs, as you will see for sugar and steel.

6.3 Agro-based industries

Sugar, edible oil, and cotton, jute, silk and woollen textiles all begin on a farm, an orchard or a sheep pasture. This section looks closely at three of them: cotton textiles, jute textiles and sugar.

6.3.1 Textile industry

Follow a cotton shirt backwards and you pass through every stage of a long value chain (मूल्य श्रृंखला): stitching, dyeing, weaving, spinning and, at the start, a farmer's field. In India all of these stages happen at home, and your textbook stresses that textiles are the only industry in the country that is self-reliant along the whole chain (Fig. 6.3). That is one reason the industry holds a special place in our economy. It also adds a large share to industrial output, gives work to millions and earns foreign exchange through exports.

6.3.2 Cotton textiles

Long before factories, Indian weavers were famous across the world for cloth that was spun and woven entirely by hand. Machines changed that. Power looms spread after the eighteenth century, and under colonial rule cheap mill-made cloth from England flooded Indian markets. Village spinners and weavers could not match its price, and many lost their living.

In the early years the mills clustered where cotton grew, in Gujarat and Maharashtra. That was no accident. Raw cotton grew close by and buyers were near. Railways and ports such as Mumbai moved cotton in and cloth out, and workers were easy to find. Even the damp coastal air helped, because cotton thread snaps less often when the air is moist.

Count the people who earn from one cotton shirt. Farmers grow the cotton and pickers pluck the bolls. Then come the workers in ginning (separating the seeds from the fibre), spinning, weaving, dyeing, designing, packing and tailoring. The mills also buy machine parts, packing material, dyes and chemicals, so their demand keeps those industries busy too.

Now look at where each stage happens (Fig. 6.4). Spinning, the twisting of fibre into yarn, needs big, costly machines, so it is done in large mills concentrated in Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Maharashtra. India's spinning is among the best in the world. Weaving is a different story. Handlooms and power looms are scattered across thousands of towns and villages, alongside the looms of the big mills. This spread keeps local skills and designs alive, from zari borders to embroidered silk. The drawback is quality: much of the cloth woven this way is coarse, so a good part of our fine yarn cannot be used at home. Hand-spun, hand-woven khadi gives work to many weavers in their own homes; it is a cottage industry.

6.3.3 Jute textiles

Jute, the golden fibre, becomes sacks, ropes, carpet backing and shopping bags. Your textbook notes that India is the world's largest producer of raw jute and of jute goods, and the second-largest exporter of jute goods after Bangladesh. Most jute mills stand in West Bengal, packed into a narrow belt that lines the Hugli river on both sides.

Why did so many mills crowd into one riverside strip? Step through Fig. 6.5 and count the advantages.

• Raw jute nearby: the jute fields of West Bengal and its neighbours are close at hand.
• Cheap water transport: boats on the Hugli carry heavy bales cheaply, and there are rail and road links as well.
• Plenty of water: raw jute must be soaked and washed during processing.
• Cheap labour: workers come from West Bengal and from neighbouring Odisha, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
• Kolkata: the big city provides banking, insurance and a port for exporting jute goods.

6.3.4 Sugar industry

Your textbook ranks India second in the world in sugar production and first in making gur and khandsari, the traditional unrefined sweeteners. Sugarcane is bulky, and once it is cut it starts losing its sucrose, the sugar stored in the stalk. The longer it travels or waits, the less sugar a mill can get out of it. So sugar mills are built right among the cane fields (Fig. 6.6).

Sugar mills are spread over the cane belts of the north (Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Bihar), the west (Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh) and the south (Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh). Uttar Pradesh and Bihar together have sixty per cent of the mills, says the textbook. The industry is seasonal: a mill crushes cane only during the months after the harvest.

In recent years more and more mills have come up in the south and west of the country, Maharashtra above all. The comparison below gives the three reasons.

6.4 Mineral-based industries: iron, steel and aluminium

When the raw material is a mineral or a metal, the industry is mineral-based. Before reading on, try to name five such industries. Steel probably came first to mind, but cement, aluminium, glass and petrochemicals belong here too. We begin with the two big metal industries.

6.4.1 Iron and steel industry

Every other industry, whether heavy, medium or light, runs on machines, and machines are made of steel. That is why iron and steel is called the basic industry. Walk through a railway station, a hospital or a kitchen and you will find steel in rails, girders, scalpels, gas cylinders and cooking vessels. Armies, telecom towers and laboratories depend on it too.

Steel is so central that a country's development is often judged by how much steel it makes and uses. Making it is a heavy, bulky business (Fig. 6.7). For roughly every 4 parts of iron ore, a plant needs 2 parts of coking coal and 1 part of limestone. It also needs a little manganese, which makes the steel harder. Hauling such loads is expensive. The finished steel is just as heavy to send to buyers, so a plant needs good transport links at both ends.

The Chhotanagpur plateau has more iron and steel plants than any other region of India, because it enjoys several advantages at once. Rich iron ore and coking coal are mined a short distance from each other, so bringing in the ore costs little. Workers are available at low wages. And the home market for steel is huge and still growing fast, so the plants can sell what they make.

6.4.2 Aluminium smelting

Why has aluminium become so popular? Lift an aluminium pressure cooker and you feel the first reason: it is light. It also resists rust, carries heat well, can be hammered and rolled into thin sheets and foil, and becomes strong when alloyed with other metals. So it is used for aircraft bodies, cooking utensils and power cables, and many industries now use it in place of steel, copper, zinc and lead. No wonder aluminium smelting (प्रगलन) ranks second only to iron and steel among India's metal industries.

Smelting uses enormous amounts of power, so the first thing a smelter needs is a regular, reliable supply of electricity. The second is a raw material supply it can count on at low cost. That raw material comes from bauxite, a bulky, dark reddish rock (Fig. 6.8). India's smelters are in Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Maharashtra, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

6.5 Chemical, fertiliser and cement industries

Your textbook lists these with the mineral-based industries too. All three turn rocks, salts, oil or gas into products that farms, builders and other factories depend on.

6.5.1 Chemical industries

From the soap in your bathroom to the fertiliser on a farm, chemicals are everywhere, and the industry that makes them is one of India's fastest-growing. Big plants and small units both take part. Its products fall into two branches, inorganic and organic, and both are expanding quickly (see the comparison).

Here is a surprise: the biggest buyer of chemicals is the chemical industry itself. A plant making sulphuric acid or caustic soda sells much of its output to other chemical plants, which turn it into new chemicals. Only then do the products reach factories, farms and shops (Fig. 6.9).

6.5.2 Fertiliser industry

Fertiliser plants make three main kinds of plant food. Nitrogenous fertilisers, chiefly urea, supply nitrogen (N). Phosphatic fertilisers and diammonium phosphate (DAP) supply phosphate (P). Complex fertilisers combine nitrogen, phosphate and potash (K) in one bag. Potash is the odd one out: India has no potash deposits worth mining, so all of it is imported.

The industry spread to many more states after the Green Revolution, when high-yielding seeds created a huge demand for fertiliser. According to the textbook, about half of India's fertiliser comes from just five states: Kerala, Punjab, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Assam, Bihar, Delhi, Goa, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh also produce significant amounts.

6.5.3 Cement industry

Every dam, flyover, airport runway, factory shed and new house needs cement. Making it takes heavy, bulky raw materials such as limestone, silica and gypsum, plus coal and electric power for the kilns, and railways to move everything in and out. Some plants in Gujarat are placed so that they can ship cement to markets in the Gulf countries.

6.6 Automobile, IT and electronics industries

6.6.1 Automobile industry

Before 1991 an Indian family wanting a car had only a few models to choose from. After the economy was liberalised that year, new and modern models arrived and buyers rushed to them. The industry boomed, above all in passenger cars and two- and three-wheelers. Today India builds every kind of road vehicle that moves people and goods quickly: motorcycles, scooters, three-wheelers, cars, multi-utility vehicles, buses and trucks. The main centres, in alphabetical order, are around Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Indore, Jamshedpur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai and Pune.

A car plant is really a giant assembly hall that depends on dozens of other industries (Fig. 6.10).

6.6.2 Information technology and electronics industry

The radar at an airport, the exchange that connects your phone calls, the mobile tower outside your school, the television at home and the computer in the lab: all are electronic products. The electronics industry also supplies much of what the telecommunication industry needs. Bengaluru is known as India's electronic capital. Electronic goods are also made in large numbers in Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai and Pune.

Why does the IT industry matter so much? Above all because of the jobs it has created, many of them for young graduates. Its future depends on growth in both hardware, the machines, and software, the programs that run on them. The industry is concentrated mainly in six cities: Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Noida and Pune. Software Technology Parks across the country give such firms ready buildings and fast data links (Table 6.7).

6.7 Industrial pollution and environmental degradation

Industries have done a great deal for India's growth, but they have also fouled our land, water and air and filled our towns with noise. They cause four kinds of pollution: of the air, of water, of land and by noise (Fig. 6.12). Thermal power plants are among the polluters too.

Stand near a brick kiln or a smelter and you can see and smell air pollution. Two kinds of pollutant are involved. One is harmful gases, such as sulphur dioxide ($\mathrm{S}\mathrm{O}{\phantom{X}}_2$) and carbon monoxide ($\mathrm{C}\mathrm{O}$), present in large amounts. The other is particulate matter: specks of dust and smoke, and tiny droplets of spray and mist, floating in the air. Refineries, smelters, paper and chemical factories and brick kilns all release smoke, as does any factory that burns fossil fuels while ignoring pollution rules. The damage is wide: people and animals fall ill, plants suffer, buildings decay and the whole atmosphere is affected.

Follow a polluted river upstream and you will often find a factory outlet. Tanneries, electroplating units, refineries, textile and dyeing units, chemical works and paper and pulp mills are the worst offenders. Their effluents (बहिःस्राव) carry both organic and inorganic wastes into the water: acids, salts, detergents and dyes; heavy metals such as mercury and lead; and pesticides, fertilisers, plastics and rubber. This is water pollution. On land, the biggest heaps of industrial solid waste are fly ash from power plants, slag from iron and steel plants and phosphogypsum from fertiliser plants.

Thermal pollution (तापीय प्रदूषण) of water happens when factories and thermal power plants drain hot water into rivers and ponds without cooling it first.

Land pollution and water pollution are two sides of one problem. When factories dump garbage, salts, packing waste, glass, effluents and harmful chemicals on land, the soil becomes useless for farming. Rain then seeps through the dump and carries the poisons down until the groundwater, too, is contaminated. Radioactive waste is the most dangerous of all: waste from nuclear power plants and from nuclear and weapons facilities can cause miscarriages, birth defects and cancers.

Next to a stone-cutting unit or a building site, you may have to shout to be heard. Pneumatic and electric drills, saws, generators, factory machines and construction work fill the air with noise pollution. It is more than an annoyance: unwanted sound causes stress, irritation and anger, and long exposure can raise heart rate and blood pressure and damage hearing.

6.8 Control of environmental degradation

According to the textbook, every litre of waste water that industry discharges pollutes about eight times as much fresh water. So the cheapest clean-up starts inside the factory. For water, three steps help.

1. Use less water. Reuse and recycle the same water through two or more stages of processing.
2. Harvest rainwater to meet part of the factory's water needs.
3. Treat before release. Cool hot water and treat effluents before they reach rivers and ponds.

Effluent treatment has three phases (Fig. 6.13). The first, primary treatment, is mechanical: screening out solids, grinding, flocculation (making fine particles clump together) and sedimentation (letting them settle). Secondary treatment is biological: microbes break down the dissolved organic matter. Tertiary treatment uses biological, chemical and physical methods to clean the water further, so that it can be recycled.

Where groundwater is already under threat, the law also needs to stop industries from pumping out too much of it. Air and noise pollution have their own fixes (Table 6.8).

In the end, the challenge is sustainable development (सतत पोषणीय विकास): growing the economy and protecting the environment together, not one at the cost of the other.