BharatNotes Deindustrialisation
nounUsage in a UPSC answer
The premature deindustrialisation of several developing economies, where the manufacturing share peaks at far lower income levels than it did for the early industrialisers, poses a formidable challenge to India's aspiration of using a labour-absorbing factory sector to lift millions out of agrarian underemployment.
Synonyms
Antonyms
Word Family
deindustrialise (v), deindustrialised (adj), deindustrialising (v pres.p), deindustrial (adj)
Root
Latin de- = reversal + industria = diligence, activity + -alisation = process suffix
Etymology
English, from de- (reversal prefix, Latin) + industrialisation (from Latin industria, "diligence, activity").
Memory Hook
Break it as DE- (undo) + INDUSTRIAL + -ISATION: literally "the un-doing of industry" — picture factory chimneys going cold and silent as the smokestacks come down.
How This Word Works in UPSC Writing
The destruction of existing industrial capacity, and the colonial case rests on a mechanism worth stating precisely. Indian handloom textiles, long the world's leading export, met first prohibitive duties in the British market and then, once mechanised production made British cloth cheaper, unrestricted competition within the Indian market itself, since India was in no position to levy protective tariffs. Weavers displaced from their craft had nowhere to go but the land, so the share of the population dependent on agriculture rose, a reversal of the normal development sequence that the nationalist economists called the ruralisation of India. The debate remains open, with nationalist and Marxist historians treating deindustrialisation as established while others hold the evidence for its scale to be weaker than claimed. Note the different modern sense, in which premature deindustrialisation means manufacturing peaking at a low income level, which is the sense the sentence above uses.
Don’t Confuse It With
Deindustrialisation in the colonial sense is the destruction of an existing handicraft industry, whereas in modern development economics it means the falling share of manufacturing in an economy, and premature deindustrialisation is that decline setting in at a low income level. Drain of wealth is the separate argument that resources were transferred without equivalent return. Commercialisation of agriculture is the parallel process by which cultivation shifted towards cash crops for export.
Hindi Meaning
विऔद्योगीकरण (vi-audyogīkaran) or औद्योगिक ह्रास.
Common Questions
- How did colonial policy deindustrialise India?
- Indian textiles faced prohibitive duties in Britain and then unrestricted competition from cheaper machine-made cloth at home, since India could not levy protective tariffs, and displaced weavers fell back on agriculture.
- What does premature deindustrialisation mean today?
- That manufacturing's share of an economy begins to fall at a much lower income level than it did for the early industrialisers, cutting short the labour-absorbing factory phase.
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