Change and Development in Industrial Society

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: GS1 asks about the social effects of work (IT hubs and their new problems, the gig economy and women, labour migration) and GS3 about informalisation and labour reform. This chapter supplies the sociology behind both: why most Indian work is informal, why government jobs are prized, how factory and office work is controlled, why mining and home-based work are hazardous and poorly paid, and what a strike costs. Mains has asked how globalisation reduced formal employment, whether informalisation harms the economy, and what the four Labour Codes achieve. The 2026-27 reprint keeps the chapter's argument but drops most of its boxes (listed below).

Contemporary hook: Two of NCERT's themes, informal work and the regulation of working conditions, changed in law in 2025-26. The four Labour Codes, consolidating 29 labour laws and including the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code that NCERT says now covers the Mines Act, came into force on 21 November 2025 (PIB). The final Code on Wages (Central) Rules followed on 8 May 2026 (PRS). Yet the structure NCERT describes persists: in 2025, 56.2 per cent of workers were self-employed and 23.6 per cent were in regular wage or salaried jobs (MoSPI, PLFS 2025).

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

Work is social. Who produces what, who works where and who sells to whom "are not individual choices, but outcomes of social patterns". NCERT opens with Bollywood: stars and mill owners live in Juhu while extras and textile workers live in Girangaon, yet the junior artists' association demands eight-hour shifts and safe conditions like any union. Caste, kinship, gender and region shape how work is organised, and work in turn shapes social relations.

Indian industrialisation is not a copy of the West's. Most Indians still work in agriculture, over 90 per cent of work is informal, few have secure jobs with benefits, and of those who do, two-thirds work for the government. Liberalisation since the 1990s has added privatisation, disinvestment, outsourcing and contract work, making even regular jobs less secure.

Control of work and its costs fall on workers. Managers raise output by lengthening hours or by organising work (Taylorism, assembly lines, just-in-time), and machinery can deskill (Braverman). Unsafe mines, migrant hostels, piece-rate home work and the 1982 Bombay textile strike show how workers bear the costs, and how hard it is to organise against them.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

Thinkers on Industrial Society (NCERT)

India's Work Structure: NCERT (2018-19) and PLFS 2025

NCERT's broad sector shares for 2018-19 (primary 43%, secondary 17%, tertiary 32%) add up to only 92 per cent, so treat them as approximate.

How People Find Jobs (NCERT)

What the 2026-27 Reprint Dropped

Nearly all the boxes: retail chains entering India (2006), the Dyal Singh College and Radisson job advertisements, the South Gujarat brickyards (Breman), the 54 trapped miners at Bhatdih colliery (2006), Madhu the bidi worker and the bidi value pie chart, and the oral histories of the 1982 strike (with the Bombay Industrial Relations Act and the RMMS's strike-breaking). Also cut: the caste-in-the-mills quotation and the Surat migrants figure. Kept: the thinkers, Indian industrialisation, liberalisation and disinvestment, jobbers and contractors, Taylorism, Gandhi on machinery, Ramcharan, Maruti, Braverman, working conditions in mines, home-based work and the bidi chain, and the strike paragraph.

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

Images of Industrial Society

Classical sociology was written when industrialisation was new. Marx, Weber and Durkheim linked industry with urbanisation and with the replacement of face-to-face rural relations by anonymous professional ones. Industry involves a detailed division of labour: people often do not see the end result of their work, which is repetitive and exhausting, "yet, even this is better than having no work at all". Marx called the condition alienation: people do not enjoy work and do it only to survive, and even survival depends on whether technology leaves room for human labour.

Industrialisation brings greater equality in some spheres: caste distinctions do not matter on trains, buses or in cyber cafes. But old discrimination may persist in new workplaces, and income inequality grows even as social inequality falls. The two often overlap, as in the domination of upper-caste men in well-paid professions such as medicine, law or journalism, and women are often paid less than men for similar work. Early sociologists saw industry as both positive and negative; by the mid-twentieth century modernisation theory saw it as inevitable and positive, with every society heading in the same direction and the West as the model. NCERT's activity asks whether Clark Kerr's convergence thesis holds, or whether culture shapes how people adapt to new technology.

The Specificity of Indian Industrialisation

"There is no standard model of industrial capitalism." In developed countries most people work in services, then industry, and fewer than 10 per cent in agriculture (ILO). In India in 2018-19 nearly 43 per cent worked in the primary sector, while services contributed more than half of output, "a very serious situation because it means that the sector where the maximum people are employed is not able to generate much income for them". Over 52 per cent of workers were self-employed, about 24 per cent regular salaried and about 24 per cent casual.

The organised sector, on one definition, consists of units employing ten or more people throughout the year, registered with the government so that workers get proper wages, pensions and benefits. In India "over 90% of the work, whether it is in agriculture, industry or services is in the unorganised or informal sector". NCERT draws three social implications:

1. Few people experience large firms where they meet people from other regions and backgrounds; in small workplaces personal relationships decide pay and jobs, without transparent recruitment or grievance redress.
2. Very few have secure jobs with benefits, and two-thirds of those who do work for the government, which is why people strive for government jobs; the rest depend on their children in old age. Government employment has helped overcome boundaries of caste, religion and region: one sociologist argued that Bhilai has never had communal riots because the public-sector Bhilai Steel Plant employs people from all over India (others may question this).
3. Since few workers are union members, informal workers lack the experience of fighting collectively for wages and safety; laws exist, but in practice workers are "left to the whims and fancies of the employer or contractor".

Industrialisation After Independence and Since Liberalisation

The first modern industries in India were cotton, jute, coal mines and railways. After independence the government took over "the commanding heights of the economy": defence, transport and communication, power, mining and other projects only the state could undertake and private industry needed. In the mixed economy, some sectors were reserved for government; licensing tried to spread industry beyond the old port cities (Madras, Bombay, Calcutta) to centres such as Baroda, Coimbatore, Bengaluru, Pune, Faridabad and Rajkot; and items such as paper and wood products, stationery, glass and ceramics were reserved for the small-scale sector. In 1991 large-scale industry employed only 28 per cent of the manufacturing workforce and small-scale and traditional industry 72 per cent (Roy 2001).

Since the 1990s liberalisation has opened sectors once reserved for government (telecom, civil aviation, power) to private and foreign firms and ended industrial licensing. Many Indian companies were bought by multinationals while some Indian companies became multinationals. NCERT's example: Coca-Cola bought Parle drinks, whose annual turnover was ₹250 crore while Coca-Cola's advertising budget alone was ₹400 crore, and the advertising replaced many traditional drinks. The next area of liberalisation was retail (Box 5.1 in 2021-22: global chains seeking entry in 2006, when family-run stores had 97 per cent of the business).

Disinvestment, the sale of government shares in public-sector companies, frightens workers: in Modern Foods, set up to make healthy bread cheaply and "the first company to be privatised", 60 per cent of workers were forced to retire in the first five years. Worldwide, companies are cutting permanent staff and outsourcing work to smaller firms or homes, and multinationals outsource across the globe to cheap labour in countries like India. Small firms competing for orders keep wages low, and unions find it harder to organise them. Meanwhile the state acquires land for industries that may not employ local people but pollute; adivasis, about 40 per cent of the displaced, protest at low compensation and the prospect of becoming casual labour on city footpaths.

NCERT's summary: India is "still largely an agricultural country"; services and the urban middle class are growing; very few have secure jobs, and even regular jobs grow insecure with contract labour; government employment, long a main avenue of well-being, is shrinking; and liberalisation and privatisation worldwide "appear to be associated with rising income inequality".

How People Find Jobs

Only a small share of people get jobs through advertisements or employment exchanges. NCERT contrasts a public-sector advertisement (a college principal's post with a fixed pay scale, allowances and detailed qualifications) with a private hotel's (flexible pay, likely contract, a "5 star work environment"): each organisation builds its own work culture. The self-employed, from plumbers and carpenters to tutors and architects, rely on personal contacts.

Factory recruitment has a different history. In the Kanpur textile mills, workers got jobs through jobbers called mistris, themselves workers from the same regions and communities, who bossed over workers with the owners' backing and also put community pressure on them. The jobber's role has declined, and management and unions recruit their own people; many workers expect to pass jobs to their children. Factories also employ badli workers to substitute for permanent workers on leave; many have worked for years without the same status and security, which is contract work in the organised sector. NCERT mentions recent schemes, MUDRA, Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Make in India, expected to support wage work and self-employment, including for SCs, STs and OBCs.

The contractor system is most visible in hiring casual labour for construction sites and brickyards. The contractor lends villagers money, including travel costs, as an advance wage, and they work without wages until it is repaid. Agricultural labourers were once tied to landlords by debt; in casual industrial work they are still in debt but not bound by other social obligations, so "they are more free in an industrial society" and can break the contract. In the 2021-22 print, Jan Breman's study of the South Gujarat brickyards (Box 5.4) describes 30,000-40,000 seasonal workers, mostly Dalit, in groups of nine to eleven making 2,500-3,000 bricks a day; children from the age of six are woken at night to carry wet bricks of about 3 kg.

How Is Work Carried Out?

A manager's basic task is to control workers and get more work from them, either by extending hours or by raising output within a given time. Machinery raises production but threatens to replace workers; both Marx and Gandhi saw mechanisation as a danger to employment. NCERT quotes Gandhi: "What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such … Men go on 'saving labour' till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation", and (1934) that adopting the spinning wheel would solve unemployment and "end the exploitation of the poor by the rich".

Output can also be raised by organising work. In the 1890s the American Frederick Winslow Taylor devised Scientific Management (Taylorism, or industrial engineering): work broken into its smallest repetitive elements, divided among workers timed with stopwatches against daily targets. The assembly line sped production further: each worker on a conveyor belt assembles one part, at a speed set by the belt. From the 1980s firms tried "indirect control", with workers motivating and monitoring themselves, but Taylorist processes often survive.

• Textiles. Ramcharan, a weaver in the Kanpur mills since the 1940s: "When four machines run all four must move together, they must not stop" (Joshi 2003).
• Automobiles. At Maruti Udyog Ltd, two cars roll off the line every minute; workers get 45 minutes of rest a day (two tea breaks of 7.5 minutes and a half-hour lunch), and most are exhausted by 40 and take voluntary retirement. Permanent jobs have fallen as cleaning, security and parts are outsourced, with suppliers delivering just-in-time every two hours.
• Software. Box 5.5, "Time Slavery in the IT Sector" (Carol Upadhya): 10-12-hour days, overnight "night outs" before deadlines, evening calls for US clients, projects costed on eight-hour "mandays" that cannot be met, and "flexi-time" that in practice means working as long as needed. In Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Gurugram shops stay open late, children go to crèches, and "the joint family … seems to have re-emerged" as grandparents look after children.

Does the shift to a "knowledge economy" increase skills? A farmer who can grow hundreds of crops by understanding weather, soil and seed is skilled, differently from a software professional. Harry Braverman argues that machinery deskills workers: architects and engineers once had to be skilled draughtsmen, and now the computer does much of the work.

Working Conditions: Mines and Migrants

The goods we use are produced, often under very bad conditions. Coal mines alone employed 5.5 lakh workers, in NCERT's figure. The Mines Act, 1952, now included in the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, limits weekly working hours, requires overtime pay and lays down safety rules. These may be followed in big companies but not in small mines and quarries, where sub-contracting is widespread and contractors avoid keeping registers, escaping responsibility for accidents and benefits; companies rarely restore land after mining. Underground miners face flooding, fire, roof and side collapses, gases and ventilation failures, and diseases such as tuberculosis and silicosis; surface miners face heat, rain and blasting injuries; mining accident rates in India are very high by international comparison. (Box 5.6 in 2021-22: 54 miners trapped by a gas explosion at the Bhatdih colliery of Bharat Coking Coal Limited in September 2006, where rescue teams lacked oxygen masks.)

Many industries employ migrants. Fish-processing plants along the coast employ mostly single young women from Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, ten or twelve to a small room, because young women are seen as "submissive workers". Many men migrate alone; in 1992, 85 per cent of the 2 lakh Oriya migrants in Surat were single (2021-22 print). "From a nation of interfering joint families, the nature of work in a globalised economy is taking people in the direction of loneliness and vulnerability", yet for many young women it also brings independence and economic autonomy.

Home-Based Work: The Bidi Chain

Home-based work, mainly by women and children, includes lace, zari, carpets, bidis and agarbattis: an agent supplies raw material and collects the product, and workers are paid by the piece. NCERT traces the bidi chain: villagers in forested areas pluck tendu leaves (about 100 bundles of 50 leaves a day) and sell them to the forest department or a contractor; the government auctions the leaves to bidi factory owners; contractors supply tobacco and leaves to home-based workers, mostly women, who dampen, cut, fill and tie the bidis; the contractor sells them to the manufacturer, who roasts and brands them; distributors and wholesalers pass them to pan shops. In NCERT's value chart (2021-22) the manufacturer takes the largest share "because of the image of the brand". Box 5.7 tells of Madhu, a 15-year-old school dropout who rolls bidis with her mother after her father died of tuberculosis, and suffers backache from sitting in one posture (Bhandari 2005).

Strikes and Unions: Bombay, 1982

Trade unions in India must overcome regionalism and casteism. In the 2021-22 print a mill worker recalls that Marathi workers would chew paan with a Mahar co-worker but not drink water from his hands, and could not practise untouchability on North Indian workers because they could not tell their caste (Menon and Adarkar 2004).

In a strike workers stay away from work; in a lockout management shuts the gates. Calling a strike is hard: managers may bring in substitute labour and workers struggle without wages. The Bombay textile strike of 1982, led by the trade union leader Dr. Datta Samant, affected nearly a quarter of a million workers and their families and "lasted nearly two years". Workers wanted better wages and the right to form their own union. The 2021-22 print explains why that mattered: under the Bombay Industrial Relations Act, a union had to be "approved", which required giving up strikes, and the Congress-led Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh (RMMS), the only approved union, "helped to break the strike by bringing in other workers"; the government refused to listen. After two years desperate workers drifted back. Nearly one lakh lost their jobs: some returned to villages, some took casual labour, others moved to powerloom towns such as Bhiwandi, Malegaon and Ichalkaranji. Mill owners did not modernise; today they seek to sell mill land for luxury apartments, "leading to a battle over who will define the future of Mumbai – the workers who built it or the mill owners and real estate agents". Box 5.8's oral histories record how Standard Mills workers persuaded Samant to lead them on 22 October 1981, how families sold their vessels to eat, and how gangs were used against strikers.

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

NCERT's Answers to Its Own Exercise Questions

Exam Strategy

For Prelims: alienation (Marx); convergence thesis (Clark Kerr); Scientific Management (F.W. Taylor, 1890s); deskilling (Braverman); organised sector = ten or more workers; mistris (Kanpur), badli workers; Modern Foods, the first company to be privatised; Mines Act 1952 now in the OSH Code; tendu leaves; Bombay strike 1982 (Datta Samant, nearly two years, about one lakh jobs lost); Labour Codes in force 21 November 2025.

For Mains: for informality and liberalisation, use NCERT's three implications of a small organised sector plus disinvestment and outsourcing, and update with PLFS 2025 status shares. For new forms of work (IT, gig), use Taylorism, indirect control and Braverman, and the Labour Codes' gig provisions. For labour rights, use the 1982 strike and the BIRA "approved union" rule.

Avoid: calling the Labour Codes only "passed" (they are in force); saying industrialisation always means urbanisation and equality (NCERT shows old discrimination persists); quoting gig or e-Shram numbers without their dates.

Practice Questions

Practice (UPSC-pattern, not past papers). Mains questions 1 to 3 adapt NCERT's own exercises.

Prelims:

1. The "convergence thesis", that industrialised societies come to resemble each other more than their own past, is associated with:
   (a) Harry Braverman
   (b) Clark Kerr
   (c) F.W. Taylor
   (d) Émile Durkheim

2. Consider the following statements in the context of NCERT's account of work in India:
   

   1. One definition of the organised sector is all units employing ten or more people throughout the year.
      
   2. Badli workers substitute for permanent workers on leave and may work for years without permanent status.
      
   3. Under the Bombay Industrial Relations Act, a union could be "approved" only if it gave up the idea of strikes.
      Which of the statements given above are correct?
      (a) 1 and 2 only
      (b) 2 and 3 only
      (c) 1 and 3 only
      (d) 1, 2 and 3

3. The 1982 Bombay textile strike was led by:
   (a) N.M. Joshi
   (b) George Fernandes
   (c) Dr. Datta Samant
   (d) B.P. Wadia

4. Under the Code on Social Security, 2020, in force from 21 November 2025, aggregators must contribute towards the social security of gig and platform workers:
   (a) 0.5% of annual profit
   (b) 1-2% of annual turnover, capped at 5% of the amount paid to such workers
   (c) 5% of annual turnover without a cap
   (d) a fixed amount per worker per month

Mains:

1. How has liberalisation affected employment patterns in India? (150 words)
2. "Very few Indians have access to secure jobs." Discuss the social implications of the small size of the organised sector. (250 words)
3. Describe the 1982 Bombay textile strike and explain what it reveals about labour relations in India. (250 words)
4. Do new forms of work in the IT and platform economy reproduce old forms of control over workers? Discuss with reference to Taylorism and Braverman. (250 words)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, Social Change and Development in India (Class XII), ch. 5 "Change and Development in Industrial Society", Boxes 5.1-5.8 (2021-22 print and Reprint 2026-27): 2021 book archive, Wayback copy; 2026-27 book archive.
• Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Periodic Labour Force Survey, annual report 2025, press note: PIB release.
• PIB (Ministry of Labour and Employment), "Government Makes the Four Labour Codes effective to Simplify and Streamline Labour Laws", 21 November 2025: pib.gov.in; PRS Legislative Research, Code on Wages (Central) Rules, 2026: prsindia.org.
• NITI Aayog, India's Booming Gig and Platform Economy, policy brief, June 2022: niti.gov.in PDF; PIB, "5 Years of e-Shram Portal", 25 August 2026: pib.gov.in.
• The Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, as amended in 2016: Indian Kanoon; ILO, "Fact sheet: Child labour in India": ilo.org.
• Supreme Court of India, Union of India v. Union Carbide Corporation (curative petitions), 14 March 2023: Indian Kanoon.