Globalisation and Social Change

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: "Effects of globalisation on Indian society" is named in the GS1 syllabus, and this chapter is NCERT's full treatment of it. It gives the vocabulary examiners reward (the weightless economy, the new international division of labour, post-Fordism, homogenisation and glocalisation, the culture of consumption) and a balanced verdict: globalisation "affects us all but affects us differently". Mains has asked whether globalisation homogenises culture or strengthens cultural specificities, whether it threatens India's diversity, how it affects women, how Tier 2 cities' consumer culture relates to a new middle class, and how India protects traditional knowledge from patents. The 2026-27 reprint keeps the chapter but drops several boxes (listed below).

Contemporary hook: NCERT's examples of the communication revolution date from 2000-2006, when India had 123 million mobile phones. By the end of August 2026 TRAI counted 1,360.70 million telephone subscriptions, and 86.3 per cent of households had internet access within the household premises in MoSPI's telecom survey of January-March 2025, against 23.8 per cent in 2017-18. The digital divide NCERT describes has narrowed sharply in access; whether it has narrowed in use and skill is the sociological question.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

Sociology studies globalisation through the link between personal lives and distant policies. NCERT's example: the end of import restrictions puts a Chinese pear and an Australian apple on the local fruit stall; the same policy means more choice for the affluent urban consumer and "a crisis of livelihood for a farmer". The sociological imagination connects the micro and the macro, the local and the global. No village, family or caste can now be studied as an isolated unit.

Global interconnection is old; globalisation is something more. India was linked to China, Persia, Egypt and Rome by the Silk Route, colonialism built a global capitalist system, and independent India kept a global outlook. What is new is "the growing interdependence between different people, regions and countries" as social and economic relations stretch world-wide, driven above all by information and communication technologies and shaped by a political context.

Globalisation affects people unequally, and culture is not a fixed thing to be lost. It brings new careers to urban middle-class youth and lost livelihoods to silk spinners, gum collectors and rag pickers. Culturally, NCERT rejects both panic and celebration: Indian culture has been "open ended", and globalisation produces glocal mixtures and new traditions as well as threats to crafts and knowledge systems.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

Dimensions of Globalisation (NCERT)

Who Gains, Who Loses (NCERT's examples)

What the 2026-27 Reprint Dropped

The quotation on the scope of sociology from NCERT's Class XI book; Charles Leadbeater's "thin air" box on the weightless economy; the box on the growth of mobile telephony (launch in 1995, the 1994 and 1999 telecom policies, 123.44 million phones in 2006); the box on early official distrust of mobile phones; the 2006 student protest letter to President Kalam; and the activity on political parties using multinational firms. Kept: the dimensions of globalisation, the internet and telecom boxes, Nike and the Pontiac, employment, political change, glocalisation, consumption, corporate culture and the threat to crafts and knowledge systems, and the four exercise questions.

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

How Sociology Studies Globalisation

No discussion of social change in the twenty-first century is complete without globalisation, and NCERT reminds students that the theme has run through earlier chapters (liberalisation and rural society in Chapter 4, liberalisation and industry in Chapter 5). Economics looks at capital flows and political science at the changing role of governments, but globalisation is so far-reaching that disciplines borrow from each other. Sociology is defined "not just [by] what it studies … but how it studies a chosen field", so it does not only study globalisation's social "consequences": it uses the sociological imagination to connect the individual and society, the local and the global. How is a peasant in a remote village affected? What happens to the neighbourhood grocer when retail opens to transnational companies? Why are there so many malls?

NCERT's examples start at the fruit stall. Since 1 April 2001 the remaining quantitative restrictions on imports have been withdrawn, so imported fruit, juice and frozen chips sit in neighbourhood stores; what families eat slowly changes. (India has been a member of the World Trade Organization since 1 January 1995, and announced the removal of restrictions on its remaining 715 items with effect from 1 April 2001 to settle a WTO dispute.) Policy changes also turned one television channel into scores, "perhaps the most visible effect of globalisation". Sociologists can no longer study a village, family or caste "as though it was an isolated entity"; studies must take account of WTO rules on agriculture and so on the farmer.

Are Global Interconnections New?

The early years. India was not isolated even two thousand years ago: the Silk Route linked it with China, Persia, Egypt and Rome, and traders, conquerors and migrants came and settled. NCERT's Box 6.1 quotes Amartya Sen: Panini, the greatest Sanskrit grammarian, "who systematised and transformed Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin"; the seventh-century Chinese scholar Yi Jing learned Sanskrit in Java (in Shri Vijaya) on his way to India; and old Sanskrit texts warn against the kupamanduka, the well-frog that "knows nothing else, and is suspicious of everything outside it". "The scientific, cultural and economic history of the world would have been very limited indeed had we lived like well-frogs."

Colonialism and the global connection. Modern capitalism had a global dimension from the start: colonialism supplied capital, raw materials, energy and markets. The greatest movement of people was the European settlement of the Americas and Australia; indentured Indian labourers were shipped to Asia, Africa and the Americas; and the slave trade carried Africans to distant shores.

Independent India and the world retained a global outlook inherited from the nationalist movement: solidarity with liberation struggles, Indians studying and working abroad, trade in raw materials and technology, and foreign firms operating in India. So the question is whether the present process is "radically different from anything we have seen in the past".

Understanding Globalisation

Globalisation "refers to the growing interdependence between different people, regions and countries in the world as social and economic relationships come to stretch world-wide". Economic forces are integral but do not alone produce it; it has been "driven forward above all by the development of information and communication technologies", within a political context.

The economic dimensions.

• Transnational corporations (TNCs) produce goods or market services in more than one country, from small firms with a factory or two abroad to giants such as Coca-Cola, General Motors, Colgate-Palmolive, Kodak and Mitsubishi. They aim at global markets and profits even with a national base. Some Indian corporations are becoming transnational; NCERT is unsure what that will mean for most Indians.
• The electronic economy. Banks, corporations, fund managers and investors move funds internationally "with the click of a mouse", which carries great risks; in India it shows in stock markets that rise and dip as foreign investors buy, profit and sell.
• The weightless or knowledge economy. Products are based on information (software, media, internet services), and much of the workforce works on design, development, marketing, sale and servicing rather than making goods. New occupations, such as event managers, have appeared. (The 2021-22 print quotes Charles Leadbeater: "We are all in the thin-air business.")
• Globalisation of finance. Integrated financial markets move billions of dollars in seconds, with 24-hour trading; New York, Tokyo and London are the key centres, and Mumbai is India's financial capital.

Global Communications and the Digital Divide

Advances in telecommunications have made links to the outside world common in homes and offices: landlines and mobiles, fax, digital and cable television, e-mail and the internet. Their uneven spread is "the digital divide". Still, these technologies compress time and space: people in Bengaluru and New York can talk and send documents by satellite, giving rise to "network and media society". The Government's Digital India programme, launched on 1 July 2015, aims to make India a "digitally empowered society" and a "knowledge economy".

NCERT's Box 6.3 records that internet users worldwide rose from 70 million in 1998 to 325 million by 2000, and that India had 3 million subscribers and 15 million users by 2000 (Singhal and Rogers 2001). It adds that in 2017-18 one in ten households had a computer and about a quarter had internet connectivity. Box 6.4 traces telecom expansion: 84,000 telephone lines in 1947 for 350 million people; 2.5 million telephones and 12,000 public phones by 1980, when only 3 per cent of 600,000 villages had telephones; 25 million lines by 1999, making the network the ninth largest in the world; villages with some telephone facility rising from 27,316 in 1988 to 300,000 in 1998; and some 650,000 public call offices (PCOs) by 2000, meeting "the strong Indian sociocultural need of keeping in touch with family members".

Changing attitudes to the mobile phone (2021-22 print). NCERT traced how the cell phone moved from distrust to necessity. Mobile services were commercially launched in August 1995; growth was slow under the New Telecom Policy of 1994 because handsets and tariffs were costly, then picked up after the New Telecom Policy of 1999: 16 million phones added in 2003, 22 million in 2004 and 32 million in 2005, reaching 123.44 million in September 2006, behind only China, the USA and Russia. Box 6.6 (from Singhal and Rogers) says the Home Ministry banned the open sale of pre-paid cash cards because criminals used them, and that new subscriptions fell by about half in 1998 when the Income Tax Department treated owning a mobile as a sign of taxable income. (NCERT dates the Home Ministry ban to "1988" and says cell phones were distrusted "in the late 1980s", which cannot refer to mobile phones in India, since its own box dates their launch to 1995.) By 2006 students were appealing to the President against a campus ban on phones. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-21, NCERT notes, lakhs of children attended classes on mobile phones.

Globalisation and Labour

A new international division of labour has emerged, with more routine manufacturing done in Third World cities. NCERT's example is Nike. Its founder, Phil Knight, began by importing shoes from Japan; the company became a transnational corporation headquartered near Portland, Oregon, but only two US factories ever made its shoes. Production moved from Japan (1960s) to South Korea (mid-1970s) as costs rose, to Thailand and Indonesia (1980s), and to India (1990s), and would move again wherever labour was cheaper. This makes labour "very vulnerable and insecure", and flexibility favours producers. Mass production at a centralised location (Fordism) has given way to flexible production at dispersed locations (post-Fordism).

Box 6.8 (Robert Reich, 1991) dissects an "ostensibly American" car, General Motors' Pontiac Le Mans. Of its showroom price of $20,000, only $7,600 went to Americans (workers and managers in Detroit, lawyers and bankers in New York, lobbyists in Washington, shareholders). Of the rest, 48 per cent went to South Korea for labour and assembly, 28 per cent to Japan for engines and electronics, 12 per cent to Germany for styling and design, 7 per cent to Taiwan and Singapore for small components, 4 per cent to the UK for marketing, and about 1 per cent to Barbados or Ireland for data processing.

Employment. For urban middle-class youth, globalisation and the IT revolution opened careers: instead of routine BSc, BA or BCom degrees, many learn computer languages, join call centres or Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firms, or work in malls and restaurants. But broader employment trends were disappointing. Box 6.9 quotes an ILO report, Labour and Social Trends in Asia and the Pacific 2005: employment in Asia and the Pacific grew by only 1.6 per cent (25 million jobs, to 1.588 billion) between 2003 and 2004, against economic growth of over 7 per cent.

Globalisation and Political Change

The collapse of the socialist world hastened globalisation and gave it a particular approach, often termed neo-liberal: a political vision of free enterprise, critical of state regulation and subsidies, that believes free markets are efficient and fair. A different globalisation is possible: NCERT names the idea of inclusive globalisation, one that includes all sections of society. Regional political groupings have grown: the European Union, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC, whose charter was signed at its first summit in Dhaka in December 1985; NCERT's Contemporary World Politics). So have intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), set up by governments to oversee a transnational domain (the WTO increasingly shapes trade rules), and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), independent bodies such as Greenpeace, the Red Cross, Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières.

Globalisation and Culture

India has had an open approach to cultural influences and been enriched by it, but the last decade brought fears that local cultures would be overtaken. NCERT returns to the kupamanduka: "fortunately for us we retain our 'traditional' open-ended attitude", visible in heated debates about clothes, music, films, language and body language. As with nineteenth-century reformers, what is different is "the scale and intensity of change".

Gender and culture. Defenders of a fixed cultural identity often defend discrimination against women in its name, from sati to exclusion from education and public life, and use globalisation "as a bogey". NCERT holds that India's democratic tradition lets culture be defined more inclusively.

Culture of consumption. Culture means a whole way of life, and two uses matter here. Until the 1970s manufacturing drove the growth of cities; now cultural consumption (art, food, fashion, music, tourism) shapes them, visible in shopping malls, multiplexes, amusement parks and "water worlds". Advertising and media promote spending: "To be careful with money is no longer a virtue." Successes in Miss Universe and Miss World fed the fashion, cosmetics and health industries, and game shows like Kaun Banega Crorepati made sudden fortune seem possible. This is the frame for questions on consumer culture in growing Tier 2 cities.

Corporate culture is a branch of management theory that seeks productivity and competitiveness through a unique organisational culture, with company events, rituals and traditions to build loyalty. Multinationals and the IT revolution have created in Indian metropolises a class of upwardly mobile professionals in software, multinational banks, accountancy, stock markets, travel, fashion, entertainment and media, with stressful schedules and high salaries: "the main clientele of the booming consumer industry".

Threats to Crafts, Literary Traditions and Knowledge Systems

Modern development had made inroads into traditional cultural forms before globalisation, "but the sheer scale and intensity of change is enormous". About 30 theatre groups around the textile mills of Parel and Girgaum in Mumbai became defunct as mill workers lost their jobs. Traditional weavers in Sircilla and Dubbaka, unable to invest in technology or adapt to competition from power looms, died by suicide in large numbers; NCERT places both in Andhra Pradesh, but they are now in Telangana, in Rajanna Sircilla and Siddipet districts. Box 6.10 quotes a performer of the dombari community of acrobats: "Television and radio have snatched away our means of livelihood … Our profession is dying" (More 1970). Traditional knowledge in medicine and agriculture is also at risk: attempts by some multinational companies "to patent the use of Tulsi, Haldi (turmeric), Rudraksha and Basmati rice" highlighted the need to protect India's indigenous knowledge.

The chapter ends by leaving the summing-up to the student: draw on Chapters 4 and 5 for agriculture and industry, and use the sociological imagination.

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

NCERT's Answers to Its Own Exercise Questions

Exam Strategy

For Prelims: quantitative restrictions on remaining imports removed from 1 April 2001; WTO member since 1 January 1995; Digital India launched 1 July 2015; Panini and Yi Jing (Box 6.1); kupamanduka; Fordism vs post-Fordism; Reich's Pontiac Le Mans; glocalisation examples; IGOs vs INGOs; TKDL (2001); turmeric patent revoked 1997.

For Mains: for culture questions, organise by NCERT's sub-heads (homogenisation and glocalisation, gender, consumption, corporate culture, threats to crafts) and end with NCERT's verdict that culture is not fixed. For economy and labour, use the new international division of labour and post-Fordism with the Nike and Pontiac cases, and update employment with dated survey figures. Always show winners and losers.

Avoid: equating liberalisation with globalisation; claiming globalisation is wholly new; quoting telecom or internet numbers without the month and measure (subscriptions are not users).

Practice Questions

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

Prelims:

1. In NCERT's account, the shift from mass production at a centralised location to flexible production at dispersed locations is described as a shift from:
   (a) mercantilism to capitalism
   (b) Fordism to post-Fordism
   (c) Taylorism to Fordism
   (d) the weightless economy to the knowledge economy

2. Consider the following statements:
   

   1. India has been a member of the World Trade Organization since 1 January 1995.
      
   2. The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library was set up by CSIR and the Ministry of AYUSH in 2001.
      
   3. The Digital India programme was launched on 1 July 2015.
      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. Which of the following NCERT examples illustrates "glocalisation"?
   (a) Nike moving production from South Korea to Indonesia
   (b) McDonald's selling no beef in India and going vegetarian during Navaratri
   (c) Women gum collectors in Gujarat losing work to imported gum
   (d) Financial trading in New York, Tokyo and London

4. In NCERT's Box 6.1, the "kupamanduka" is used to warn against:
   (a) the dangers of foreign trade
   (b) isolationism and suspicion of everything outside one's own world
   (c) cultural homogenisation
   (d) colonial exploitation

Mains:

1. What are the distinctive features of a globalised economy? Discuss with Indian examples. (150 words)
2. "Globalisation affects us all but affects us differently." Examine with reference to its impact on different sections of Indian society. (250 words)
3. What is glocalisation? Is it simply a market strategy adopted by multinational companies, or is a genuine cultural synthesis taking place? (250 words)
4. How has India sought to protect its traditional knowledge from biopiracy in a globalised world? (150 words)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, Social Change and Development in India (Class XII), ch. 6 "Globalisation and Social Change", Boxes 6.1-6.10 (2021-22 print and Reprint 2026-27): 2021 book archive, Wayback copy; 2026-27 book archive.
• NCERT, Indian Economic Development (Class XI), ch. 3, Reprint 2026-27: ncert.nic.in PDF; NCERT, Contemporary World Politics (Class XII), ch. 3 "Contemporary South Asia" (SAARC), Reprint 2026-27: ncert.nic.in PDF.
• World Trade Organization, India country page: wto.org; dispute DS90, India: Quantitative Restrictions on Imports: wto.org.
• Ministry of Electronics and IT, Digital India, "About Us": digitalindia.gov.in.
• NSO, NSS Report No. 585, Household Social Consumption on Education in India (75th round, 2017-18): mospi.gov.in PDF; PIB (MoSPI), Results of the Comprehensive Modular Survey: Telecom, 2025, 29 May 2025: pib.gov.in.
• Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Press Release No. 125/2026, "Highlights of Telecom Subscription Data at the end of August 2026", 28 September 2026: trai.gov.in PDF.
• CSIR, Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, "Bio-piracy of Traditional Knowledge": tkdl.res.in; PIB (Ministry of AYUSH), "Traditional Indian Systems of Medicines", 17 December 2021: pib.gov.in.
• Government of Telangana, Rajanna Sircilla district: rajannasircilla.telangana.gov.in; Siddipet district: siddipet.telangana.gov.in.