Critically examine the effects of British Industrial Revolution on India's economic life.

Deindustrialisation and trade rules

• Machine-made Lancashire cloth, after the Charter Act of 1813 opened India more fully to British private trade, undercut Bengal muslin, Dhaka weaves, and inland handlooms that had earlier earned bullion from Europe and Asia.
• Tariff asymmetry — free entry of British yarn and cloth into India, while Indian textiles faced duties in Britain — is the policy core of what nationalist writers called deindustrialisation.
• Dadabhai Naoroji’s drain theory, R. C. Dutt’s economic histories, and later estimates of artisan unemployment show a shift from finished exports to raw-material exports: cotton, jute, hides, and opium for China.
• Railways after 1853, steam shipping, and the telegraph cheapened that one-way commodity flow; they were modern infrastructure in form and colonial extraction in function.

Agrarian life, famine, and a mixed ledger

• Commercialisation pushed peasants into indigo (nil revolt, 1859–60), opium, cotton, and jute, raising cash needs for land revenue in silver while food stocks thinned; the Deccan and Bengal famines sit on this commercial map.
• Plantations of tea and indigo, and later Bombay and Ahmedabad cotton mills (1850s–70s), created a thin modern sector and a new working class, so the Industrial Revolution was not only destruction; it was delayed, lopsided industrialisation under British capital and managing agencies.
• Critique therefore refuses a single sentence: handicrafts and village weavers lost; ports, rails, and a few mill towns gained; per capita industry and skilled employment did not keep pace with Britain’s own factory leap.
• After 1947 the same rail and port skeleton was reused, which does not cancel the nineteenth-century social cost of turning India into a raw farm for Lancashire.