Revision summary
The 1991 LPG reforms opened trade and capital and are the usual start of India’s current globalisation. IT and diaspora remittances created new middle-class and village incomes; informal and gig work spread insecurity. Media and brands hybridised consumption while caste and kinship adapted, including on matrimonial sites. Uneven growth, agrarian stress, and digital identity politics are the other face of the same social change.
Model answer
Introduction
Globalisation in India is commonly dated from the 1991 liberalisation of trade, investment, and foreign exchange under the Narasimha Rao government and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh. A discussion of its social impact must hold together new work, new consumption, and new fractures.
Body
Work, class, and the city
- Information technology, business-process work, and special economic zones created an English-facing middle class in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Gurugram, and Pune, tied to global time zones.
- Organised factory jobs grew slower than informal and contract work; contract labour and the gig economy spread insecurity even where wages rose.
- Remittances from the Gulf and the wider diaspora changed village housing, marriage payments, and local status, especially in Kerala, Punjab, and parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Culture, media, and family
- Satellite television, later the internet and smartphones, brought global brands, cricket as a media industry, and a consumer youth culture into small towns.
- Diet, dress, and festivals hybridised: shopping malls and multiplexes sit beside caste panchayats and temple trusts.
- Nuclear and dual-earner households increased in metros, while kinship, arranged marriage, and caste endogamy adapted rather than vanished; matrimonial websites often filter by jati.
- Women’s paid work rose in services and export factories, yet unpaid care and safety in public space remain constrained, as the 2012 Delhi gang-rape debate showed in a global media frame.
Inequality, agrarian stress, and identity
- Growth after 1991 was uneven: coastal and southern states pulled ahead; rainfed agriculture faced cheap imports, price volatility, and farmer protests, including those of 2020–21.
- Globalisation intensified both cosmopolitan identity and defensive identity politics — Hindutva, regional pride, and minority anxiety travel on the same digital platforms.
- Public health and education saw private internationalised supply for those who can pay, while the poor still depend on underfunded state systems.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD G[LPG 1991] --> W[IT informal diaspora] G --> C[Media hybrid culture] G --> I[Inequality identity] W --> S[Indian society] C --> S I --> S
Conclusion
Globalisation has recast Indian society through IT work, diaspora money, media, and hybrid culture. The same process has widened regional and class gaps and forced caste, gender, and faith to renegotiate themselves in a faster market.
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