Revision summary
Globalisation links villages to distant labour, media, and crop markets. Remittances and phones are real openings. Land, artisan work, and farm risk are the main threats. Chipko and Niyamgiri show local defence against outside extraction. PESA and FRA are legal tools, not automatic shields.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Globalisation ties Indian villages to distant markets, media, and labour circuits. It opens cash and information, and it also strips local control over land, seed, and youth.
Body
Opportunities
- Remittances from Gulf and city work raise house quality and school fees in many dry villages, a pattern Jan Breman also documented in labour migration, though he stressed its cost.
- Mobile phones, satellite television, and rural roads cut isolation that S. C. Dube still had to travel by jeep in the Shamirpet years.
- Crop markets, dairy cooperatives, and some contract farming raise cash where irrigation and cold chains exist.
- MGNREGA and national schemes ride the same fiscal global state. They are not village autarky, but they are a buffer.
Challenges
- Cheap industrial goods and corporate retail undercut village artisans. Land conversion for highways, SEZs, and mining hits Scheduled Area hamlets despite PESA, 1996 and FRA, 2006.
- Agrarian price swings and patented seed raise risk. Youth exit hollows out farm labour, which then returns as seasonal gangs.
- Media Westernisation, in Srinivas’s sense, shifts consumption faster than local employment. Caste and gender rules may harden as a defence, or they may crack unevenly.
How to read the balance
- Chipko in the Garhwal Himalaya was an earlier defence of forest livelihood against outside extraction. Niyamgiri later showed a Gram Sabha using law against a global mining plan.
- The village of Marriott and Dube was already a part-society. Globalisation intensifies that dependence. It does not create it from zero.
Limit
- Opportunity and threat are not equal for every jati and every region. A Punjab mandi and a shifting-cultivation hamlet do not meet the same global.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD G[Globalisation] --> O[Remittance market media] G --> T[Land seed labour exit] T --> L[PESA FRA Niyamgiri]
Conclusion
Globalisation gives villages remittance, media, and some markets. It also exposes land, craft, and youth to distant price and extraction. Law such as PESA and FRA is the village’s remaining bargaining chip.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Caste and social capital
Next question on this syllabus topic (2021 · Q1(d)). View answer →
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Is globalisation only cultural Westernisation?
No. Capital, labour, and law move too. Srinivas’s Westernisation is only one strand.
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Do all villages lose from globalisation?
No. Irrigated commercial belts often gain cash. Forest and dryland hamlets more often lose control.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
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2016 · Q8(a) · Anthropology GS 2 · 20 marks
Write in detail various provisions provided by the Constitution of India for the scheduled tribes under Fifth and Sixth Schedules
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