Revision summary
Globalisation carries new technology across borders as machines, patents, and platforms. Scarcity of oil, water, land, and minerals is the test of that pair. Yield-raising, digital, and renewable tools can stretch Indian resources. The same pair fuels consumption, e-waste, and imported mineral thirst. India’s way is public digital and green technology, not resource-blind consumer globalism.
Model answer
Introduction
Globalisation moves goods, capital, and ideas across borders; new technology changes how much resource each unit of output needs. In a world of scarce oil, water, land, and rare minerals, the two together can save resources or burn them faster. India lives both sides.
Body
How the two forces join
- Open trade after 1991 let India import machines, seeds, and later smartphones, so new technology arrived as a global package, not only as a domestic lab.
- Digital networks, the internet, and now renewable hardware are global production systems; no country, including India, makes the whole stack at home.
- Scarcity is the third term: hydrocarbons, groundwater, fertile land, and critical minerals are finite, so technology is asked to decouple growth from depletion.
Easing scarcity
- The Green Revolution’s high-yield seed, later drip and satellite weather, and now soil sensors show technology stretching land and water, even as they created new chemical loads.
- Solar modules, wind turbines, and LED lighting, traded globally, let India cut some oil for power and lighting despite poor domestic oil reserves.
- UPI, Aadhaar-enabled delivery, and remote work reduce some travel and leakages, which is a resource saving in time, fuel, and subsidy waste.
- Indian IT and generic pharma used global demand and licensed or off-patent technology to earn without a matching claim on domestic mines.
- Recycling, electric mobility, and efficiency standards are the scarcity-facing face of the same global tech market.
Tightening scarcity and unequal access
- Global middle-class consumption, copied in Indian cities, raises meat, air-travel, and gadget demand that technology often serves rather than caps.
- Export agriculture and data centres are thirsty; chips and batteries need minerals India does not dominate, so scarcity is offshored, not abolished.
- E-waste, leftover patents, and a digital divide mean new technology can waste rare metals and leave the water-poor farmer outside the saving.
- TRIPS-era rules can raise the price of green and health technologies unless public procurement and compulsory paths are used.
- Climate change, itself a global-technology-and-growth product, makes Indian monsoon water more scarce in some regions even as apps improve forecasts.
India’s special reference
- India must use global technology to leapfrog dirty industrial stages, and must regulate global consumption models that treat groundwater and clean air as free.
- Public digital infrastructure plus renewable manufacturing is the scarce-resource path; uncritical consumer globalisation is the waste path.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD G[Global markets] --> N[New technology] N --> S[Stretch water energy land] N --> W[More consumption e-waste] R[Scarce resources] --> S R --> W I[India DPI renewables] --> S
Conclusion
Globalisation delivers new technology at speed; scarcity decides whether that technology is used to stretch land, water, and energy or to multiply wants. India’s task is to import and make saving technologies while refusing a global lifestyle that treats finite resources as infinite.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Does technology end resource scarcity?
It can raise efficiency. It does not end wants, waste, or the mineral base of the devices themselves.
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Is globalisation only a resource threat to India?
It also brought IT earnings, generics, and renewable gear. The threat is unregulated consumption on a scarce water-energy map.
PYQ trend
When UPSC asked this
Related PYQs from other years, newest first. Open a question to read it.
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2020 · Q18 · GS I · 15 marks
Is diversity and pluralism in India under threat due to globalisation? Justify your answer. -
2018 · Q19 · GS I · 15 marks
'Globalisation is generally said to promote cultural homogenisation but due to this cultural specificities appear to be strengthened in the Indian society.' Elucidate. -
2016 · Q8 · GS I · 12 marks
To what extent globalisation has influenced the core of cultural diversity in India? Explain.
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