Revision summary
Technology can raise yields, health, and administrative capacity. The same tools can deepen dependency through patents, platforms, and data rents. Frank, Wallerstein, and Cardoso map dependent development. Gig modernisation can be informalisation. Gendered care is not automatically solved by apps. Both processes accelerate; ownership decides the mix.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
Technology raises productivity and connects markets. That can look like development. The same tools can deepen dependency when patents, platforms, and standards sit in a core. A. G. Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein named the second process. Both can run together.
Body
Acceleration of development
- W. W. Rostow treated technique as a take-off lever. Green Revolution yields and digital public goods in India show real gains in output and delivery.
- Max Weber’s rationalisation: calculation, records, and machines thicken modern organisation.
- Public health techniques cut some deaths. That is development as capability, after Amartya Sen.
Acceleration of dependency
- Frank’s development of underdevelopment: technology arrives as a package with surplus drain.
- Patents, software stacks, and platform rents keep the periphery as a user. Cardoso’s dependent development still fits some manufacturing.
- Labour platforms informalise work while looking modern, a capitalist shell Jan Breman would recognise.
- Data colonialism: Indian users feed models owned elsewhere.
How they couple
- A UPI rail can be developmental and still sit on hardware and chip dependencies.
- Skill polarisation: a few engineers, many gig riders. Class, not only nation, is the unit.
- Gender: care apps do not automatically end unpaid labour, as Ann Oakley would note.
Discuss
- Technology is not a neutral accelerator. It accelerates the path already structured by class and world-system.
- Delinking every chip is fantasy. Bargaining over standards and public tech is the political middle.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD TECH[Technology] --> DEV[Productivity health delivery] TECH --> DEP[Patents platforms drain] WS[World-system class] --> PATH[Which arrow wins] TECH[TECH] --> PATH[PATH]
Conclusion
Technology has accelerated development as productivity, health, and state capacity. It has also accelerated dependency as patents, platforms, and informalised modern work. Frank and Wallerstein remain relevant; Rostow’s one-way machine does not. Discuss both arrows, and name who owns the tool.
Quick related
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Is every imported machine dependency?
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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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2024 · Q8(c) · Sociology GS 1 · 10 marks
Critically examine the World-Systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein in terms of development and dependency of various nations -
2021 · Q7(b) · Sociology GS 1 · 15 marks
Critically examine the contribution of dependency theories in understanding the present global scenario.
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