Class 12 Sociology Book 2 Chapter 1 Structural Change NCERT Solutions

Q. How has colonialism impacted our lives? You can either focus on
one aspect, like culture or politics, or treat them together.

Answer: Colonialism’s impact on Indian life has been wide-ranging
and, as the chapter stresses, contradictory. Politically, colonial rule
introduced the parliamentary and legal system India still runs on today, and
India entered the age of the nation-state, the political form that became
dominant alongside capitalism; yet the same colonial rule denied
Indians the sovereignty and self-rule that its own political ideas said
people deserved: a contradiction Indian nationalist leaders grasped, which
is why they declared swaraj their birthright.

Economically and structurally, colonialism changed land-ownership laws,
decided which crops could be grown, altered production and distribution,
brought in Forest Acts that restricted pastoralists, and reshaped whole
regions through new industries like tea plantations, recruited by fraud and
coercion under laws such as the Transport of Native Labourers Act of 1863.
It also caused deindustrialisation in some sectors and, unlike in Britain,
its initial impact led more Indians to move into agriculture, even as new
colonial port cities such as Bombay, Calcutta and Madras grew.

Culturally, its legacy is visible in everyday things the chapter itself
names: our parliamentary, legal, police and educational systems built on
the British model; driving on the left; English food terms and neckties in
school uniforms; and the English language itself, which remains both a mark
of privilege and, for groups like the Dalits who were traditionally denied
formal education, may open doors of opportunity that were formerly closed.
Some colonial effects were unintended: western education, introduced to
create Indians who would manage British colonialism, instead led to the
growth of a nationalist and anti-colonial consciousness. Taken together,
colonialism is not simply a closed chapter of history: it lives on, in
complex and contradictory ways, in institutions and habits we still live
with today.

Q. Industrialisation and urbanisation are linked processes.
Discuss.

Answer: Industrialisation is the emergence of machine production
based on inanimate power resources like steam or electricity, and it is
usually linked to urbanisation because industrial societies need large
numbers of people working in factories, offices and shops rather than on
the land: over 90% of people in the west live in towns and cities, where
most jobs are to be found. Britain shows the link clearly: as the first country
to industrialise, it was also the first to become predominantly urban, with
the share of its population in towns of over 10,000 rising from well under 20%
in 1800 to 74% by 1900, and London growing from about 1.1 million people to
over 7 million in the same period.

But the chapter is explicit that the two processes “often do occur
together but not always so”, and colonial India is its own counter-example.
The very same British industrialisation that urbanised Britain caused
deindustrialisation in parts of India: traditional cotton and silk
manufacturing declined under Manchester competition, and cities like Surat
and Masulipatnam declined further. Rather than pulling people into cities,
the initial impact of British industrialisation in India led more
people to move into agriculture, unlike the British pattern, as the 1911
Census of India Report shows. Urban growth in colonial India took a
different shape: new colonial port cities (Bombay, Calcutta, Madras) grew
largely because they served British export interests, and from the end of
the 19th century mechanised factory industries also made some towns much
more heavily populated. So the two processes are linked, but the shape of
that link depends on whose interests the industrialisation and
urbanisation are organised to serve: in colonial India they were governed
by colonial interests.

Q. Identify any town or city with which you are familiar. Find out
both the history of its growth and its contemporary status.

Answer: This is an open-ended activity question, so the answer
should be about a real town or city the student actually knows, following
the model the chapter itself provides for a colonial port city. Using
Kolkata as a worked example: in 1690, English merchant Job Charnock
leased three villages, Kolikata, Gobindapur and Sutanuti, by the river
Hugli to set up a trading post. In 1698, Fort William was established there
for defence, and the fort together with the open ground around it (the
Maidan) formed the core from which the city rapidly grew. Kolkata became
one of colonial India’s most important port cities, exporting jute to
Dundee and linking the British economic core to the colonised Indian
periphery. Box 1.4 describes the colonial city’s “European town”, whose
residents utilised civic services such as water supply, electricity and
sewage links fully, whereas their use was quite restricted in the
“native town”.

Today Kolkata remains a major metropolitan city and the capital of West
Bengal, still carrying the physical and institutional legacy of this
colonial planning in its layout, older buildings and port history. A
student answering for their own city should follow the same structure:
when and why the town/city began or grew, what economic or political role
it played (colonial-era or otherwise), and what it looks like today:
population, main economic activity, and any visible legacy of its older
history.

Q. You may be living in a very small town, may be in a very big
city, a semi-urban settlement or a village. Describe the place where you
live. What are the features which make you think it is a town and not a
city, a village and not a town, or a city and not a village? Is there any
factory where you live? Is agriculture the main job that people do? Is it
the occupational nature that has a determining influence? Is it the
buildings? Is it the availability of educational opportunities? Is it the
way people live and behave? Is it the way people talk and dress?

Answer: This is an open-ended activity question about the
student’s own place of residence, so there is no single “correct” answer.
It should be answered honestly, using the sociological cues the chapter
itself points to as markers of “town-ness” or “city-ness”. A strong answer
works through each of the book’s own questions in turn:

Occupational nature: is the main livelihood agriculture (a mark
of a more village-like settlement), or factory/office/shop work (a mark of
an industrial, urban settlement)? The book asks whether the occupational nature
has a determining influence; the chapter’s own account of industrial
societies, where a large majority work in factories, offices or shops
rather than agriculture, suggests why it often does.

Presence of a factory or industry: a settlement built around or
near a factory (like Bhilai in the chapter’s own example) develops a
distinctly different character: more immigrant workers, more housing
demand, and a local market shaped by industrial wages rather than
agricultural produce.

Buildings and infrastructure: planned streets, multi-storey
buildings, piped water, sewage and electricity connections are more
typical of a city; scattered housing and dependence on surrounding
farmland are more typical of a village.

Educational and social opportunities: access to schools,
colleges and formal institutions tends to be far greater in towns and
cities, and the chapter’s own account of English education shows how such
opportunities can reshape a person’s or a community’s future.

Way of life: how people talk, dress and behave, and how closely
they know their neighbours, are markers the chapter’s closing quotation
(Wirth, 1938) points to directly: urbanisation is not only a matter of
buildings and jobs but “a way of life” in itself. A student’s answer should
end by weighing which of these features apply most strongly to their own
place, and conclude honestly whether it functions more like a village, a
town, or a city.

Q. Find out more about the beginnings of the three cities. Find out also more about the story of the names they were called by leading to the very recent changes from Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai, Calcutta to Kolkata, Bangalore to Bengaluru. Find out about the growth of other colonial urban centres.

Answer:

• Kolkata (Calcutta). The chapter itself gives its beginning: in 1690 the English merchant Job Charnock leased three villages, Kolikata, Gobindapur and Sutanuti, by the river Hugli to set up a trading post. Fort William was built in 1698, and the fort and the open Maidan around it became the core from which the city grew. It became a port that exported jute.
• Mumbai (Bombay). Bombay was a group of islands that passed from the Portuguese to the English Crown in 1661 and was leased to the East India Company in 1668 (outside the book). The chapter notes that the British planned and re-developed it so that by 1900 over three-quarters of India’s raw cotton was shipped through the city.
• Chennai (Madras). The East India Company built Fort St George here in the 1640s, and the settlement grew around the fort. Under colonial rule Madras sent coffee, sugar, indigo dyes and cotton to Britain.
• The new names. After independence, state governments replaced the colonial-era spellings with the names local people had long used in their own languages: Bombay became Mumbai (1995), Madras became Chennai (1996), Calcutta became Kolkata (2001) and Bangalore became Bengaluru (2014). The renaming reflects the wish to drop names that carried the stamp of colonial rule.
• Other colonial urban centres. Write up one or two from your own region. Common types were hill stations built as summer retreats for officials (such as Shimla and Darjeeling), cantonment towns built for the army, and railway towns that grew around workshops and junctions. For each, note when and why it grew and what it is like today.

Q. For many of you Amul Butter and other Amul milk products may be familiar names. Find out how this milk industry emerged?

Answer: Amul grew out of the cooperative movement among milk producers in Kaira (Kheda) district of Gujarat. In 1946 the farmers formed the Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producers’ Union at Anand, so that they could sell their milk together instead of through private traders who paid them very little. Leaders such as Tribhuvandas Patel, and later the engineer Verghese Kurien, built the union into a large dairy that processed milk and sold products under the brand name Amul. The Anand model, in which village milk societies own the dairy, was later spread across India through Operation Flood. This links directly to the chapter: after independence a large cooperative sector was considered very important for India’s industrialisation, and Amul is one of its best-known successes.

Q. Many new industrial towns emerged in India in the years after Independence. May be some of you live in such towns. Find out more about towns, like Bokaro, Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur. Find out whether such industrial towns exist in your region. Do you know of townships built around fertiliser plants and oil wells? If no such town exists in your region, find out the reasons for their absence.

Answer:

• Bokaro, Bhilai, Rourkela and Durgapur are steel towns. Each grew around a large public sector steel plant set up after independence, when the state gave priority to heavy and machine-making industries and to the public sector. Planned townships with housing, schools, hospitals and markets were built for the workers, and people came from many parts of India to work there.
• Townships around fertiliser plants and oil wells. Examples are Sindri in Jharkhand, which grew around a fertiliser factory, and Digboi and Duliajan in Assam, which grew around oil fields and a refinery.
• Your region. Name any such town near you and describe how it began and what it is like today. If there is none, give the reasons: industries of this kind are set up where raw materials (iron ore, coal, oil or gas), water, power and transport are available, so a region without these is unlikely to have such a town.