Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. Define alienation, in the book’s own sense.
Answer: Alienation (Marx) is the situation in which people do not enjoy work, and see it as something they have to do only in order to survive; and even that survival depends on whether the technology has room for any human labour.
Q. What share of India’s workers were in the primary sector in 2018-19?
Answer: About 43% of India’s workers were in the primary sector (agriculture and mining) in 2018-19.
Q. Name the two components of employment opportunity the chapter lists.
Answer: (i) A job in an organisation as a casual wage labourer or regular salaried worker, and (ii) self-employment.
Q. What is a badli worker?
Answer: A badli worker substitutes for a regular permanent worker who is on leave, and often works for years without gaining the same permanent status or security.
Q. Name the three government schemes the chapter names for generating employment and self-employment.
Answer: MUDRA, Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Make in India.
Q. Who led the 1982 Bombay Textile Strike?
Answer: Trade union leader Dr Datta Samant led the 1982 Bombay Textile Strike.
Q. What does ‘disinvestment’ mean, as used in the chapter?
Answer: Disinvestment means the government selling its share in public-sector companies.
Q. How many workers does coal mining alone employ in India, per the chapter?
Answer: Coal mines alone employ 5.5 lakh workers.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. What did classical sociologists like Marx, Weber and Durkheim associate with industrialisation?
Answer: They associated industry with urbanisation, the loss of face-to-face relationships found in rural areas (where people worked their own farms or for a landlord they knew), and their replacement by anonymous, professional relationships in factories and workplaces.
Q. State the organised-sector definition given in the chapter, and the size of the informal sector in India.
Answer: According to one definition, the organised sector consists of all units employing ten or more people throughout the year; these have to be registered with the government so that their employees get proper salaries or wages, pension and other benefits. Over 90% of all work in India, whether in agriculture, industry or services, is in the unorganised or informal sector.
Q. Give the book’s Parle-Coca Cola example of liberalisation, with both figures.
Answer: Coca-Cola bought Parle Drinks. Parle’s annual turnover was ₹250 crore, while Coca-Cola’s advertising budget alone was ₹400 crore, a scale of advertising that pushed up cola consumption across India.
Q. What happened to Modern Foods after privatisation?
Answer: Modern Foods, set up by the government to sell healthy bread cheaply, was the first company to be privatised, and 60% of its workers were forced to retire within the first five years.
Q. Describe the role of a jobber or ‘mistri’ in the Kanpur textile mills.
Answer: In the past, many workers got their jobs through jobbers, known in the Kanpur textile mills as mistris. Mistris were themselves workers and came from the same regions and communities as the workers, but because they had the owner’s backing they bossed over the workers; the mistri also put community-related pressures on the worker. Nowadays the importance of the jobber has come down.
Q. How does the chapter describe the contractor system for casual construction labour?
Answer: A contractor visits a village, offers work and loans the worker money, which covers travel to the worksite; this loan is treated as an advance wage, and the worker works without pay until it is repaid.
Q. Give the book’s Maruti Udyog Ltd example of machine-paced work.
Answer: Two cars roll off the assembly line every minute; workers get only 45 minutes of rest a day (two 7.5-minute tea breaks and one 30-minute lunch break), and most are exhausted and take voluntary retirement by age 40.
Q. What is Harry Braverman’s deskilling thesis?
Answer: Braverman argues that the use of machinery actually deskills workers. For example, whereas earlier architects and engineers had to be skilled draughtsmen, now the computer does a lot of the work for them.
Q. Distinguish a strike from a lockout, as defined in the chapter.
Answer: In a strike, workers do not go to work (often in response to harsh working conditions). In a lockout, the management shuts the gate and prevents workers from coming.
3 4-Mark Questions
Q. Explain the three social implications of India’s small organised sector, as given in the chapter.
Answer: First, very few people experience employment in large firms meeting people from other regions and backgrounds; most work is in small-scale workplaces where personal relationships, not fixed rules, decide raises or job loss. Second, very few Indians have secure, benefit-bearing jobs, and two-thirds of those who do work for the government; government employment has helped overcome boundaries of caste, religion and region, and one sociologist has argued that this is why there have never been communal riots in a place like Bhilai, whose public-sector steel plant employs people from all over India (others may question this). Third, because so few informal-sector workers are union members, they lack the experience of fighting collectively for fair wages and safe conditions; the government has laws to monitor the unorganised sector, but in practice they are left to the whims and fancies of the employer or contractor.
Q. Explain the bidi industry’s full production chain, from the forest to the pan shop.
Answer: Villagers in forested villages pluck tendu leaves and sell them to the forest department or a private contractor, who resells them to the forest department; a person can collect about 100 bundles of 50 leaves each in a day. The government auctions the leaves to bidi factory owners, who give them to contractors, who supply tobacco and leaves to home-based workers, mostly women, who dampen, cut, fill and tie the bidis. The contractor collects the finished bidis and sells them to the manufacturer, who roasts them and adds a brand label; the manufacturer sells to a distributor, who sells to wholesalers, who finally sell to neighbourhood pan shops.
Q. Describe the working conditions in Indian mining, as given in the chapter.
Answer: Coal mines alone employ 5.5 lakh workers. The Mines Act, 1952 (now part of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Condition Code, 2020) fixes maximum weekly hours, requires overtime pay and lays down safety rules, but smaller mines and quarries often ignore these, and sub-contracting is widespread with many contractors failing to keep proper worker registers. Underground miners face flooding, fire, roof collapse, gas emission and ventilation failure, leading to diseases like tuberculosis and silicosis; overground miners work through heat and rain and face blasting injuries. Mining companies are supposed to restore the land after mining, but the book notes plainly that ‘they don’t do this.’
Q. Explain Box 5.1’s account of ‘Time Slavery’ in the IT sector.
Answer: An average IT workday runs 10 to 12 hours, with ‘night outs’, staying overnight for deadlines, not uncommon. This is partly due to the time difference with US client sites, making conference calls fall in the Indian evening, and partly because outsourced project costs and timelines are underestimated in terms of eight-hour ‘mandays’, forcing extra hours. ‘Flexi-time’ in theory offers freedom to choose hours, but in practice means working as long as it takes; employees also stay late from peer pressure or to appear hardworking to the boss even without real pressure.
Q. Narrate the 1982 Bombay Textile Strike as described in the chapter.
Answer: Led by trade union leader Dr Datta Samant, the strike demanded better wages and the right to form their own union. It lasted nearly two years and affected nearly a quarter of a million, about 2.5 lakh, workers and their families. Workers eventually returned to work out of desperation; nearly one lakh lost their jobs, going back to villages, taking up casual labour, or moving to powerloom towns like Bhiwandi, Malegaon and Icchalkaranji. Mill owners did not invest in modernisation and are now trying to sell the mill land to real-estate developers for luxury apartments.
Q. How did liberalisation change employment patterns through outsourcing, according to the chapter?
Answer: Companies reduced permanent staff and outsourced work to smaller companies or homes, including globally by multinationals seeking cheap labour in countries like India. Small companies competing for orders from big companies keep wages low and working conditions are often poor, and it becomes harder for unions to organise in small firms. Almost all companies, even government ones, now practise some form of outsourcing and contracting, but the trend is especially visible in the private sector.
Q. Compare the working conditions of migrant workers in fish-processing plants with home-based bidi workers.
Answer: Fish-processing migrant workers are mostly single young women from Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, housed 10-12 to a small room and sometimes sharing shifts; young women are seen as ‘submissive’ workers, and the migrants have little time to socialise beyond other migrants, which takes people towards loneliness and vulnerability, though for many young women it also represents some independence and economic autonomy. Home-based bidi workers, mostly women working from their own homes, are paid on a piece-rate basis for pieces made and supplied raw material by an agent; the book does not describe them as migrants; their work is home-based rather than in a plant.
4 6-Mark Questions
Q. Discuss how liberalisation since the 1990s has changed Indian industry, using the chapter’s own examples.
Answer: Since the 1990s, the government has followed a policy of liberalisation: private and foreign firms have been encouraged into sectors once reserved for government (telecom, civil aviation, power), licenses are no longer required to open industries, and foreign products are now easily available. Liberalisation let multinationals buy Indian companies, while some Indian companies are becoming multinationals: Coca-Cola bought Parle Drinks (Parle’s turnover was ₹250 crore against Coca-Cola’s ₹400 crore advertising budget alone), pushing up cola consumption and displacing traditional drinks. The government has also pursued disinvestment, selling its share in public-sector firms; Modern Foods, the first company privatised, forced 60% of its workers to retire within five years. Companies increasingly outsource work to smaller firms or homes, which keeps wages low and makes union organising harder, a trend visible even in government companies but especially in the private sector. Overall, India remains largely agricultural, the service sector and urban middle class are growing, but secure jobs remain rare and government employment, once a major route to well-being, is shrinking, while liberalisation and privatisation appear linked worldwide to rising income inequality.
Q. ‘Industrialisation reduces some inequalities while creating others.’ Discuss with examples from the chapter.
Answer: Industrialisation reduces some social inequalities: caste distinctions do not matter any more on trains, buses or in cyber cafes. Yet older forms of discrimination may persist even inside new factories and workplaces, and while some social inequality narrows, economic or income inequality is rising: social and income inequality often overlap, for instance in the domination of upper-caste men in well-paying professions like medicine, law and journalism, and women are frequently paid less than men for similar work. The organised sector, where formal protections exist, employs a small share of Indians; over 90% of work is unorganised, where personal relationships rather than rules govern pay and job security, and very few workers get secure, benefit-bearing jobs. So industrialisation’s promise of equality is real but partial: it removes some traditional markers of inequality while allowing new economic inequalities, and some old ones, to persist alongside it.
Q. Describe how work is actually carried out in Indian industry, using the chapter’s account of managers, machinery and the IT sector.
Answer: A manager’s basic task is to control workers and extract more work, either by extending hours or increasing output within the same time; machinery raises production but risks replacing workers, which both Marx and Gandhi saw as a danger to employment. Textile workers often described themselves as extensions of the machine; Ramcharan, a Kanpur weaver since the 1940s, said weaving is done under a continuous gaze and the focus must be on the machine. At Maruti Udyog Ltd, two cars roll off the line every minute; workers get only 45 minutes of rest a day and are mostly exhausted and retired voluntarily by 40, while outsourced, just-in-time parts delivery keeps costs low but keeps workers tense. Even in the services sector, software professionals, though middle-class and supposedly self-motivated, work under Taylorist, machine-like conditions, described in Box 5.1 as ‘Time Slavery’: 10-12 hour days, ‘night outs’ for deadlines, and ‘flexi-time’ that in practice means working as long as needed. This raises the sociological question of whether such work truly builds skill: Harry Braverman argues machinery instead deskills workers, since earlier architects and engineers had to be skilled draughtsmen, whereas now the computer does a lot of the work for them.
Q. Write a critical note on trade unions and strikes in India, using the 1982 Bombay Textile Strike as your central example.
Answer: In a strike, workers do not go to work, often in response to harsh working conditions; in a lockout, management shuts the gate instead and keeps workers out. Calling a strike is difficult because managers may use substitute labour and workers struggle without wages. The 1982 Bombay Textile Strike, led by Dr Datta Samant, is the chapter’s central case: demanding better wages and the right to form their own union, it lasted nearly two years and affected about 2.5 lakh workers and their families. Desperation eventually forced workers back to work; nearly one lakh lost their jobs, dispersing to villages, casual labour, or powerloom towns like Bhiwandi, Malegaon and Icchalkaranji. Mill owners, instead of modernising, are now trying to sell the mill land to real-estate developers for luxury apartments, which the book frames as a battle over who gets to define Mumbai’s future, the workers who built it, or the owners and developers who now hold the land. The episode shows both the real power unions can mobilise and the real costs, in lost jobs, that a long strike can leave behind.
5 Case Studies
(A) 1 mark Which sector, organised or unorganised, does Rajesh’s auto-parts unit belong to, and why?
Answer: The unorganised (informal) sector, because it employs fewer than ten people, is not registered with the government, and does not guarantee Rajesh wages or benefits.
(B) 2 marks Using the chapter’s own account of outsourcing, explain why a large car company might rely on small units like Rajesh’s instead of hiring him directly.
Answer: The chapter explains that companies increasingly outsource work to smaller companies to keep costs low, since small firms compete for orders from big companies and therefore keep wages low. (Your own analysis, not the book’s: this also leaves workers like Rajesh without work when the big company’s orders are delayed.)
(C) 3 marks Compare Suresh’s situation with the chapter’s account of ‘badli’ workers and contract labour, and explain what risk Suresh is right to worry about.
Answer: Suresh currently holds a secure, salaried job with benefits, unlike a badli worker who substitutes for a permanent worker without gaining the same status. But his worry reflects a real trend the chapter describes: companies are reducing permanent staff and outsourcing or contracting work instead, so even secure, regular salaried jobs like Suresh’s are becoming more insecure as firms replace permanent posts with contract labour.