Essay of development of industries BY rearguard Essay on Development of Modern Industries In India under the British Rule An important development in the second half of the nineteenth century was the establishment of large-scale machine-based industries in India. The machine age in India began when cotton textile, jute and coal-mining industries were started in the sass. The first textile mill was started In Bombay by Showcase Anybody In 1853, and the first Jute mill In Risers (Bengal) In 1855. These Industries expanded slowly but continuously. In 1879 there were 56 cotton textile mills in India employing nearly 3,000 persons.
In 1882 there were 20 Jute mills, most of them in Bengal, employing nearly 20,000 persons. By 1905, India had 206 cotton mills employing nearly 196,000 persons. In 1901 there were over 36 Jute mills employing nearly 1 15,000 persons. The coal-mining industry employed nearly one lake of persons in 1906. Other mechanical industries which developed during the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century’s were cotton gins and presses, rice, flour and timber mills, leather tanneries, woolen textiles, sugar mills, iron and steel works, and such mineral Industries as salt, mica and saltwater.
Cement, paper, matches, sugar and glass industries developed during the sass. But all these industries had a very stunted growth. Most of the modern Indian industries were owned or controlled by British capital. Foreign capitalists were attracted to Indian Industry by the prospect of high profit. Labor was extremely cheap; raw materials were readily and cheaply available; and for many goods, India and Its neighbors provided a ready market. For many Indian Products, such as tea, Jute and manganese, there was a ready demand the world over.
On the other hand, profitable investment opportunities at home were getting fewer. At the same time, the animal government and officials were willing to provide all help show all favors. Foreign capital easily overwhelmed Indian capital in many of the industries. Only in the cotton textile industry did Indians have a large share from the beginning, and in the sass, the sugar industry was developed by Indians. Indian capitalist also had to struggle from the beginning against the power of British managing agencies and British banks. Managing agencies dominating that field.
In many cases even Indian-owned impasses were controlled by foreign-owned or controlled managing agencies. Indians also found it difficult to get credit from banks most of which were dominated by British financiers. Even when they could get loans they had to pay high interest rates while foreigners could borrow on much easier terms. Of course, gradually Indians began to develop their own banks and insurance companies. In 1914, foreign banks held over 70 per cent of all bank deposits in India; by 1937, their share had decreased to 57 per cent.
British enterprises in India also took advantage of their close connection with British appliers of machinery and equipment, shipping, insurance companies, marketing agencies, government officials and political leaders to maintain their dominant position in Indian economic life. Moreover, the government followed a conscious policy of favoring foreign capital as against Indian capital. The railway policy of the government also discriminated against Indian enterprise; railway freight rates encouraged foreign imports at the cost of trade in domestic products.
It was more difficult and costlier to distribute Indian goods than to distribute imported goods. Another serious weakness of Indian industrial effort was the almost complete absence of heavy or capital goods industries, without which there can be no rapid and independent development of industries. India had no big plants to produce iron and steel, or to manufacture machinery. A few petty repair workshops represented engineering industries and a few iron and brass foundries represented metallurgical industries.
The first steel in India was produced only in 1913. Thus India lacked such basic industries as steel, metallurgy, machine, chemical and oil. India also lagged behind in the development of electric power. Apart from machine-based industries, the nine! Tenth century also witnessed the growth of plantation industries such as indigo, tea and coffee. They were almost exclusively European in ownership. Indigo was used as a dye in textile manufacture. Indigo manufacture was introduced into India at the end of the eighteenth century and flourished in Bengal and Briar.
Indigo planters gained notoriety for their oppression over the peasants who were compelled by them to cultivate indigo. In his play Nell DARPA in 1860. The invention off synthetic dye gave a big blow to the indigo industry and it gradually declined. The tea industry developed in Assam, Bengal, south India and the hills of Himalaya Pradesh after 1850. Being foreign-owned, it was helped by the government with grants of rent-free land and other facilities. In time, the use of tea spread all over India and it also became an important item of export.
Coffee plantations developed during this period in south India. The plantation and other foreign-owned industries were of hardly any advantage to the Indian people. Their profits went out of the country. A large part of their salary bill was spent on highly paid foreign staff. They purchased most of their equipment abroad. Most of their technical staff was foreign. Most of their products were sold in foreign markets and the foreign exchange so earned was utilized by Britain. The only advantage that Indians got out of these industries was the creation of unskilled Jobs.
Most of the workers in these enterprises were, however, extremely low paid, and they worked under extremely harsh conditions for very long hours. Moreover, conditions of near-slavery prevailed in the plantations. On the whole, industrial progress in India was exceedingly slow and painful. It was costly confined to cotton and Jute industries and tea plantations in the nineteenth century, and to sugar and cement in the sass. As late as 1946, cotton and Jute textiles accounted for 40 per cent of all workers employed in factories.
In terms of production as well as employment, the modern industrial development of India was paltry compared with the economic development of other countries or those with Indian’s economic needs. It did not, in fact, compensate even for the displacement of the indigenous handicrafts; it had little effect on the problems of poverty and overcrowding of latrine’s of Indian industrialization is brought out by the act that out of a population of 357 million in 1951 only about 2. 3 million were employed in modern industrial enterprises, remorse, the decay and decline of the urban and rural handicraft industries continued unabated after 1858.
The Indian Planning Commission has calculated that the number of persons engaged in processing and manufacturing fell from 10. 3 million in 1901 to 8 million in 1951 even though the population increased by nearly 40 per cent. These old indigenous industries. Moreover, even the modern industries had to develop without government help and often in opposition to British policy. British manufacturers looked upon Indian textile and other industries as their rivals and put pressure on the Government of India not to encourage but rather to actively discourage industrial development in India.
Thus British policy artificially restricted and slowed down the growth of Indian industries. Furthermore, Indian industries, still in a period of infancy, needed protection. They developed at a time when Britain, France, Germany and the United States had already established powerful industries and could not therefore compete with them. In fact, all other countries, including Britain, had protected their infant industries by imposing heavy customs duties on the import of foreign manufacturers. But India was not a free country.
Its policies were determined in Britain and in the interests of British industrialists who forced a policy of Free Trade upon their colony. For the same reason the Government of India refused to give any financial or other help to the newly founded Indian industries as was being done at the time by the governments of Europe and Japan for their own infant industries. It would not even make adequate arrangements for technical education which remained extremely backward until 1951 and further contributed to industrial backwardness.
In 1939 there were only 7 engineering colleges with 2217 students in the country. Many Indian projects, for example, those concerning the construction of ships, locomotives, cars and rare planes, could not get started because of the government’s refusal to give any help. Finally, in the sass and sass under the pressure of the rising nationalist movement and the Indian capitalist class, the Government of India was forced to grant some riff protection to Indian industries. But, once again, the government discriminated against Indian-owned industries.
The Indian-owned industries such as cement, iron and steel, and glass were denied protection or given inadequate protection. On the other hand, foreign dominated industries, such as the match industry, were given the protection they desired. Moreover, British imports were given special vehemently. Another feature of Indian industrial development was that it was extremely lopsided regionally. Indian industries were concentrated only in a few regions and cities of the entry. Large parts of the country remained totally underdeveloped.
This unequal regional economic development not only led to wide regional disparities in income but also affected the level of national integration. It made the task of creating a unified Indian nation more difficult. An important social consequence of even the limited industrial development of the country was the birth and growth of two new social classes in Indian society the industrial capitalist class and the modern working class. These two classes were entirely new in Indian history because modern mines, industries and means of transport were new.
Even though these classes formed a very small part of the Indian population, they represented new technology, a new system of economic organization, new social relations, new ideas and a new outlook. They were not weighed down by the burden of old traditions, customs and styles of life. Most of all, they possessed an all-India outlook. Moreover, both of these new classes were vitally interested in the industrial development of the country. Their economic and political importance and roles were, therefore, out of all proportion to their numbers.
