Manufacturing Industries
Manufacturing and its importance
Explain why manufacturing matters and classify industries.
What is manufacturing? Turning raw materials into more valuable products, in large quantities: paper from wood, sugar from sugarcane, steel from iron ore, aluminium from bauxite. People who do this work are in the secondary sector. A country's economic strength is judged by how well its manufacturing has grown.
Harish goes shopping. At Diwali, Harish and his parents buy shoes, clothes, utensils, sugar, tea and diyas. How can so much be made? His father explains: shoes, clothes and sugar come from machines in large industries, some utensils from small industries, and diyas from artisans working at home (household industry).
Why manufacturing matters.
- It modernises farming, and gives people jobs outside farming, so fewer depend only on farm income.
- It is needed to remove unemployment and poverty. That was the idea behind public sector and joint sector industries. Setting up factories in tribal and backward areas was meant to reduce the gap between regions.
- Exports of manufactured goods bring in foreign exchange.
- Countries that turn raw materials into higher-value goods become prosperous.
Farms and factories need each other. Agro-industries buy farm produce as raw material, and sell farmers irrigation pumps, fertilisers, pesticides, PVC pipes, machines and tools. That has helped farmers grow more, more efficiently. Today, being self-sufficient is not enough: our goods must match the quality of goods sold around the world.
Five ways to sort industries.
- Raw material: agro-based (cotton, jute, silk, woollen textiles, rubber, sugar, tea, coffee, edible oil) or mineral-based (iron and steel, cement, aluminium, machine tools, petrochemicals).
- Main role: basic or key industries make things other industries use as raw material (iron and steel, copper and aluminium smelting); consumer industries make goods for us to use directly (sugar, toothpaste, paper, fans).
- Capital: a small-scale industry is one whose assets stay under a set limit, now rupees one crore.
- Ownership: public (government: BHEL, SAIL); private (TISCO, Bajaj Auto, Dabur); joint (government and private together: Oil India Ltd.); cooperative (owned by the producers of the raw material or the workers, who share profit and loss: sugar mills in Maharashtra, coir industry in Kerala).
- Bulk: heavy (iron and steel) or light (electrical goods).
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