Chapter 19 — 5.8 Industries in India

Industry, in the sense used in geography, is the economic activity that converts raw materials into more useful products, adding value at each stage. The farmer who grows cotton is engaged in a primary activity; the mill that spins and weaves it into cloth is a secondary activity, and that is industry; the shop that sells the cloth is a tertiary activity. Manufacturing has three marks: it uses raw materials, it needs power, and it employs labour and machines in a fixed place, the factory. The importance of industry is that it raises the value of raw materials many times, gives employment off the crowded land, earns foreign exchange, supports agriculture with fertilisers, pumps and tractors, and is the measure of a country's development; about 25 per cent of India's national income and 12 per cent of its workers are in industry, and the Government's target is to raise the share of manufacturing to 25 per cent of the economy.

Industries are classified in several ways. By the source of raw material: agro-based industries use farm products, such as cotton textiles, jute, sugar, tea, edible oil and paper; mineral-based industries use minerals, such as iron and steel, aluminium, cement, petrochemicals and chemicals; forest-based use timber, bamboo and lac; animal-based use wool, leather and dairy; and marine-based use fish.

By the nature of the product: basic or key industries supply the raw material for other industries, such as iron and steel, aluminium and petrochemicals, which are also called heavy industries because their products are heavy; consumer industries make goods for direct use, such as sugar, textiles, paper, soap and electronics, and are generally light industries. By size and capital: large-scale industries employ hundreds or thousands of workers with heavy capital, such as steel plants and cotton mills; small-scale industries employ a few workers with limited capital, such as the powerloom, the flour mill and the workshop; and cottage or household industries are carried on at home with family labour and hand tools, such as handloom weaving, pottery, basketry and the silk of Murshidabad. In India the small and medium enterprises employ more people than the large ones and the Government supports them.

By ownership: public sector industries are owned by the Government, such as the steel plants of SAIL, BHEL, ONGC and Coal India; private sector industries by individuals and companies, such as Tata Steel, Reliance and the cotton mills; joint sector by the Government and private capital together, such as Maruti in its early years; and cooperative sector by the producers, such as the Amul dairy and the sugar cooperatives of Maharashtra. The examination expects the student to place a named industry in each class.

A factory is built where the cost of making and selling its product is lowest, and the geographer's task is to explain why an industry is where it is. The factors of location are these.

Raw material. Industries whose raw material is heavy, bulky or perishable and loses weight in manufacture are drawn to its source: the iron and steel plants sit on the coal and iron ore of Chhotanagpur, the sugar mills stand in the cane fields because cane loses sugar within a day, the cement works are on the limestone, and the jute mills on the jute of the delta. Industries whose raw material is light, valuable or gains weight in manufacture, such as electronics, watches and soft drinks, can be anywhere. Power. Coal, electricity, oil and gas drive the machines; the early cotton mills of Mumbai ran on coal and later hydro-electricity from the Ghats, the aluminium smelters of Odisha and the Rihand region sit on cheap coal power because they eat electricity, and the whole Chhotanagpur belt rests on the coalfields. Labour. Industries needing much cheap labour, such as textiles, jute and garments, go where population is dense, and industries needing skilled labour, such as software and precision engineering, go where the engineers are, which is why Bengaluru has the IT industry.

Market. Industries whose product is heavy, fragile, perishable or made to the customer's order are located near the market: bakeries, breweries, furniture and printing in every city, and the cotton mills of Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Kanpur drew on the market of the plains as much as the cotton of the Deccan. Transport. Every industry needs to bring raw materials in and send goods out; the ports of Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, the railway junctions and now the highways attract industry, and the petroleum refineries stand at the ports where the crude oil lands. Water. Steel, paper, chemicals and textiles use enormous quantities of water for cooling, washing and processing, so they stand on rivers: the Hooghly for jute, the Damodar for Durgapur and Bokaro, the Subarnarekha for Jamshedpur. Site and land. Flat, cheap, well-drained land is needed for large plants, which is why industry has moved from the crowded city centres to the outskirts and the new industrial estates. Capital and banking favour the commercial cities of Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, where the capital, the banks and the entrepreneurs were. Government policy has placed the public-sector plants of Bhilai, Rourkela, Durgapur and Bokaro in backward regions on purpose and has drawn industry to Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and the new special economic zones by tax concessions, cheap land and infrastructure. And climate played a part in the past: the humid air of Mumbai and Ahmedabad kept cotton yarn from snapping, the reason the cotton mills grew there before air-conditioning.

No single factor decides a location; several act together, and the weight of each differs by industry. Once an industry is established the presence of ancillary units, skilled workers, banks and repair shops keeps it there even when the original reason has gone, an effect called industrial inertia, and the cluster grows by agglomeration, as the Hooghly jute belt and the Mumbai textile belt show.

The iron and steel industry is the basic or key industry of a modern economy, because almost every other industry uses its products: machines, railways, ships, bridges, buildings, cars, tools and utensils. It is a heavy industry, because its raw materials and its products are heavy, and this decides its location. India, with the fourth largest reserves of iron ore in the world and large coalfields close to them, is the second largest producer of crude steel after China, with about 140 million tonnes a year.

The raw materials are four. Iron ore, chiefly haematite and magnetite, of which about 1.5-2 tonnes are needed for a tonne of steel, comes from the mines of Odisha (Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Mayurbhanj), Jharkhand (Singhbhum, Noamundi, Gua), Chhattisgarh (Bailadila, Dalli-Rajhara), Karnataka (Bellary, Hospet, Kudremukh) and Goa. Coking coal, about 1 tonne per tonne of steel, comes from Jharia, Bokaro, Karanpura and Giridih in Jharkhand and Raniganj in West Bengal; India's coking coal is limited and of poor quality, so some is imported from Australia. Limestone and dolomite, used as flux to remove impurities, come from Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand, and manganese, which hardens steel, from Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka. Add to these water in huge quantities for cooling and cleaning, and power.

Because 4-5 tonnes of raw material go into a tonne of steel and all of it is heavy, the plant must be where the raw materials are cheapest to bring together. In India that place is the Chhotanagpur plateau and its margins in Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh, where iron ore, coking coal, limestone, dolomite and manganese all lie within 200-300 km of one another, with the Damodar and Subarnarekha for water, the DVC and the coalfields for power, the dense population of Bihar and Bengal for cheap labour, the Kolkata port and the railway network for transport, and the market of the Kolkata industrial belt. Steel is made by the blast furnace, in which iron ore, coke and limestone are smelted to pig iron, and the basic oxygen furnace or electric arc furnace, in which the pig iron is refined to steel; an integrated plant does everything from the ore to the finished rolled steel on one site, while a mini steel plant makes steel from scrap in an electric furnace and can be anywhere near a market.

The Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), set up in 1973, runs the public-sector plants; Tata Steel is the oldest private producer; and JSW, Jindal, Essar and RINL at Visakhapatnam are the other large producers, with several hundred mini plants. The National Steel Policy aims at 300 million tonnes by 2030.

The first successful steel plant in India was the Tata Iron and Steel Company (TISCO), now Tata Steel, founded by Jamsetji Tata's sons in 1907 at Sakchi, renamed Jamshedpur, in Jharkhand, which began production in 1911. It stands at the meeting of the Subarnarekha and Kharkai rivers, gets its iron ore from Noamundi and Gua in Singhbhum 50-100 km away, its coal from Jharia and West Bokaro, its limestone from Sundargarh, its water from the two rivers and the Dimna lake, and sends its steel by rail to Kolkata 250 km away and the whole country. It is the largest private plant, with about 10 million tonnes, and the city is India's first planned industrial town. The Indian Iron and Steel Company (IISCO) at Burnpur-Kulti near Asansol in West Bengal, begun in 1918-22, lies on the Raniganj coalfield itself with ore from Gua and water from the Damodar; it is now SAIL's IISCO Steel Plant. Visvesvaraya Iron and Steel Works at Bhadravati in Karnataka, begun in 1923, used the ore of the Baba Budan hills and at first charcoal from the forests and later hydro-electricity from Jog falls; it is the one old plant outside the eastern belt.

After Independence the Second Five Year Plan built three integrated plants in the public sector, each with foreign collaboration, all in the eastern belt. Rourkela in Odisha (1959), with German help, uses ore from Sundargarh and Keonjhar, coal from Jharia and Talcher, limestone from Purnapani and water from the Brahmani and Koel rivers. Bhilai in Chhattisgarh (1959), with Soviet help, uses ore from Dalli-Rajhara 90 km away, coal from Korba and Jharia, limestone from Nandini and water from the Tandula dam; it is the largest and most profitable SAIL plant and makes the country's railway rails. Durgapur in West Bengal (1962), with British help, stands on the Damodar 160 km from Kolkata, on the Raniganj coalfield, with ore from Noamundi and Gua, limestone from Birmitrapur and Gangpur, power from the DVC and water from the Durgapur barrage; it makes alloy steel as well and gave rise to the Durgapur industrial town. The Fourth Plan added Bokaro in Jharkhand (1972), with Soviet help, on the Bokaro coalfield beside the Damodar with ore from Kiriburu and Meghahatuburu, the largest of the early public plants. Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh (1992), India's first shore-based plant, run by Rashtriya Ispat Nigam Limited, uses ore from Bailadila by rail and imported coal by sea and exports through the port. Salem in Tamil Nadu makes stainless steel, and Vijayanagar (JSW) at Toranagallu near Bellary in Karnataka, on the Hospet ore, is now the largest single plant in India with about 12 million tonnes. Jindal at Raigarh and Angul, Essar at Hazira in Gujarat, and Tata's new plant at Kalinganagar in Odisha are the other large producers.

The examination expects the location and the reasons for four or five of these, above all Durgapur, Jamshedpur, Bokaro, Bhilai and Rourkela, and the general reason why all but Bhadravati, Salem, Vijayanagar and Visakhapatnam lie within the Chhotanagpur triangle.

The cotton textile industry is the oldest, largest and most widespread industry of India, employing about 45 million people directly and indirectly, more than any other, and India is the second largest producer and exporter of cotton cloth and yarn in the world. India spun and wove cotton for three thousand years, and the muslin of Dhaka and the calico of Calicut were sold in Rome and London; the handloom was ruined by the machine-made cloth of Lancashire in the nineteenth century, and the first Indian mill was built at Mumbai in 1854 by Cowasjee Nanabhoy Davar, followed by Ahmedabad in 1861. Today the industry has three sectors: the mill sector of large spinning and weaving mills, the powerloom sector of small workshops that weave mill yarn and now make most of the cloth, and the handloom sector of household weavers, protected by the Government and important in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

The industry's raw material, cotton, is light, not perishable and does not lose weight in manufacture, so the mill need not be at the cotton field; other factors decide its location. The industry grew first at Mumbai, the 'Cottonopolis of India', for these reasons: the black-soil cotton fields of the Deccan were behind it, connected by rail from the 1860s; the port imported machinery and long-staple cotton and exported yarn and cloth; the humid climate of the coast kept the yarn from breaking; hydro-electricity came from the Tata power stations in the Western Ghats after 1915; cheap labour came from the Konkan and the Deccan; the Parsi and Gujarati merchants provided capital and enterprise; and the city itself and the plains behind it were the market. Ahmedabad, the 'Manchester of India', grew for similar reasons, on the cotton of Gujarat with the capital of its old trading families, cheaper land and labour than Mumbai and the market of the north. Coimbatore, the 'Manchester of South India', grew on the cotton of the Tamil Nadu plains, the hydro-electricity of the Pykara and Mettur schemes and cheap labour, and Tamil Nadu now has the largest number of mills, mostly spinning.

The industry is now spread through Maharashtra (Mumbai, Solapur, Nagpur, Pune), Gujarat (Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Rajkot), Tamil Nadu (Coimbatore, Madurai, Tiruppur, Erode, Chennai), Uttar Pradesh (Kanpur, the 'Manchester of the North'), Madhya Pradesh (Indore, Gwalior), Karnataka (Bengaluru, Davangere), Punjab (Ludhiana, Amritsar), Rajasthan (Bhilwara), Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal (Kolkata, Howrah, Serampore, Murshidabad), and Tiruppur has become the knitwear and garment export capital. The problems are old machinery in the mills, competition from the powerlooms and from synthetic fibres, the sickness and closure of many Mumbai and Ahmedabad mills since the 1980s, shortage of long-staple cotton, erratic power, and competition from China, Bangladesh and Vietnam in the export market; the National Textile Corporation was set up to take over sick mills.

The jute industry is the industry most closely identified with West Bengal. It makes sacking (gunny bags), hessian, carpet backing, twine, rope, tarpaulin, and now decorative fabrics, bags, geotextiles for roads and embankments, and jute-based composites, from the fibre of the delta. The first mill was set up at Rishra on the Hooghly in 1855 by the Scot George Acland, and by 1947 the Hooghly banks held the largest concentration of jute mills in the world. India today has about 90 jute mills, about 70 of them in West Bengal, with about 2.5 lakh workers directly employed and 40 lakh farm families supplying the fibre, and is the largest producer of jute goods in the world, followed by Bangladesh.

The industry is concentrated in a narrow belt about 100 km long and 3 km wide along both banks of the Hooghly from Bansberia and Tribeni in the north to Budge Budge and Birlapur in the south, through Titagarh, Barrackpore, Naihati, Shyamnagar, Jagatdal, Serampore, Rishra, Howrah and Uluberia. The reasons for this concentration are the classic set. The raw jute is grown in the delta all around, in Nadia, Murshidabad, Hooghly and the 24 Parganas, and the mills sit in the middle of the field. Cheap water transport on the Hooghly and its connected rivers brings the bales to the mill gate and carries the goods to the port; the Kolkata port exported the goods and imported the machinery, and the railways of the Eastern and South Eastern lines converge here. The Raniganj coalfield, 200 km away, supplied cheap coal and the DVC and the Kolkata thermal stations now supply power. Abundant fresh water from the Hooghly is needed for processing the fibre. Cheap labour came from the crowded districts of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha as well as Bengal, and most mill hands are still Hindi-speaking migrants. The humid climate keeps the fibre supple. Capital and management were supplied by the British managing agencies of Kolkata and later by the Marwari houses. And the market for gunny bags was the whole grain, sugar and cement trade of India and the export trade of the world. Once established, industrial inertia and agglomeration have kept the industry here.

The industry's problems are equally classic. The Partition of 1947 gave three-quarters of the jute land to East Pakistan and all the mills to India, so the mills starved for fibre until the jute area of West Bengal, Bihar and Assam was expanded. Bangladesh now competes with newer mills and cheaper fibre. Synthetic substitutes, polythene, polypropylene and paper, have taken the packaging market, and bulk handling of grain has cut the need for sacks. The machinery of the mills is old, the productivity low and labour trouble and lockouts frequent; many mills are sick or closed. And the price of raw jute swings with the monsoon. The Jute Corporation of India buys the fibre at a support price, the Jute Packaging Materials Act of 1987 reserves the packing of foodgrain and sugar for jute, the National Jute Board promotes diversified products, and the industry is turning to the eco-friendly market for jute bags, geotextiles and composites as its future.

The sugar industry is the second largest agro-based industry of India after textiles. India is the largest consumer and the second largest producer of sugar, with about 500 mills, about 35 million tonnes of sugar, and about 5 crore cane farmers and 5 lakh mill workers. Because cane is heavy, bulky and loses its sucrose within 24 hours of cutting, and because about ten tonnes of cane make one tonne of sugar, the mills are placed in the cane fields, each drawing from a radius of 15-25 km, and the industry follows the cane belts exactly. About half the mills are in the northern belt of Uttar Pradesh (Meerut, Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar, Bijnor, Gorakhpur, Deoria), Bihar and Haryana; the rest in the peninsular belt of Maharashtra (Ahmednagar, Pune, Kolhapur, Sangli, Solapur), Karnataka (Belagavi, Mandya), Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. The industry has been shifting south since the 1960s because the peninsular cane has a higher sugar content and a longer crushing season, the cooperative mills of Maharashtra are efficient, and the tropical climate lets the mills run eight or nine months a year against five or six in the north. The industry's problems are the short crushing season and idle mills for half the year, the low sugar content of northern cane, old machinery, the swing of cane output with the monsoon and the price, and the arrears owed to farmers; its by-products, molasses for alcohol and ethanol, bagasse for paper and power, and press mud for manure, are now important and the ethanol-blending programme uses a growing share of the cane. In West Bengal there are a few small mills at Plassey (Nadia) and Ahmedpur (Birbhum), and most cane is made into gur.

The tea industry processes the plucked leaf on the estate itself, since the leaf must be withered within hours, so the factories are on the gardens of Assam, north Bengal and the Nilgiris; Kolkata is the largest tea auction centre and the headquarters of the trade. The edible oil industry crushes groundnut in Gujarat, mustard in Rajasthan and Bengal and coconut in Kerala, and refines imported palm oil at the ports. The paper industry, using bamboo, wood, bagasse and waste paper, is at Titagarh, Kankinara and Naihati in West Bengal, Nepanagar (newsprint) in Madhya Pradesh, Ballarpur in Maharashtra, Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh, Dandeli in Karnataka and Jagadhri in Haryana. The food-processing industry, from flour and rice mills to dairy, fruit juice, biscuits and packaged food, is the fastest-growing agro-industry and is spread everywhere near the market. The leather industry of Kanpur, Chennai, Kolkata (Bantala) and Agra and the silk industry of Murshidabad, Bengaluru, Mysuru and Varanasi complete the list of the traditional agro-based industries.

The petroleum industry refines crude oil into petrol, diesel, kerosene, aviation fuel, LPG, naphtha, lubricants, bitumen and wax. India has about 23 refineries with a capacity of about 250 million tonnes, the fourth largest in the world, and since domestic crude from Assam, Gujarat and Bombay High meets only a fifth of the demand, most refineries stand at the ports where imported crude lands or at the end of pipelines from them: Jamnagar in Gujarat (Reliance, the largest refinery complex in the world), Vadinar, Koyali near Vadodara, Mumbai (two), Mangaluru, Kochi, Chennai, Visakhapatnam, Haldia and Paradip on the coast; and Digboi (the oldest, 1901), Guwahati, Bongaigaon and Numaligarh on the Assam oilfields, Barauni in Bihar, Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, Panipat in Haryana, Bathinda in Punjab and Bina in Madhya Pradesh inland on pipelines. Refineries are located at the port or the field because crude oil is cheapest to move by tanker and pipeline and the products are lighter to distribute by pipeline, rail and road to the market.

The petrochemical industry takes naphtha and natural gas from the refineries and makes from them synthetic fibres (polyester, nylon, acrylic), plastics (polythene, PVC, polypropylene), synthetic rubber, detergents, solvents, fertilisers and a thousand other products, which have replaced cotton, jute, wood, metal and glass in daily use. It began at Trombay near Mumbai in 1966 with the Union Carbide and National Organic Chemical Industries plants and grew at Vadodara (IPCL, 1973), Hazira and Jamnagar in Gujarat, which is now the petrochemical state of India, Panipat, Nagothane in Maharashtra, Auraiya in Uttar Pradesh on the gas pipeline from Bombay High, Mangaluru, Dahej and Haldia in West Bengal, whose petrochemical complex of 2000 supplies the plastics industries of eastern India.

The chemical industry is the third largest of India's industries by value and has two branches. Inorganic chemicals, sulphuric acid, nitric acid, soda ash, caustic soda, chlorine and alkalis, are made near the market and the raw material (salt at Mithapur in Gujarat, sulphur from the refineries) at Mumbai, Vadodara, Kolkata, Chennai, Kanpur and Haldia. Organic chemicals, dyes, drugs, pesticides and paints, cluster around the petrochemical centres and in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Hyderabad (the pharmaceutical capital, with the Genome Valley), Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata. India is the third largest producer of pharmaceuticals by volume and the largest exporter of generic medicines. The fertiliser industry makes nitrogenous fertiliser (urea) from natural gas and naphtha and phosphatic fertiliser from imported rock phosphate, at Sindri (the first, 1951, in Jharkhand), Nangal, Trombay, Kalol, Vadodara, Kota, Panipat, Namrup, Haldia, Durgapur, Kakinada and Paradip, near the refineries, the gas pipelines and the farm markets; India is the second largest consumer of fertiliser in the world.

The engineering industry makes machines and metal goods of every kind, from heavy machinery, machine tools, electrical equipment and railway rolling stock to bicycles, sewing machines and hand tools, and it is the largest industrial group of India by output and employment after textiles, and the largest exporter. Heavy engineering was built in the public sector after 1956: Heavy Engineering Corporation at Ranchi makes steel-plant and mining equipment; Bharat Heavy Electricals (BHEL) at Bhopal, Haridwar, Hyderabad, Tiruchirappalli and Bengaluru makes turbines, generators, boilers and transformers; Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT) at Bengaluru, Pinjore, Kalamassery and Hyderabad made machine tools and watches. Railway equipment is made at Chittaranjan Locomotive Works in West Bengal (electric locomotives, 1950), Banaras Locomotive Works at Varanasi (diesel and now electric), the Integral Coach Factory at Perambur, Chennai, the Rail Coach Factory at Kapurthala, the Modern Coach Factory at Raebareli, the wheel and axle plant at Yelahanka, Bengaluru, and the private wagon works of Titagarh and Texmaco at Belgharia in West Bengal, whose Howrah-Hooghly belt has been the country's wagon-building centre since the nineteenth century. Shipbuilding is at Kochi (the largest, Cochin Shipyard), Visakhapatnam (Hindustan Shipyard), Mumbai (Mazagon Dock, warships and submarines), Kolkata (Garden Reach Shipbuilders, naval ships) and Goa. Aircraft are built by Hindustan Aeronautics at Bengaluru, Nashik, Kanpur, Koraput and Lucknow, and the defence ordnance factories are at Ichapur and Cossipore in West Bengal, Jabalpur, Kanpur and Pune.

The automobile industry has grown since the entry of Maruti-Suzuki in 1983 and the liberalisation of 1991 into the fourth largest in the world by production, with about 25 million vehicles a year including two-wheelers, and it employs about 3.5 crore people directly and indirectly. It clusters in four regions where markets, skilled labour, ports, steel and the component makers meet: the Delhi-Gurugram-Manesar belt (Maruti, Hero, Honda); the Pune-Chakan-Mumbai belt (Tata Motors, Bajaj, Mahindra, Mercedes, Volkswagen); the Chennai-Sriperumbudur-Oragadam belt, the 'Detroit of Asia' (Hyundai, Ford, Renault-Nissan, Ashok Leyland, TVS); and the Sanand-Halol belt of Gujarat (Tata, Ford, Suzuki, MG), with Jamshedpur (Tata trucks), Lucknow, Indore-Pithampur, Bengaluru-Hosur (Toyota, TVS, Volvo) and Kolkata (Hindustan Motors at Uttarpara, once maker of the Ambassador, closed 2014) as older centres. The electric-vehicle industry is now growing in the same clusters.

The electronics and electrical industry makes computers, telephones, televisions, semiconductors, consumer appliances and telecommunications equipment; it began in the public sector with Bharat Electronics at Bengaluru (1954) and ITI and has grown with the mobile-phone assembly plants of Noida-Greater Noida, Sriperumbudur near Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune, so that India is now the second largest maker of mobile phones. The Salt Lake Electronics Complex and the Falta special economic zone are the electronics centres of West Bengal. The Government's production-linked incentive schemes and the semiconductor mission at Dholera in Gujarat aim to build the missing chip industry.

The information technology (IT) industry writes software, runs data centres, provides IT-enabled services such as call centres, back-office processing and medical transcription (BPO and ITES), and now builds artificial intelligence, cloud and digital services for the world. It is not manufacturing in the old sense, since its raw material is knowledge and its product is sent by wire, but it is counted as an industry and has become, since the 1990s, the most valuable and the fastest-growing sector of the Indian economy: it earns about 250 billion dollars a year, most of it from export to the United States and Europe, employs about 5.5 million people directly, more than any other modern industry, and accounts for about 8 per cent of the national income. Its growth rests on India's large pool of English-speaking engineers, the low cost of skilled labour, the twelve-hour time difference from the United States that lets work continue round the clock, the satellite and fibre links that made distance irrelevant, and the policy of the 1991 reforms and the Software Technology Parks of India (1991), which gave tax-free export zones with their own data links.

The location of the IT industry follows a different logic from steel or jute. It needs no raw material, water or bulk transport; it needs skilled labour, which means cities with engineering colleges and research institutions; infrastructure of reliable power, fibre-optic links and airports; a pleasant living environment to attract and keep professionals; land for campuses and technology parks; and government support. It has therefore concentrated in a few cities. Bengaluru, the 'Silicon Valley of India', leads, on the base of its public-sector electronics and aircraft industries, the Indian Institute of Science and its engineering colleges, its mild climate and the Electronics City of 1978 where Infosys and Wipro grew. Hyderabad (HITEC City, 'Cyberabad'), Chennai, Pune, Mumbai, the Delhi-Noida-Gurugram region, Kolkata (Salt Lake Sector V and New Town, with TCS, Wipro, Cognizant and IBM), Thiruvananthapuram (Technopark, the first in India, 1990) and Kochi, Chandigarh-Mohali, Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar (GIFT City), Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore, Jaipur and Indore follow. The large companies, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, HCL and Tech Mahindra, and the Indian centres of the global firms, work from these campuses, and the Government's Digital India programme and the spread of the internet have created a domestic market of start-ups in e-commerce, payments and services as well.

The IT industry is a footloose industry, free of the pull of raw material and able to locate wherever the people are, and its environmental impact is small, though its power and water use, its traffic, its effect on land prices and the e-waste of its equipment are real. It is linked to the wider knowledge industries of biotechnology (Bengaluru, Hyderabad), pharmaceuticals, research and design, education, film (Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata) and media, in which India's advantage is again its trained people. The examination asks for the factors of location of the IT industry, the reasons for Bengaluru's lead, and the IT centres of West Bengal.

Industries do not spread evenly; they cluster where the factors of location coincide, in industrial regions, which are areas of dense industrial activity with many linked factories, a large industrial workforce, good transport and one or more big cities. India has eight major industrial regions and a number of minor ones, and the examination asks for their location, basis and main industries.

The Mumbai-Pune region, the oldest and largest, grew on the cotton textile industry of Mumbai and has diversified into petroleum refining and petrochemicals at Trombay, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, engineering, automobiles at Pune-Chakan, electronics, film and finance, with Thane, Kalyan, Bhiwandi, Nashik and Pune as its other centres; its basis is the port, the Deccan cotton, the Ghats hydro-power, Bombay High oil and gas and the capital of India's financial centre. The Hooghly region of West Bengal, the second oldest, grew on jute and is described in the next topic. The Ahmedabad-Vadodara region of Gujarat grew on the cotton of Gujarat and has become the petrochemical, chemical, pharmaceutical, textile, diamond-cutting (Surat) and engineering region on the oil and gas of Ankleshwar, Koyali and Bombay High, the ports of Kandla and Hazira and the enterprise of the Gujarati merchants; Surat, Bharuch, Ankleshwar, Jamnagar and Rajkot are its other centres.

The Chhotanagpur region of Jharkhand, West Bengal's Bardhaman district and northern Odisha is the heavy-industry region built on the coal of Jharia, Bokaro and Raniganj, the iron ore of Singhbhum and Keonjhar, the water of the Damodar and the DVC power: the steel of Jamshedpur, Bokaro, Durgapur and Burnpur, the heavy engineering of Ranchi, the locomotives of Chittaranjan, the fertiliser of Sindri, the aluminium of Muri, the cement, the chemicals of Durgapur and the coal-based industries of Dhanbad and Asansol; it is called the Ruhr of India. The Bengaluru-Chennai region is the southern industrial belt, based on hydro-electricity from the Mettur, Sivasamudram and Pykara schemes rather than coal: cotton textiles at Coimbatore and Madurai, aircraft, electronics, machine tools, IT and biotechnology at Bengaluru, automobiles, petroleum refining and engineering at Chennai, and cement, sugar, leather and fertiliser through the belt, with Salem, Tiruchirappalli, Hosur and Mysuru. The Chhattisgarh-Vidarbha region around Bhilai, Raipur, Korba and Nagpur has steel, cement, aluminium and power. The Gurugram-Delhi-Meerut region has automobiles, electronics, textiles, sugar, IT and light engineering on the market of the capital and the Punjab-Haryana wealth. The Kollam-Thiruvananthapuram region of Kerala has coir, rubber, cashew, fertiliser, IT and marine products. The Visakhapatnam-Guntur region of the Andhra coast has steel, a refinery, shipbuilding, fertiliser and pharmaceuticals on the port. Minor regions include Kanpur-Lucknow, Ludhiana-Jalandhar, Indore-Pithampur, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Bhopal and the Brahmaputra valley of Assam with its oil and tea.

The Government has tried since the 1950s to reduce the concentration of industry in a few regions by placing public-sector plants in backward areas, by industrial estates, by incentives for the north-east, Jammu and Kashmir and the hill states, and lately by the industrial corridors such as the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor and the Amritsar-Kolkata Industrial Corridor along the freight railways.

The Hooghly industrial region is the second oldest and, after Mumbai-Pune, the second largest industrial region of India. It stretches along both banks of the Hooghly for about 100 km from Bansberia and Tribeni in the north to Budge Budge and Uluberia in the south, and 3-5 km wide, with Kolkata and Howrah at its heart, and it includes the towns of Serampore, Rishra, Konnagar, Uttarpara, Chandannagar, Bhadreswar and Bansberia on the west bank in Hooghly district, and Titagarh, Barrackpore, Naihati, Jagatdal, Shyamnagar, Kankinara, Belgharia, Dum Dum, Garden Reach and Budge Budge on the east bank in the 24 Parganas. Its extension is the Durgapur-Asansol belt 150-200 km to the north-west on the Damodar coalfield, and the Haldia port complex 100 km to the south, so that the whole region forms a T-shape along the river and the Grand Trunk Road.

The reasons for its growth are the same set that explains the jute industry, of which it was the child. Kolkata was the capital of British India until 1911 and its greatest port, so capital, management, banking, trade and the railways centred here; the Hooghly gave cheap water transport, abundant fresh water and a port; the delta grew jute, rice and tea for processing and supplied cheap labour; the Raniganj coal 200 km away and later the DVC supplied power; the iron ore and other minerals of Chhotanagpur were close; the humid climate suited jute and cotton; and the market of the whole Ganga plain and the north-east lay behind it. Once the jute mills had come, engineering shops to serve them, wagon works, paper mills, chemical works, cotton mills and every other industry followed by agglomeration.

The industries of the region are these. Jute is still the largest, with about 70 mills. Engineering, the second, includes railway wagons and coaches (Texmaco at Belgharia, Titagarh, Jessop at Dum Dum), ships (Garden Reach), machinery, electrical goods, foundries and hand tools, concentrated in Howrah, the 'Sheffield of India'. Cotton textiles at Serampore, Howrah, Kolkata and Sodepur; paper at Titagarh, Kankinara and Naihati; chemicals and pharmaceuticals at Rishra, Kolkata and Maheshtala; rubber (Bata at Batanagar, tyres at Sahaganj, Dunlop); leather at Bantala; petroleum and petrochemicals at Haldia; fertiliser at Haldia; glass, ceramics, matches, food processing, printing, tea packing, plastics and electronics (Salt Lake); and steel and alloy steel at Durgapur and Burnpur, locomotives at Chittaranjan, chemicals and cement at Durgapur and coal at Raniganj in the western extension.

The region has declined relative to the west and south since the 1960s: the Partition cut off the jute fields and the East Bengal market, the freight-equalisation policy of 1956-91 destroyed the advantage of being near coal and steel, the port silted, labour militancy and the flight of capital in the 1970s closed many factories, and the older industries of jute, cotton and engineering aged. Since the 1990s Haldia, the Salt Lake and New Town IT hubs, the Falta SEZ, the Durgapur-Asansol expansion, the Kharagpur industrial park and the Kalyani and Dankuni estates have brought new industry, and the state's other industrial centres are Siliguri (tea, timber, pharmaceuticals), Kharagpur, Kalyani, Bankura (cement) and the coalfield towns.

Indian industry has grown fast but faces problems that the examination expects the student to list and explain. The shortage and cost of power has long been the first: erratic supply, load-shedding and the high cost of captive generation raise the cost of every product, though the position has improved since 2015. The shortage of capital and the high cost of borrowing limit new investment, especially for small units. Old technology and machinery in the jute, cotton, sugar and engineering industries keep productivity low and quality uneven. Regional imbalance: industry is concentrated in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and a few other states, while Bihar, Odisha, Assam and the north-east, which have the raw materials, have little industry and export them raw. The poor infrastructure of roads, railways, ports and storage slows the movement of goods and raises costs. Industrial sickness: thousands of mills and factories, including many jute and cotton mills of Bengal and Mumbai, have closed or run at a loss through bad management, obsolete plant, labour disputes and changing markets. Labour problems: strikes, lockouts and low skills, alongside the exploitation of unorganised workers. Competition from imports since the opening of the economy in 1991, especially from China. Shortage of raw materials such as coking coal, long-staple cotton and crude oil, which are imported. Land acquisition disputes, of which Singur in West Bengal in 2006-08, where the Tata Nano factory was abandoned, is the famous example. And pollution, discussed next.

The industrial policy of the Government has changed with the times. The Industrial Policy Resolution of 1956, the charter of the planned economy, reserved the basic and heavy industries for the public sector, licensed private industry and gave the state the commanding heights; the Second Plan built the steel plants, HEC, BHEL and Sindri, and the public sector grew to over 200 enterprises. The policy of 1991, in the crisis of that year, abolished industrial licensing for most industries, opened the reserved industries to private and foreign investment, reduced import duties, allowed foreign companies to hold majority shares, and began the disinvestment of public enterprises; industrial growth accelerated, and the automobile, IT, telecom and pharmaceutical industries are its children. Since then the Government has promoted special economic zones (2005) with tax-free exports, the Make in India programme (2014) to raise manufacturing to 25 per cent of the economy, production-linked incentives for electronics, pharmaceuticals and solar equipment, the industrial corridors along the freight railways, the MSME policy for small and medium enterprises, which employ 11 crore people, and the start-up and digital programmes. West Bengal's own policy offers land banks, the Falta and other SEZs, the Bengal Silicon Valley hub in New Town and the annual Bengal Global Business Summit to attract investment.

Industry brings prosperity but also pollution, the addition of harmful substances to air, water, soil and the living environment, and the geography course asks how industry pollutes and how the damage is controlled.

Air pollution comes from the smoke, dust and gases of factory chimneys, thermal power stations, brick kilns, refineries and vehicles: sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which cause acid rain and lung disease; carbon monoxide; suspended particulate matter, the dust and soot that make Kolkata, Delhi and the coal towns of Asansol and Dhanbad among the most polluted cities in the world; and carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas of global warming. The worst industrial air disaster in history was the Bhopal gas tragedy of 2-3 December 1984, when methyl isocyanate leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide plant and killed several thousand people and injured lakhs. Water pollution comes from the discharge of untreated effluents into rivers and the sea: the dyes and chemicals of the textile mills, the acids and metals of the tanneries and electroplating works, the mercury of the chlor-alkali plants, the oil of refineries, the organic waste of sugar mills, distilleries and paper mills, and the hot water of power stations. The Ganga below Kanpur, the Damodar below the coalfields, the Hooghly along the mill belt, the Yamuna below Delhi and the Noyyal below Tiruppur are the classic examples. Thermal pollution from hot water kills fish; noise pollution from machinery and traffic harms hearing and nerves; land pollution comes from the dumping of fly ash from thermal stations, mine spoil, slag, chemical waste and the plastic and e-waste of the consumer industries, and from the leaching of these into the ground water. And the degradation of land by mining, quarrying and the spread of factories destroys forest and farmland.

The control of industrial pollution rests on law, technology and planning. The Water Act of 1974, the Air Act of 1981 and the Environment Protection Act of 1986, passed after Bhopal, set up the Central and State Pollution Control Boards, fix standards for effluents and emissions, require environmental impact assessment before a large project is cleared, and allow polluting units to be closed; the National Green Tribunal (2010) hears environmental cases, and the Supreme Court has ordered the tanneries of Kanpur and Kolkata's Tangra to move to treatment complexes and the polluting industries of Delhi and the Taj trapezium to close or convert to gas. The technologies are the treatment of effluents in effluent treatment plants and common treatment plants for industrial estates, the recycling of water, the fitting of electrostatic precipitators, scrubbers and filters to chimneys, the use of cleaner fuels such as natural gas and cleaner processes, the dry disposal and use of fly ash in bricks and cement, the safe disposal of hazardous waste, rainwater harvesting and the planting of green belts. The planning measures are the siting of polluting industry away from cities and rivers in industrial estates with common facilities, the zoning of land, the Ganga Action Plan and Namami Gange for the river, the promotion of renewable energy and energy efficiency, and the principle of sustainable development, meeting the needs of the present without harming the ability of the future to meet its own. The examination asks for the types of industrial pollution with examples and three or four measures of control.

The Madhyamik examination tests this chapter through short factual questions, explanatory questions on location, and map-pointing, and the student should prepare all three. The short-answer questions ask, for example, for the first jute mill and its date (Rishra, 1855), the first cotton mill (Mumbai, 1854), the first steel plant (Jamshedpur, 1907-11), the Manchester of India (Ahmedabad) or of North India (Kanpur) or of South India (Coimbatore), the Ruhr of India (Chhotanagpur), the Silicon Valley of India (Bengaluru), the Detroit of Asia (Chennai), the Sheffield of India (Howrah), the largest refinery (Jamnagar), the steel plant built with British help (Durgapur), the oldest refinery (Digboi), the first fertiliser plant (Sindri), the meaning of a footloose industry (one free of the pull of raw material, such as IT), and the classification of a named industry.

The explanatory questions, of 3 to 5 marks, ask why the iron and steel industry is concentrated in the Chhotanagpur region, why the cotton textile industry grew at Mumbai or in western India, why the jute industry is concentrated on the Hooghly, why sugar mills are located in the cane fields and why the industry has moved south, why refineries are at the ports, why the IT industry has grown at Bengaluru, what the problems of the jute or cotton or sugar industry are, what the factors of industrial location are, or what the effects of industrial pollution are and how they are controlled. The answer should name the factors in order, tie each to a fact or a place, and give the figure or the date where it exists; a sketch map of the Hooghly belt or the Chhotanagpur triangle adds marks.

The map-pointing questions ask the student to mark on an outline map of India: the steel plants of Jamshedpur, Durgapur, Bokaro, Bhilai, Rourkela and Visakhapatnam; the cotton textile centres of Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore and Kanpur; the jute industrial region of the Hooghly; the sugar industry of western Uttar Pradesh or Maharashtra; the petrochemical centre of Vadodara or Haldia; the refineries of Jamnagar, Digboi and Haldia; the IT centres of Bengaluru and Hyderabad; the automobile centres of Chennai, Pune and Gurugram; the shipyards of Kochi and Visakhapatnam; the Chittaranjan locomotive works; and the industrial regions of Mumbai-Pune, Hooghly and Chhotanagpur. The student should practise placing each on a blank map: the steel plants form a triangle in the north-east of the peninsula, the cotton centres a line down the west and south, the refineries a ring around the coast, and the IT cities a cluster in the south.

A revision table with the industries as rows and the columns raw material, chief locational factor, leading state, chief centre and West Bengal centre is the most efficient preparation; the West Bengal column is often the one that the state's examiners test.