Industrial Revolution Essay

The development of India into a modern industrialized country is a slow but continuing process. Industrialized society is the one which is driven by the use of technology to enable mass production, supporting a large population with a high capacity for division of labor. It is the period of social and economic change that causes transformation of an agrarian society into an industrial one. It is a part of a wider modernization process, where social change and economic development are closely related with technological innovation.

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and within a few decades spread to Western Europe and the United States. The mass production of consumer goods with the help of the newly invented machines ushered in a new era in the history of humanity. Inventions and new technology created a system of large-scale machine production .The first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanization of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by handing in hundreds of weavers' cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 19th century, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line process and introduced the age of mass production. India being a British colony had an indirect effect of industrial revolution that occurred in Europe.

Before independence, India was a largely agriculture-based country. Though there were manufacturing units in some parts of the country but in the form of small-scale local enterprises such as spinning, weaving and woodwork industries. In the seventeenth century, India was a relatively urbanized and commercialized nation with an export trade, devot...

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...hat were not of its own choice and many of the technological developments that have taken place in India have been geared more towards the export market than bringing about all-round improvements in the quality of life for the Indian masses. For that reason, it cannot yet be said that India has fully entered the modern industrial era. India is able to harness the power of technology and modern industry, but has failed to improve the quality of life for the vast majority of its people.

That will require not only major advances in the Indian education system, but radical social changes that have yet to take place in a systematic way. Above all, the forces of religious fundamentalism, religious obscurantism and social backwardness will have to be pushed back and defeated. That is the real lesson of the Industrial Revolution that has yet to sink in completely in India.