What are the functions of village?
Answers
What are the functions of the village?
As it was presented, the village can be seen as a source of easily available resources, which are given by people who know each other directly and are linked by bonds of friendship. It is also a reference point for the coordination of individual sub-groups in the activities held in common and therefore allows a greater specialization of the activities themselves, relying on the contribution of various internal groups.
In case of need, in a small group it is possible that none is currently available or has the necessary knowledge or other, but in a village made up of over 50 people that eventuality becomes highly unlikely. In this case the individual has therefore rightly the feeling of not ever being alone: there is always someone we can rely on and to contact. The psychological benefits in terms of peace and security are immediately obvious. Especially in the management of culture and information, it is possible to get much higher performance, in fact in a population of several dozen individuals can be collected a huge cultural heritage and the same applies to the information useful or potentially useful. Here is then defined another concept having fundamental importance: the growth of the group is important to increase the skills and synergies, and then the growth makes sense only if it allows an improvement of the effectiveness of the group or a reduction in effort of individuals, otherwise it is a useless growth, if not harmful. When the size of a group may weaken the bonds on which the group is based, it is better not to increase it or may even be advisable a decrease, but this must not make renounce definitively to growth: it must instead be seen as the necessary step to develop a different structure that enables an advantageous growth.
Today, the associations formed by a few tens of people are innumerable, carry out several thousand activities and could all take the form of a village, taking a greater role of aggregation and social organization. In fact, the activities that would be added (information, cultural, psychological and material) would make the new organization similar to a real community with a certain autonomy from the social point of view; this would be just that community which has been lost for some time in large cities, leaving the citizen increasingly alone.
Some time back, the young mothers who had the need to work, not having nursery facilities nearby, organized themselves taking the weekly day off on different days so that each one, in turn, would have taken care of children of all others. Facing the problem of road accidents continually occurring on Saturday nights making massacre of youth returning from night clubs, a father who had thus lost his son managed to organize some families to hire a coach that, like a school bus, did the rounds of the nightclubs nearby, greatly reducing the risk of accidents. These systems seem to work well, while from years the Government does not know what to do, or worse still spends money on useless initiatives.
If those who have had these two brilliant ideas had been part of a village, how much less effort would have done to achieve them? How much less effort would be needed to make us imitate them? Although these initiatives have worked, they have been isolated cases, as building an organization from scratch is not easy; however, with a village of any kind that there would be no problem, whatever the activity carried out is , its structure could be reused to test new solutions.
1. Processing:
Processing is one of the most basic functions of a town and involves processing of agricultural products, for instance, wheat into wheat flour and oilseeds into oil. The most easily accessible village generally becomes the processing centre. This may have been the reason for the emergence of the earliest towns.
2. Trade:
ADVERTISEMENTS:
After processing, the next level of towns are associated with trade. The towns act as the centres for exchange of processed items or manufactured goods between two or more places. These markets may operate on a daily or weekly basis. Weekly markets are a common feature throughout India. These centres may also specialise in one or more items such as fruits and vegetables, cattle and food-grains.
3. Wholesale Trade in Agricultural Products:
Towns engaging in wholesale trade in agricultural products for the next high level in functional pattern of towns. Transport facility is a crucial factor in such towns. These towns generally fulfill processing functions also. Later, they may develop manufacturing and other services also.
They are generally small in size and dispersed, often specialising in one commodity or the other. For instance, Hapur is a wholesale centre for food-grains, Ahmedabad and Tiruppur for cotton, Sangli and Erode for turmeric, Bangalore for silk and Guntur for tobacco.
4. Services:
In towns, services like education, health, administration and communication, not adequately available in villages, are well- developed. Of all these functions, administration is the most important one. A town may be the headquarters of a panchayat union, a state cooperative or a district. Administrative towns also have law courts, police stations, government departments associated with developmental works, etc. Chandigarh is a good example of an administrative town.
5. Manufacturing and Mining:
ADVERTISEMENTS
Such activities give rise to large towns because manufacturing and mining activities generate large-scale employment and give rise to other useful economic activities like trade, services, transport, ancillary industry etc. These activities attract large-scale migrations from adjoining regions. Jamshedpur came up around the Tata Iron and Steel Works while Raniganj and Kolar are examples of towns which have come up around mining activities.
6. Transport:
Transport is a basic necessity for all types of economic activities and for the evolution and further expansion of a town. Many of the towns, therefore, have come up around railway stations or port towns. Railway stations act as the centres for change from road to rail traffic and vice-versa and for purposes of transshipment, collection, sorting and despatch. Jolarpettai in south India is a good example of a town which has come up at a railway junction.
hope it helps you