What is de industrialisation? What is its impact on the Indian economy during the colonial period.
Answers
India is not an industrial country in the true and modern sense of the term. But by the standards of the 17th and 18th centuries, i.e., before the advent of the Europeans in India, India was the ‘industrial workshop’ of the world.
This may be a process called ‘de-industrialisation’. Daniel Thorner defined de-industrialisation as a decline in the proportion of the working population engaged in secondary industry to total working population, or a decline in the proportion of population dependent on secondary industry to total population. But in India, quite the opposite rule worked and the nationalist economists like R. C. Dutt and M. G. Ranade labelled it as the process of ‘de- industrialisation’ since the bulk of the population found agriculture rather than industry as a means of livelihood.
But this internal balance of the village economy had been systematically slaughtered by the British Government. In the process, traditional handicraft industries slipped away, from its pre-eminence and its decline started at the turn of the 18th century and proceeded rapidly almost to the beginning of the 19th century.
Deindustrialization denotes the competition of the products manufactured by the British machineries with that of the Indian handicraft industries.
Before the emergence of British rule in India, the Indian economy was balanced by the income obtained from two mega sources namely agriculture and Handicrafts. It was the time during which no alien product was introduced in the Indian market as a result of which Indian bought products produced and manufactured by Indian.
As the Britishers entered the country for trading, they came up with goods that were cheaper than the one available in the local market and made a big blow to the Indian Economy. It reduced the demand of the handicraft products and hence, paved way of down falling of many handicraft industries and the huge population became unemployed.