Socio-Economic Dimensions of Globalization in India

Abstract:     
India's globalization is a conscious and deliberate effort to permit the factors of production, the produce and the socio-economic forces to permeate across the national boundaries and remove any obstacle to such permeance. In short, it has been a deliberate decision to open up a national economy to the forces of product, factor and money markets, followed by a sequence of requisite policies and actions, leading to structural reforms.

Unlike how the presently developed economies expanded and went global in their hoary past, the main reform initiatives in India (like in many other developing countries), were undertaken after a fiscal and foreign exchange crisis which brought it to the verge of default on the foreign loans. Thus, the Indian globalization is a result of the decadence within and the pressure from without.

The effects of globalization on the Indian economy in the post-globalization years are clearly visible in the foreign sector - foreign exchange reserves, international trade, inflow of foreign capital, etc. However, structural changes in the domestic economy are not significant. The source-wise structure of savings and capital formation has changed, but trends in the macro-economic indicators such as national income are more or less traditional. The relative contributions of agriculture and industry to national income have followed the historical trends. The contribution of area under cultivation to production also remains largely unchanged.

Although economic in the core, globalization has pervasive effects on the society. It has its impact on the social structure, values, social institutions and attitudes. India is a multilingual, multiethnic and multi-cultural society. Globalization has impacted noticeably on cultural identity and social harmony among various social groups. The Indian social structure is basically pluralistic, replete with a multitude of enclaves of several types and strata. There are enclaves making rural-urban, men-women, caste-dalits, organized-unorganized, formal-informal, and so on. Globalization has led to an increase in disparities among these enclaves.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 23

Keywords: Globalization, Globalisation, India, Impacts, social, socio-economic, national income, components of agricultural growth, savingd, capital formation, import, export, foreign reserves

JEL Classification: F01, F02, F43

working papers series