Chapter 14 — Economic Activities Around Us

Economic activities are activities that create monetary value — that is, their value can be measured in terms of money. Earlier, most people were involved in agriculture, livestock rearing, making tools, pottery, and weaving cloth. Today, economic activities include manufacturing computers, working in banks, driving vehicles, creating software, and repairing electronic items.

The primary sector includes economic activities in which people are directly dependent on nature to produce goods, such as farming, mining, fishing, forestry, and raising livestock. For example, cultivating grains and vegetables from farms and extracting coal from mines are both primary sector activities.

The secondary sector involves taking raw materials from the primary sector and transforming them into products. For example, grains from farms are processed into flour in mills, wood from forests is converted into furniture and paper, and cotton is turned into clothes. The primary sector extracts raw materials from nature directly, while the secondary sector processes those materials into a new or finished form.

The tertiary sector includes all economic activities that provide services and support to the primary and secondary sectors. Examples include transportation, banking, teaching, healthcare, communication, software development, and services at hotels, restaurants, hospitals, and shops. It is called the service sector because its activities are services rather than the production or extraction of physical goods.

Tertiary sector activities include a truck driver transporting grains from a farm to a market, a doctor or nurse providing healthcare, and a bank offering financial services. Communication services through mobile and internet, software development, and services at airports and warehouses are also tertiary activities.

AMUL stands for Anand Milk Union Limited. It is a milk cooperative set up in 1946 in Anand district of Gujarat. It was established under the leadership of Tribhuvandas Patel (a lawyer and freedom fighter) and Dr. Varghese Kurien (an engineer who was working at a dairy factory in Mumbai).

Farmers in Anand had to walk or cycle to nearby villages to sell milk in scorching heat, and milk spoils quickly in hot weather. They depended on middlemen who bought milk in bulk at very low prices and sold it at higher prices in the market, leaving farmers feeling cheated. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel advised them to form a cooperative so they could control the production and sale of milk themselves without relying on middlemen.

A cooperative is a group of people who voluntarily come together to meet their economic and social needs in a formal way. The members own the cooperative and take decisions collectively. AMUL is one well-known example, where dairy farmers jointly manage the collection, processing, and sale of milk.

Middlemen are persons who buy goods from producers and sell them to consumers, charging a fee for this service. Before AMUL was formed, middlemen would buy milk from farmers at very low (meagre) prices and sell it at higher prices in the market. Farmers often felt cheated and harassed by this arrangement, which is why they decided to form a cooperative.

In the AMUL story, milking cows and selling milk is a primary sector activity because milk is derived directly from a natural source (livestock). Processing that milk into butter, ghee, cheese, and milk powder in factories is a secondary sector activity. Transporting the products by lorries, trucks, railway, air, and shipping services, and selling them in retail stores across India and to other countries, is a tertiary sector activity.

Pasteurisation is a process by which milk is preserved by heating it to a specific temperature in order to kill harmful bacteria. In the AMUL cooperative, the milk producers collectively made decisions on production, pasteurisation, and sale of milk.

Yes. The chapter lists several milk cooperatives: Nandini from Karnataka, Mother Dairy from Delhi-NCR, Aavin from Tamil Nadu, Vijaya from Andhra Pradesh, Kevi from Nagaland, Sudha from Bihar, and Verka from Punjab.

Making a textbook requires all three sectors working together. Wood pulp is extracted from trees (primary sector). The pulp is processed into paper, which is then printed and assembled into books (secondary sector). The finished books are transported and sold in shops (tertiary sector). The chapter notes that no part of this process would be possible without all three sectors.

According to the chapter, recycling just one tonne of paper saves 17 trees and 2.5 cubic metres of landfill space. It also takes 70 per cent less energy and water to recycle paper compared to making new paper from wood pulp.

Yes, the PDF is completely free to read and download on cbseprepmaster.com. No sign-up or account is required.