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GENERAL
STUDIES 1
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Indian culture: the salient aspects of Art

Forms, Literature and Architecture from
ancient to modern times
Culture is a principal mechanism to explore, integrate and assert the national identity of India
which truly and certainly pluralistic. Culture pervades every sphere of human activity,
determines and governs life and pattern of Indian civilisation. The word ‘Culture’ is emanated
from the Latin term ‘cult or cultus’ which means tilling, or cultivating or refining and worship.
Overall, it means cultivating and refining a thing to such an extent that its end product evokes
our admiration and respect. This is nearly the same as 'Sanskriti' of the Sanskrit language.
Basically, Culture denotes to a human-made environment which includes all the material and
nonmaterial products of group life that are communicated from one generation to the
subsequent.Buy These   Notes   in   PDF   Format
The culture of India is about how people maintain their lifestyle. It was evident that India's languages,
religions, dance, music, architecture, food, and customs changed from place to place within the country.
The Indian culture, often labelled as an incorporation of several cultures, spans across the Indian
subcontinent and has been influenced by ancient history where many rulers dominated and altered its
art, and architecture. Many features of India's diverse cultures, such as Indian religions, Indian
philosophy and Indian cuisine, have had a weighty impact across the world. Significant aspects of Indian
culture is the caste system. The caste system in India is significant part of ancient Hindu custom and
dates back to 1200 BCE. The phrase caste was first used by Portuguese travellers who entered to India in
the 16th century. In Hinduism there exists four castes arranged in a hierarchy. The highest Varna is of
the Brahman. Members of this class are priests and the educated people of the society. The Varna after
them in hierarchy is Kshatria. The members of this class are the rulers and aristocrats of the society.
After them are the Vaisia. Members of this class are the landlords and businessmen of the society. After
them in hierarchy are the Sudra. Members of this class are the peasants and working class of the society
who work in non-polluting jobs (R.K. Pruthi, 2004).

The untouchablity feature in the caste system is one of the harshest aspects of the caste system. It
is seen by many as one of the strongest racist phenomenon in the world. In Indian society people
who worked in ignominious, polluting and unclean occupations were seen as polluting peoples
and were therefore considered as untouchables. The untouchables had almost no rights in the
society. In different parts of India they were treated in different ways. In some regions the
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attitude towards the untouchables was harsh and strict. In other regions it was less strict.

Since earlier time, India had many religions that include Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and
Sikhism, collectively known as Indian religions.
Ancient India:
The History of India originates with the Indus Valley Civilization and the coming of the Aryans.
These two periods are generally defined as the pre-Vedic and Vedic periods. The Indus River
Civilization dates back to 2300 – 1750 BC and had two main cities; Harappa in western Punjab
and Mohenjo-Daro on the lower Indus in Sindh. Currently, the two important provinces of
Pakistan. Both cities were urban grain growing civilizations and were believed to have run by
Aryans who came from some other place. The statues found at the locations include both human
and animal forms with intricacies and premium details. Some seals were found engraved with
figures and motifs also. All these things were made with limestone, bronze, stone and terracotta
(Pal, 1988). When discussing architecture, The Harappa and Mohanjo Daro sites display the
great architecture patters of the time. The Houses were made of baked bricks, the drains and
bathrooms were also laid down by bricks. There was a proper drainage system from the houses
to the central drain. The houses were double storey with the ground floor made of bricks and the
upper storey of wood. There was a public bath site found that could have been used for religious
motives. Thus the cities were scientifically laid down. It was found in literature that there were
cultural relationships of Indus valley civilization with other communities like the similar items
are found in Mesopotamia (Mcintosh, 2008).
In previous literature, it is documented that India's past is the Rig Veda. It is difficult to date this
work with any accuracy on the basis of tradition and vague astronomical information contained
in the choruses. It is expected that Rig Veda was composed between 1,500 B.C. and 1,000 B.C.
In Rig Veda, there are references of dancing and other musical instruments as part of religious
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practice. The hymns of Rig Veda were chanted as a religious singing, it was more like a
recitation than singing (Gupta, 1999). It was noted that The Vedas are the most primitive
fabricated literary record of Indo-Aryan civilization. It entails mostly mantras or prayers and
summons in praise of various Aryan gods. The word Veda means insight, facts or revelation, and
it is valued and regarded as the language of the gods in human speech. The core message of the
Vedas is to control the social, legal, domestic and religious traditions of the Hindus which are
exactly followed to the present day. All the customs of Hindus conducted upon birth, marriage,
death etc. are based upon Vedic principles and they are being followed from time immemorial
(Khanna, 2007).
The Rig Veda is an assemblage of inspired songs or hymns and is a main source of information
on the Rig Vedic civilization. It is the oldest book in any Indo-European language and contains
the earliest form of all Sanskrit mantras that date back to 1500 B.C. - 1000 B.C. Some scholars
date the Rig Veda as early as 12000 BC - 4000 B.C. (Vipul Singh, 2012).
Brahmanism was found in 900 B.C. In the meantime a group of solitary persons or loners and
wanderers of the forest developed the concept of Supreme Reality in terms of “Brahma, the
infinite divine power which means that by stripping off everything external a man can find its
true being, the self, the soul. This originated the ideas of Hinduism, which later was the reason
and motivation of many religious movements in the area. This later period is portrayed in the
epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. There are folklores about the basis of dance in
Hinduism, like the great Lord Siva gave the first indication of the dance who was a cosmic-
dancer and among his many great names is Nataraja meaning the Lord of Dancers and Actors.
Another holy dance is that of Krishna and Radha, the Eternal Lovers ((Bahadur, 1979). In this
period, the class system divided the society and the people of lower castes were repressed and
cruelly treated by the upper classes. There were no mixing of the lower and upper classes people,
no social contacts, no marriages and lower classes were considered and treated like slaves.
In 500 B.C or 6th Century B.C, two major religions emerged such as Jainism and Buddhism.
They transmitted the messages of Truth, Non-violence and Renunciation/Denial. They advocated
for religion as a personal matter of an individual and exhibited reflection on the daily conduct of
life (Sen, 1988). Their message was for ethical values and they believed in love, freedom and
equality for all human beings. But people were divided into class system the oppression of the
priests, became prone to their teachings and large number of people among the middle class and
kings changed to Buddhism and Jainism was mostly followed by the richer merchant class (Sen,
1988). The lessons of Buddha were against the development of art as it leads to desire and avoid
the man from reaching the final goal, so the monks were prohibited to paint the pictures on the
walls of the monasteries or to indulge in the art of sculpture. So we find no traces of sculpture art
in this period (Swarup, 1968). With respect to development of Architecture, from Indus Valley
Civilization till the period of Maurya, there were no traces of architectural leftover and have to
depend upon the literature and make assumption. The Vedic literature showed about houses,
halls and fire-altars. In Ramayana and Mahabharata, there is description of assembly halls,
balconies, gateways and double storey buildings (Swarup, 1968)
In the period of 327-26 B. C, Alexander attacked the Punjab state of the region and linked India
with Iranian Civilization (Gordon and Walsh, 2009). In the fifth century, large sections of India
were amalgamated under the regime of Maurya vansh. The 6th Century B.C. was a period of
great uproar in India. The kingdom of Magadha, one of the 16 great Janapadas had become
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dominant over other kingdoms of the Ganges Valley. In this period, there was emergence of
various heterodox cliques in India. In this period, Buddhism and Jainism arose as popular
protestant movements to pose a serious challenge to Brahmanic convention.
During the period of 324 – 200 B.C or 273 – 236 B.C, Asoka Maurya’s period was dominated by
Buddhism but he also showed tolerance to other religions (Sen, 1988).This period was followed
by the Mauryas of whom the most famous was Ashoka the Great. The borders of his empire
extended from Kashmir and Peshawar in the North and Northwest to Mysore in the South and
Orissa in the East but his reputation rests not so much on military conquests as on his celebrated
rejection of war. Asoka tried to give harmony of culture by making stupas (Buddhist relic
shrines) and pillars inscribed with his addresses and lectures.
The pillars of Asoka’s period were regarded as marvellous piece of work in the Indian art history
as they embodied bold designing, technical skills and expressive symbolism. During this era,
there were renewal of Sanskrit language and the great epics. Under, Pushyamitra and his
successors, the Buddhists were permitted to embellish their stupas and eventually the ritualistic
worship was accepted in Budhism also (Sen, 1988). This paved the way for art to flourish as the
Buddhists opinions and ideas, myths and legends were presented in visual forms. The pillars and
stupas of that time portrayed the reincarnation stories of Buddha and were illustrated as scenes
on them. The use of stone in architecture began in Maurya’s rule (Schmidt, 1995). He established
monuments, pillars and stupas engraved with the teachings of the Master (Buddha). In the
supremacy of Asoka, the dance continued as a sacrificial practice (Schmidt, 1995).
The greatest monument of this period, executed in the supremacy of Chandragupta Maurya, was
the old palace at the site of Kumhrar. Excavations at the site of Kumhrar nearby have unearthed
the remains of the palace. The palace is thought to have been an aggregated of buildings, the
most important of which was an immense pillared hall supported on a high substratum of
timbers. The pillars were set in regular rows, thus dividing the hall into a number of smaller
square bays. The number of columns is 80, each about 20 high.
During the reign of Ashoka, stonework was highly diversified order and comprised lofty free-
standing pillars, railings of stupas, lion thrones and other colossal figures. The use of stone had
reached great perfection during this time that even small fragments of stone art was given a high
lustrous polish resembling fine enamel. This period noticeable the beginning of the Buddhist
school of architecture, Ashoka was responsible for the construction of several stupas, which were
large halls, capped with domes and bore symbols of Buddha.
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Maurya Empire (Source: Vipul Singh, 2012)

For the next four hundred years (after the great Mauryas), India remained politically separated
and weak. It was recurrently invaded and plundered by outsiders. In Gupta Dynasty, there was
some stability. The art of the time was reflected as “classic” in Indian history as it touches the
limits of elegance and sophistication. Different gods of Hindu were portrayed in sculpture with
sensuous details. The animal figures were also made but vegetative patterns found no place in the
art (Prakash, 2005). It was the period of peace and prosperity and observed an unparalleled
pinnacle of art, literature and the sciences. This period also witnessed as the beginning of Hindu
temple architecture. The Gupta regime saw the development and rise of pivotal period in the
form of temple as a Hindu sense of “House of god”. The Vishnu temple in Jabbalpur district,
Siva temple at Bhumara in Negod, Parvati temple at Nachna in Ajaigah, temple of Siva at
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Deogarh in the Jahnsi district and nine rock-cut asylums in Gupta tradition at Udayagiri in
Bhopal are the examples of fine architecture of the time (Prakash, 2005). In Gupta
administration, dancing became basic elements in upper class culture and dancing at courts was a
common feature. The history shown that some of the rulers of Gupta regime were musicians
themselves (Prakash, 2005).
After the Guptas, there was only a brief glow, in the time of Harshavardhana of Kannauj. A
Chinese traveler, Huen-tsang visited India from (629 - 645 A.D.) during the supremacy of
Harshavardhana. He made changes that had taken place in the lives of the Indian people since the
days of the Guptas.
Muslim era:
Mahmud invaded the region in 1000 A.D. from Ghazni and demolished the worship style and
wealth of the area and as a result the Hindu domain disappeared from most of the Punjab. A
century passed and another Muslim warrior Sultan Muhammad came from Ghur a neighbouring
area of Ghazni with his slave governor, Qutbuddin Aibak. Mughal Empire lasted from 1526 to
1858. The Muslims who supported for one God and the equality of all men, their simplicity and
disapproval of caste system, polytheism, worship and ritualism became popular in the masses
and most of the Hindus embraced Islam for the true faith, sincerity and purity of life which
symbolized from the life of the Muslims. But at the same time, there were Muslim writers and
poets (Muslim Sufi order) who along with their Islamic traditions brought assimilation with
Hinduism and the rulers offered Hindus the jobs in bureaucracy and in Army too, without
compromising in the supremacy of Islam. Hindu music, art and dance were given space at the
courts and Hindu motifs got blended with Islamic art (Richard, 1995). In that period, the
teachings of Islam and Quran forbade making of sculptures so human and animal statues and
drawings are not found in this period (Sharma, 1999).
The Muslim architecture of the time was dominated by carving and paintings of text from the
Holy Book “Quran” and Arabic and Persian floral and geometric motifs are found on the sites of
Muslim architectures. The Mosque and the Grave were major important buildings of the time.
Agra Fort and Moti Masjid near Delhi, Taj Mahal at Agra by Shahjahan and Badshahi Mosque at
Lahore built by Aurengzaib (1674), are the fine examples of Muslim architecture (Sharma,
1999). The paintings in the regime of The emperors Khilji and Tughhluq included the
calligraphy (transcribing the text from the Holy Quran) and also the garden scenes but no
animated picture could be found in this time.
The Mughal had good perception in art. The style of painting in their rule is known as
“miniature” which was primarily done on the delicate palm tree leaves till the introduction of
paper in the country in 1400, which then became the most popular material for paintings. The
supremacy of Jehangir was also considered as the Golden age of Mughal painting, the portraits
of emperors, members of royal families, holy men, saints, soldiers and dancing girls were
depicted by the artists in the paintings (Sharma, 1999). In the period of Muslim rule, there were
decline of dancing art particularly in the North, only Kathak dance was the only survival in
North with all its emotions and with the passage of time and the influence of the ruling elites
became more and more secular (Sharma, 1999). Well-known Persian, Hazrat Amir Khusrau was
a poet, a musician and a soldier during that time. In Akbar’s court, there were total thirty eight
masters of music as stated in Ain i Akbari and Dhrupad was the most favoured melody sung
mostly by Swami Hari Dass at Akbar’s court. The later emperors, Jahangir and Shahjahan
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displayed the same desire for music. Tansen played Rabab a musical instrument of that time and
Amir Khusrau use to play sitar. Tabla and Shehnai were other popular musical instruments in
later years of Mughal rule (Sharma, 1999). Sufism is a spiritual system that has had an incredible
impact on world literature and has affected many cultures. The impact of Sufism on Islamic
culture can also be observed in the design of many buildings and the architecture in general, the
patterns of poetry and music, and the visual effect of colours and calligraphy (Bayat and Jamnia,
1994). Art in the Muslim period prospered due to their decent taste and aesthetic sense. The
artists, writers, poets, thinkers, scholars from all over Asia came to their courts. It was a period of
Indo-Islamic culmination of appearance and magnificence in arts (music, painting, crafts and
architecture) and culture (Richard, 1995). Historical reports indicated that All the Mughal rulers
stimulated the artists and musicians and thus the people of different religions gather together and
also the sufis saints of the time paved a way in bringing people together.
In the period of 1700 – 1900, The European came to India from the route of the sea. These were
the Portuguese traders, then subsequently came the British, the French and the Dutch. All these
invaders brought with them the elements of western cultures into the art and ways of living of the
people of the country. The Portuguese initiated the revival of glitzy art and the French introduced
their tastes in the decorations of palaces and houses. The British brought with them the Britain
style of architecture and also influenced their modes in paintings and sculptures to such an extent
that the Indian mind became alien to their own inheritance. In Rashtrapati Bhawan, New Delhi,
there is a clear picture of the British impact on Indian architecture. Apart from these architectural
leftovers, the colonial state also left behind a uniform system of government, a system of
education based on Western ideas, science and philosophies. Modern literature in Indian
languages were all profoundly influenced by the spread of English education and through it
India’s intimate contact with the ideas and institutions of the West.
The salient aspects of Art Forms in India:
It is documented that India have a rich and ancient history. Since ancient times there has been an
amalgamation of indigenous and foreign influences that have shaped the course of the arts of
India, and subsequently, the rest of Asia. Arts is defined as paintings, architecture, literature,
music, dance, languages and cinema. In early India, most of the arts were derived Vedic
influences.
Ancient Indian art: It is analysed that each era is exclusive in its idiosyncratic culture. In the
same way Indian art forms have constantly evolved over thousands of years. In ancient India,
various art forms like paintings, architecture and sculpture evolved. The history of art in ancient
India begins with prehistoric rock paintings as theoretical literature indicated.
After the birth of current Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, arts thrived with the
support of emperors. In the era of Islam, new form of Indian architecture and art were visible.
Finally, the British brought their own Gothic and Roman influences and attached it with the
Indian style. They have a culture infusion in their art. The use of symbolic forms in India is
ancient since the period of the Harappan seals. The fire altars of the Vedic period, with their
astronomical and mathematical significance also play an important role in the development of
the later temples. It was followed by a period in the history of Indian art that is important for
rock-cut caves and temple architecture. The Buddhists introduced the rock-cut caves, Hindus and
Jains started them at Badami, Aihole, Ellora, Salsette, Elephanta, Aurangabad and
Mahabalipuram. The rock-cut art has constantly progressed, since the first rock cut caves, to suit
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different purposes, social and religious contexts, and regional differences. Together with the art
forms like architecture, paintings and sculpture, there have been evolving, changing, altering,
folk and tribal art traditions in India. These art forms are expression of people belonging to
different cultural and social groups of India. It is the communication of people whose life is
adjusted to the rhythms of nature and its laws of recurring change and whose life is tangled with
natural energy. In India tradition, Gods and legends are transformed into modern forms and
familiar images. Fairs, festivals and local deities also has significant role in the development of
these arts forms. It is an art where life and creativity are inseparable. The tribal arts of India have
a unique sensitivity, as the tribal people possess an intense awareness very different from the
settled and urbanized people. Their minds are flexible and intense with myth, legends, and
snippets from epic, multitudinous gods born. Their art is an expression of their life and holds
their fervour and mystery.
Architecture:
The greatest achievements of Indian civilization is unquestionably its architecture which was the
outcome of socio-economic and geographical condition. Indian architecture is that vast drapery
of production of the Indian subcontinent that includes a multitude of expressions over space and
time, renovated by the forces of history considered exclusive to the sub-continent, sometimes
abolishing, but most of the time absorbing. The earliest production in the Indus Valley
Civilization was characterised by well-planned cities and houses where religion did not seem to
play an active role. The Buddhist period is mainly represented by three important building types-
the Chaitya Hall (place of worship), the Vihara (monastery) and the Stupa (hemispherical mound
for worship/ memory) – exemplified by the awesome caves of Ajanta and Ellora and the
monumental Sanchi Stupa.
In early period, Hindu temple architecture have been traced to the remains at Aihole and
Pattadakal in present day Karnataka, and have Vedic altars and late Vedic temples as described
by Panini as models. Later, as more differentiation took place, the Dravidian/ Southern style and
or the Indo-Aryan/ Northern/ Nagara style of temple architecture emerged as prevailing modes,
epitomized in productions such as the magnificent Brihadeeswara Temple, Thanjavur, and the
Sun Temple, Konark. The older terminologies of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan are not used in
recent practice because of their racial and uncertain origins. Buddhist elements and themes have
influenced temple architecture to great extent.
Previously, temples were rock-cut, later structural temples evolved. The Kailasanatha temple at
Ellora is best illustration of the former, excavated from top to bottom out of a massive rock face.
The pyramid formed an essential architectonic feature in any temple composition- stepped in the
Dravidian style, stepped and slightly curved in the Northern style. The structural system was
essentially trabeated and with stone being the basic raw material for the Indian craftsman,
construction could be done with minimal or no mortar. Decoration was necessary to Indian
architecture and is seen in the innumerable details of figured sculpture as well as in the
architectural elements. The notion of fractals has been used to observe the form of the Hindu
temple, both in terms of its planning and external appearance. The garba-griha or the womb
chamber forms the central focus housing the deity of the temple and is provided with a
circumambulation passage around. However, there are also many subsidiary shrines within
temple complexes, more particularly in the South Indian (the Dravidian style) temple. As the
Hindu temple is not meant for congregational worship, the garba-griha is small in scale when
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compared to the whole temple complex. However, it is articulated externally by the vimana or
the sikhara. Pillared halls or mandapas are found preceding the garba-griha.
The three-dimensional experience of a South Indian temple multifaceted and is considered
particularly rich and meaningful. Among them, such as the Ranganathaswamy temple at
Srirangam, the concentric enclosures or prakaras along with the series of gopurams or entrance
gateways reducing in scale as they move towards the garbha-griha set up a rhythm of solids and
voids as well as providing a ritual and visual axis. The principles of temple architecture were
organised in treatises and canons such as Manasara, Mayamatam, and Vaastu Shastra. These
offered an ordering framework yet permitted a certain autonomy for contextual articulation.
Presently, most of the ancient Hindu architecture flourishes in temples of south India and South-
east Asia as the subsequent forces of Islam renovated the cultural landscape of India more
dominantly in the north.
Rich literature have shown that the Jaina temples can be seen in the Dilwara Temples in Mt.Abu.
Early beginnings of Hindu temple architecture have been traced to the remains at Aihole and
Pattadakal in present day Karnataka, and have Vedic altars and late Vedic temples as described
by Paṇini as models. Later, as more differentiation took place, the Dravidian/ Southern style and
or the Indo-Aryan/ Northern/ Nagara style of temple architecture emerged as dominant modes,
epitomised in productions such as the magnificent Brihadeeswara Temple, Thanjavur, and the
Sun Temple, Konark.
With the arrival of Islam emperors, the arch and dome began to be used and the mosque or
masjid too began to form part of the landscape, adding to a new experience in form and space.
The most famous Islamic building type in India is the tomb or the mausoleum which evolved
from the basic cube and hemisphere vocabulary of the early phase into a more elaborate form
during the Mughal era where multiple chambers are present and tombs were set in a garden
known as the char-bagh. Popular architectural buildings are the Gol Gumbaz, Bijapur and the Taj
Mahal, Agra, the latter renowned for its attractiveness in white marble, its minarets and its
setting. With colonisation, a new episode began. Though the Dutch, Portuguese and the French
made substantial raids, it was the English who had a lasting impact. The architecture of the
colonial period varied from the beginning attempts at creating authority through classical
prototypes to the later approach of producing a supposedly more responsive image through what
is now termed Indo-Saracenic architecture, a mixture of Hindu, Islamic and Western elements.
After independence and initiation of Modern Architecture into India, the quest was more towards
progress as a paradigm fuelled by Nehruvian visions. The planning of Chandigarh is good
example. Later on as modernism exhausted itself in the West and new directions were sought for,
in India too there was a search for a more expressive architecture rooted in the Indian situation.
Apart from this, process of globalisation and economic development in the decade of the 90s, has
produced an inspiring collection of modern Information Technology campuses and skyscrapers,
and as economic reform accelerates, metropolitan areas are gaining innovative horizons.
Literature:
Indian literature is generally recognized, but not wholly established, as the oldest in the world.
India has 22 officially recognized languages, and large form of literature has been produced in
these languages over the years. Sanskrit literature has a special place in Indian civilization. It
extended from about 1400 BC to AD maha 1200 and reached its height in the period from the 1st
to the 7th centuries AD. The two major one of the oldest literatures Ramayana and
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Mahabharatha, and Abhigyanashakuntalam, Meghadutam by Kalidasa, are the best examples.

The Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas and Dharmasutras are all written in Sanskrit. In Indian
literature, oral and written forms are both important. Hindu literary traditions govern a large part
of Indian culture. The Vedas are the earliest known literature in India (Pande, 1990). The Vedas
were written in Sanskrit and were handed down orally from one generation to the other. There
are four Vedas, namely, the- Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda and Atharva Veda. Each Veda
consists of the Brahmanas, the Upanishads and the Aranyakas. The Rig Veda, Sama Veda and
the Yajur Veda are collectively known as Traji. In later years the Atharava Veda was
incorporated in this group. The Rig Veda is the original of the Vedas. It is a collection of 1028
hymns in Vedic Sanskrit. Many of these are beautiful explanations of nature. The prayers are
largely for seeking worldly prosperity. It is supposed that these recitations are the natural
outpouring of Vedic rishis experiencing a mentally transcendental stage. Some of the famous
rishis during that period were Vasistha, Gautama, Gritasamada, Vamadeva, Vishvamitra and
Atri. The prominent gods of the Rig Veda are Indra, Agni, Varun, Rudra, Aditya, Vayu, Aditi
and the Ashwini twins. Some of the prominent goddesses are Usha - the goddess of dawn, Vak -
the goddess of speech and Prithvi - the goddess of earth.
Yajur entails sacrifice or worship. This Veda is related with resources and mantras of different
sacrifices. It gives directions for the performance of the yajnas. It has both poetic and prose
versions. Being a treatise on rituals, it is the most popular of the four Vedas. There are two major
categories of Yajur Veda, namely Shukla and Krishna Yajur Veda i.e. Vajasaneyi Samhita and
Taitriya Samhita. This text replicates on the social and religious condition of India at that time.
Sama means tune or songs. This Veda comprises of 6,000 ragas and raginis or musical notes. Out
of total 1875 verses only 75 are original and others are from the Rig Veda. The Sama Veda
suggests the tunes for the recitation of the hymns of the Rig Veda. It may be called the book of
Chants (Saman). This book is an evidence of the development of Indian music during this period.
The Atharva Veda is also recognized as the Brahma Veda. It contains treatment for ninety-nine
diseases. The source of this Veda is traced to two rishis called Atharvah and Angiras. The
Atharva Veda has great value as it signifies the religious ideas at an ancient time of civilisation.
It has two categories, the Paippalada and the Saunaka. This book gives detailed information
about the family, social and political life of later Vedic period.
In brief, Vedas provide education (siksha), grammar (vyakarana), ritual (kalpa), etymology
(nirukta), metrics (chhanda) and astronomy (Jyotisha).
After creation of the four Vedas, other works known as the Brahmanas were developed. These
books gave a thorough explanation of Vedic rituals and instructions and deal with the science of
sacrifice. The latter portions of the Brahmanas were called the Aranyakas while the final parts of
the Aranyakas are metaphysical books named Upanishads which belong to the later stage of the
Brahmana literature. Each of the four Vedas have their own Brahmana books. Rig Veda had
Kaushitaki and Aitreya. Taitteriya belongs to Krishna Yajur Veda and Shatpath belongs to
Shukla Yajur Veda. Tandav, Panchvish and Jaimaniya belongs to Atharva Veda. It is through
them that we get a detailed information of the social, political and religious life of the people.
The Arayankas deal with soul, birth and death and life beyond it. These were studied and taught
by men in Vanprastha i.e. Munis and the inhabitants living inside the forests.
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After that Upnishads were produced as literature. The word Upanishad is derived from upa
(nearby), and nishad (to sit-down), that is, “sitting down near”. The Upanishads mark the
conclusion of Indian thought and are the final parts of the Vedas. Historical texts represented that
there are more than 200 known Upanishads, one of which, the Muktika, gives a list of 108
Upanishads. This number corresponds to the holy number of beads on a mala or Hindu rosary.
The Upanishads form an important part of Indian literary inheritance. They deal with questions
like the origin of the universe, life and death, the material and spiritual world, nature of
knowledge and many other questions. The ancient Upanishads are the Brihadaranyaka which
belongs to the Sukla Yajur Veda and Chand yogya which belongs to the Sama Veda. Some of the
other important Upanishads are the Aitareya, Kena, Katha Upanishad.
Besides the Vedas which are a sacred form of knowledge, there are other works such as the
Hindu extravaganzas such as Ramayana and Mahabharata, treatises such as Vaastu Shastra in
architecture and town planning, and Arthashastra in political science. Two great literatures the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata are popular among Hindu society of India. The Ramayana of
Valmiki is the original Ramayana. The Ramayana showed a picture of a perfect society. The
other epic, the Mahabharata, was written by Ved Vyas. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana
have several versions in different Indian languages. The Mahabharata contains the famous
Bhagavad Gita which contains the spirit of divine wisdom and is truly a universal gospel.
In the Bhagvad Gita, Krishna explains to Arjuna his duties as a fighter and prince and elaborates
on different Yogic and Vedantic philosophies with examples and analogies. This makes Gita a
concise guide to Hindu philosophy and a parochial, self-contained guide to life.
The rationalistic age of India is characterised by the rise of two major reform movements such as
Vedanta and Buddhism. Vedanta is orthodox and accepts the Vedic Word, but no longer in a
literal sense. The interpretation of Scripture by the Vedantic theologians is extremely bold and
independent. Buddhism is heterodox, and rejects the authority of the Vedas altogether. Buddha
first preached the People's Gospel in B.C. 522, when Bimbisara was King of Magadha. The
battle between the old-established faith and the Buddhist rebels raged for two hundred years,
and, when the Greek battalions of King Alexander attacked the Punjab (b.c. 327), the sun of
Brahminism was setting, and the new star was shining in the East. At that time, Nanda sat on the
throne of Magadha. His empire was conquered by the dissident Chandragupta, who was the first
to tie the North of India from Magadha to the Punjab under one Imperial Government. By birth a
Shudra, the Emperor was not expected to be antagonistic to a religion which swept away all
social distinctions, and put Brahmin and Pariah on the same level. Buddhism ruled supreme in
the land of its birth until the fifth century after Christ, when Brahminic influence once more
became powerful.
Devotional Hindu drama, poetry and songs span the subcontinent. Among the popular are the
works of Kalidasa (writer of the famed Sanskrit play Shakuntala) and Tulsidas (who wrote an
epic Hindi poem based on the Ramayana, called Raamcharitmaanas). Tamil literature has been in
existence for more than 2500 years. Tolkaappiyam has been attributed as its oldest work,
whereas the exact origins of Thirukkural is unknown. The golden age of Tamil literature was
during the Sangam period, roughly 1800 years ago. The classic works of this period are
Cilappatikaram, Manimekalai, and Sivakasinthamani. Tamil literature is identified for its secular
traditions, although its authors had strong religious beliefs. Thirukkural is considered to be the
greatest of Tamil works.
 13

Kannada literature is perhaps the third oldest in Indian literature next to Sanskrit literature and
Tamil literature. The earliest reported work in Kannada literature dates back to the fifth century.
The first available literary in Kannada is Kavirajamarga, written in the eighth century by
Amoghavarsha Nrpatunga. Hindi literature started as religious and philosophical poetry in
medieval periods in dialects like Avadhi and Brij. The most famous personalities during this era
were Kabir, Tulsidas and Meerabai. The Scriptures of modern Hinduism are the Puranas which
were first committed to writing about the sixth century of era. The Hindus has inclination
towards stories about the Gods. The ancient myths were handed down from father to son, and
poets largely added to the stock from the stores of their leanings.
Antiquaries and divines took great pains to preserve this ocean of folklore. They set to work in
the same fashion as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The two brothers went about the country, and
collected ancient folklores among the German peasantry. Generations of Brahmins must have
been busy compiling and arranging, curtailing and enlarging the Puranas which were modified
time after time until they came out in that encyclopedic form in which we possess them now. The
Puranas have interesting information on almost every topic. There are lengthy accounts of the
lives of gods and patriarchs, stories of the creation, sacred as well as profane history. Psalms and
prophecies stand peacefully by the side of geological teaching, anatomy is taught together with
music, and theories about the movement of the stars are oddly intermixed with lessons on
grammar. But long-winded as the Puranas, they are grand old books, comparable to a fine old
man who is excellent company when he affectionately strolls over the various events and
experiences of his chequered life.
The era of Indian modern literature began in the late nineteenth century. With the establishment
of vernacular schools and the importation of the printing press, a great impetus was given to
popular prose, with Bengali writers perhaps taking the lead. In modern times Swami
Vivekananda, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi and many others used the text to help
motivate the Indian independence movement. During this period, the Khadi dialect became more
noticeable and different types of literature was produced in Sanskrit. Bankim Chandra
Chattopadhyaya, Rabindranath Tagore, Premchand etc rank among the world's best literary
personalities. Some of the prominent modern writers in Indian languages include Premchand,
Ageyeya in Hindi; Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, Sunil Gangopadhyay in Bengali; Amrita Pritam
in Punjabi; Ali Sardar Jafri, Firaq Gorakhpuri and Josh Malihabadi in Urdu; Shiv Shankar Pillai,
M.T.Vasudevan Nair, Malayattor Ramakrishnan in Malayalam; Subramaniya Bharati in Tamil;
Gobind Triumbak Deshpande in Marathi; and Tara Shankar Joshi in Gujarati.
The most famous Bengali writer is Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, who received the Nobel
Prize in 1913 for Literature. Tagore's own translation of 'Gitanjali' into English brought him
international fame. His 'Gora' is considered to be a very outstanding novel in Indian literature. In
the last century, several Indian writers have distinguished themselves not only in traditional
Indian languages but also in English. VS Naipaul, a diaspora Indian novelist born in Trinidad,
also won the Nobel in 2001. Other eminent writers who are either Indian or of Indian origin and
derive much inspiration from Indian themes are R. K. Narayan, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie,
Arundhati Roy, Raja Rao, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, Mukul Kesavan, Nayantara Sehgal,
Anita Desai, Ashok Banker , Shashi Deshpande, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Bharati Mukherjee. In
Indian culture, Indian dance, music and theatre traditions span back more than 2,000 years,
(Kluwer Law International, 2010). The major classical dance traditions, Bharata Natyam,
Kathak, Odissi, Manipuri, Kuchipudi, Mohiniattam and Kathakali draw on themes from
 14

mythology and literature and have rigid presentation rules. Regarding attire of India, Indian
clothing is diligently identified with the colourful silk saris worn by Indian women. The
traditional outfit for men is the dhoti, an unstitched piece of cloth that is tied around the waist
and legs. Men also wear a Kurta, a loose shirt that is worn about knee-length. For special
occasions, men wear a Sherwani, which is a long coat that is buttoned up to the collar and down
to the knees.
It is appraised that the ancient culture of the Indian sub-continent is vast and diverse. There are
people in India who are still living in the Stone Age and also others who are equally competent
and look up to the West. Indians live simultaneously with their beggars, their own satellites and
Indian cosmonauts. India is a secular state with tribal philosophies and there are many religions
like mixed with Hindu, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and Sikh faiths. There is no single faith of
religion, and no dominant religious community.
To summarize, the art of India is principled in nature with strong traces of different cultures and
civilizations in it. It is apparent from the history that the cultural representatives in the region
were the invaders, warriors that brought the cultural transmission through hard power but along
with them there were numerous soft power promoters as artists, suifs, poets, musicians, and story
tellers. The role of these cultural diplomats was important in contributing to the better
sociocultural understanding and building relationship between people of different faiths, sects
and regions.
History of Indian literature evolved as a wholesome domain through the Hindu literature like
Ramayana and Mahabharata, treatises such as Vaastu Shastra in architecture and town planning
and Arthashastra by Kautilya, making political science and involvement in politics household in
ancient India. Prehistoric devotional Hindu play, poetry and songs sweep the subcontinent, with
almost distinct imagery noticed in the gradual evolvement of literature in India. Certainly, if
thoroughly investigated, it can be observed that history of literature in India can be divided into
three periods, comprising of the ancient, the medieval and modern or contemporary.
In architecture, as in all other visual arts, there is a search for identity. In Indian architecture,
government buildings of India, which are actually intended to display the nation's identity, are a
complete distortion. Due to dominance of many rulers like the British, the Mughals and the
diverse native Indian architecture, the perceived notion of Indian identity is in a complete
confusion. During Indus Valley Civilization, there were well planned cities. Buddhist and Jaina
Architecture represented three important building types- the Chaitya Hall (place of worship), the
Vihara (monastery) and the Stupa. Many temples were built for devotees. With the beginning of
Islam, the former Indian architecture was slightly modified to allow the traditions of the new
religion, but it remained strongly Indian at its heart and character. Arches and domes began to be
used and the mosque or masjid too began to form part of the landscape, adding to a new
experience in form and space.

TOPIC: Modern Indian history from about the middle of the eighteenth century until the
present- significant events, personalities, issues.
 15

1) Gandhi’s decision to withdraw from Civil Disobedience Movement and

participate in second round table conference was controversial. Examine the
controversies that arose as a result of Delhi Pact?(250 words)

From Plassey to Partition : page 320

Key demand of the question

The question asks us to examine the controversies that emerged out of Gandhi Irwin Pact. We
have to mention the controversies, examine the causes of the controversies and assess whether
the controversies made sense

Directive word

Examine – When you are asked to examine, you have to probe deeper into the topic,  get into
details, and find out the causes or implications if any . In the case of above question, you have to
discuss the issues as discussed above.

Structure of the answer

Introduction – Discuss the contents of the Delhi pact and mention the controversies that it caused
such as

 Decision to withdraw was taken under bourgeoisie pressures

 Several leaders like Nehru, Bose etc were dissatisfied with the decision to withdraw the
movement

Body
 16

 Examine the controversies one by one. First of all, examine the claim that the decision to
withdraw was taken under bourgeoisie pressures.

o Mention the reason why this controversy arose

o Examine whether the capitalist class presented a unified front and whether
Congress was actually concerned with their worries

 Examine the controversy that Congress’s withdrawal signalled defeat

o Mention that similar things had happened post chauri chairs

o Mention that people’s capacity for protest is limited

o Mention the use of superior force by British

o Etc

 Highlight the actual impact and significance of Delhi pact and the reasons behind
aggreing to participate in RTC

Conclusion – mention your point of view on Delhi pact by summarising your answer.

ow to prepare Modern Indian History for IAS

Modern Indian History for Civil Services
Examination
Dealing with Modern History

Before starting your preparation for General Studies, aspirants are advised to
review the syllabus for the same.
Official Syllabus for the Prelims
 History of India and Indian National Movements
Official Syllabus for Mains
 17

 Indian culture will cover the salient aspects of Art Forms, Literature and
Architecture from ancient to modern times.
 Modern Indian history from about the middle of the eighteenth century until
the present- significant events, personalities, issues.
 The Freedom Struggle - its various stages and important key contributions and
people from India.
 Post-independence consolidation and reorganization within the country.
 History of the world will include events from 18th century such as industrial
revolution, world wars, redrawl of national boundaries, colonization, political
philosophies like communism, capitalism, socialism etc and their forms and
effect on the society.
After reviewing the syllabi, we can divide it into four part:
 Modern Indian History (will common for both Prelims and Mains)
 Before Freedom
 After Freedom
 Medieval Indian History (Thing are common to read)
 Ancient Indian History (Thing are common to read)
 World History (Only in Mains)

What type of questions asked in Modern Indian History?

For Prelims:
 Chronology based, related to freedom movement
 Key personalities of freedom movement and related stuff like organisations
they had set-up, positions of importance
 Key movements (NC, CDM etc.)
 Reforms and step taken by British Governance etc.
For Mains:
 Contribution of different sections of society (women, tribal, middle class, etc)
and key individuals (Gandhi, Nehru, Abul Kalam etc.) particularly those who
have 50th or 100th etc birth/death anniversary.
 18

 Nature of movement and participation

 Analysis of events considering national and global historical context
 National building after independence - Political, Social, Economic,
Technological and Foreign Relations (panchsheel principles, nehruvian foreign
policy etc.)
To Decode: Practice last three year Prelims papers and five years GS papers
(related to History).

Sources to Prepare Ancient Indian History

Before Independence:
 History of Modern India by Bipin Chandra (Not India's Freedom Struggle) or
you can refer to 'Modern India' by Sumit Sarkar suggested by many other
toppers.
 Spectrum's 'Modern India'
 NCERT (not necessary)
After Independence (For Mains)
 India after Independence by Bipin Chandra
 India after Gandhi by Ram Chandra Guha
 Online practice quizzes (General Knowledge Today or any other good source)
and past year questions.

How to read and comparison?

From the recommended books point of view: Modern India is better for

Mains rather than 'India Freedom Struggle' so it is better to read that from
beginning. Spectrum vs Bipin Chandra - Spectrum is excellent for revision
before exam, and Bipin Chandra is good to develop historical analysis aptitude
and Mains type answers. So, we suggest to read both but use Spectrum for
revision. '
 First read Bipin Chandra / Sumit Sarkar and then revise by reading Spectrum.
 Pay efforts to make notes from Bipin Chandra for last minute revision.
 19

How to Remember Chronology?

Don't focus on each event's year, remember key landmark events' year to
figure out year of related events. Focus on events' connection (succeeding and
proceeding) and connect the dots (implications). For example - Gandhi came >
Champaren > Khilafat Movement > Non-cooperation Movement > Visit by
Prince of Wales > Chauri Chaura ...

NCERT Books?

See, if you can read Spectrum and Bipin Chandra then we don't think you need
to read NCERT. In case old NCERT book is better than new one in terms of
content. Now Tamilnadu Board's history book is also good and gives adequate
weightage  to South India (in terns of personalities who contributed to Freedom
Struggle).

What and how to read about Post-independence History?

We should say from exam point of view 'India Since Independence' by Bipin

Chandra is good but it is highly biased so always check alternate perspectives
but Guha is more objective and neutral. It covers most relevant topics - read
from Chapters 7 to Chapter 24 (Consolidation to the Punjab Crisis). Initial parts
are covered in History of Polity and later parts (Economy, Land reforms etc) can
be covered from NCERT 'Indian Economy' book.
To check you have covered all relevant topics, find the check list from
History optional syllabus:
 13. Consolidation as a Nation; Nehru's Foreign Policy; India and her
neighbours (1947-1964); The Linguistic reorganization of States (1935-1947);
Regionalism and regional inequality; Integration of Princely States; Princes in
electoral politics; the Question of National Language.
 14. Caste and Ethnicity after 1947; Backward  caste and tribes in post-colonial
electoral politics; Dalit movements.
 20

 15. Economic development and political change; Land reforms; the politics of

planning and rural reconstruction; Ecology and environmental policy in post -
colonial India; Progress of science.
Tips: Remember your understanding and views and don't just go by author's
view.
 In recent years some questions have asked to
 Contribution of North East in freedom struggle (persons and places related to
it)
 Contribution of women in freedom struggle
 Tribal movement and personalities related to freedom struggle
 Specially give attention to some anniversary or occasion related to above like
Postal Stamp issued / Award constituted / celebration of 100 years of that etc.
 Reference: Gaurav Gupta, AIR-117 (CSE - 2013)

Indian Civil Services Examination

Handbook/The Freedom Struggle
 Read in another language
 Download PDF
 Watch
 Edit
< Indian Civil Services Examination Handbook

Contents
The Freedom Struggle ‐ its various stages and important
contributors/contributionsEdit
BooksEdit
 History of Modern India, Bipan Chandra
 India's Struggle for Independence, Bipan Chandra et al
 Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore and Other Eminent Personalities of Modern India , Spectrum Editorial Board
 NCERT Class 12 Themes in Indian History Part III
 NCERT Class 10 Social Science, India and the Contemporary World - II , Chapter III
 NCERT Class 8 Social Studies Our Past - III

Previous years questionsEdit

 21

2013 onwardsEdit
Defying the barriers of age, gender and religion, the Indian women became the torchbearer
during the struggle for freedom in India. Discuss. (200 words) [2013]

Several foreigners made India their homeland and participated in various movements. Analyze
their role in the Indian struggle for freedom. (200 words) [2013]

In what ways did the naval mutiny prove to be the last nail in the coffin of British colonial
aspirations in India? (150 words) [2014]

What were the major political, economic and social developments in the world which motivated
the anti-colonial struggle in India? (150 words) [2014]

1987-2012Edit
Discuss the major social reform movement of the second half of the 19th century. In what way
did they contribute to the rise and growth of Indian National Movement? (Not more than 200
words)

Explain briefly the importance of the following: (About 30 words for each) (i) Ghadar Party (ii)
The Deccan Education Society (iii) National Archives of India.

Who were the following and why are they so well-known? (Not more than two sentence for
each) (i) Sir William Jones (ii) M.R. Jaykar (iii) Pandita Rama Bai (iv) K. Kamraj (v) M.N.Roy

What were the motives which led to the partition of Bengal? What were its consequences? Why
was it annulled? (About 250 words)

Who wrote our National Anthem? When, where and on what occasion was it sung for the first
time? When was it accepted as our National Anthem?

Why did salt emerge as the central issue for launching the Satyagraha? (About 100 words)

What was the Gandhi Irwin pact ? Why was it signed and what were its consequences ? (About
150 words)

Describe Nehru attitude towards Russia in the pre-1947 period. (About 50 words)

Why did Gandhi launch the No-violent Non-cooperation Movement on the Khilafat question?
How were other issues joined to it later on? Discuss the constructive program me of the Non-
cooperation Movement.

What was Cabinet Mission plan? How was the grouping clause fundamental to it? What was its
impact on the attitude of the Congress and the League? (About 250 words)

The recruitment of Indians to civil service was the most important question in the last quarter of
19th century. Explain.
 22

How was Jawaharlal Nehru influenced by socialist ideas? How did the Socialist thinking of
Nehru and other leaders influence the Congress before 1942?

Analyse briefly the contribution of religious reform movements to the growth of extremist
nationalist movement.

The trial of INA officers did more harm than good to the British rule in India. Explain

Why have the following become famous? (i) Subrahamania Bharati (ii) Chanipur (iii) Damansky
Brothers (iv) Khudiram Bose (two sentence on each)

Trace the origin of the Swaraj Party. What was the manifesto of the Swaraj Party? What were the
Swarijists demands and the reactions of the British?

What was the attitude of the Indian National Congress towards the Second World War? What
was the August Offer? What were the factors that led the British to change its negative policy
and send Cripps to India? (About 250 words)

What was Gandhi’s concept of socialism? How did it differ from Marxian socialism?

What were the main features of the Act of 1935? What was Jawaharlal Nehru’s reaction to the
Act? Why did he conduct the elections of 1937 and with what effect?

How did Lala Lajpat Rai and Bal Gangadhar Tilak champion the cause of militant nationalism in
India?

If Aurobindo was the high priest, Rabindranath, was the great poet of the Swadeshi movement.
Elucidate.

When and why did the revolt of the ratings of the Royal Indian Navy take Place? Why did they
suspend the movement? What were the attitudes of Gandhi and Patel towards the movement?
(About 50 words each)

Narrate the phase of the India’s freedom movement especially from the beginning of 1947 till
independence?

Discuss the growth of revolutionary terrorism with special reference to its ramifications in
Maharashtra, Bengal and Punjab till the first decade of the twentieth century.(About 250 words)

What was Harijan Movement? Why and with what effect did Gandhi launch individual
Satyagraha?

Dr. Ambedkar’s versatile career went through various phases. State briefly the various facets of
his life.

State the various regulations imposed by the British Government to curtail the freedom of the
press.
 23

What do you know about the following movements? (i) Swadeshi Movement (ii) Khilafat
Movement (iii) Namdhari Movement

'The Viceroyalities of Lord Lytton and Lord Ripon formed an important landmark in the history
of the Indian National Movement'. Examine the truth of the statement.

How far was the Swadeshi Movement linked with Boycott? Analysis the nature of mass
participation in the Movement. (About 250 words)

Analyse Jawaharlal Nehru's views on Independence and Dominion Status. How far these
reflected in the policy enunciated by the Lahore Congress?

Why did Mahatma Gandhi launch Civil Disobedience Movement? Analyse the intensity of the
movement in different parts of India.

What do you know about the following movements? (i) Wahabi Movement (ii) Indigo
Movement (iii) Quit India Movement

Why have the following become famous? (i) M.A. Ansari (ii) P.C. Joshi (iii) Indulal Yagnik (iv)
Lord Pethwick Lawrence (v) Sree Narayan Guru (vi) Nandlal Bose

"Mahatma Gandhi's succession, during 1916-20, in getting the 'technique of non-violent

satyagraha accepted by the nation as a weapon of struggle against the British was phenomenal."
Elucidate.

Why was Bengal partitioned in 1905? How did it lead to the growth of extremist and terrorist
schools of nationalism? Why was it annulled and with what consequences? (About 250 words)

"From August offer of Mountabatten Plan was a logical Revolution." Discuss.

What was the Macdonald Award? How was it modified and with what results?

Analyse the main differences between the approaches of Tilak and Gokhale on social and
political issues. (About 150 words each)

"The Minto-Morely Reforms did not and could not provide an answer to Indian problems."
Explain.

"The Lucknow Pack of 1916 was signed without regard for its consequences." Elucidate.

What do you know about the following? (i) Home Rule Movement (ii) Temple Entry Programme
(iii) Mass Contact programme of Nehru (iv) Sikander-Jinnah Pact

Why did the following places become famous during the freedom struggle? (i) Dandi (ii)
Haripura (iii) Surat (iv) Bardoli

Why have the following become famous? (i) C.Ilbert (ii) John Simon (iii) Ramsay Macdonald
(iv) Wavell
 24

How did the outbreak of the Second World War affect India's political scene? Did the Cripps
Mission resolve the political crisis in India? (About 250 words)

Trace the emergence of Gandhiji in Indian political scene till the Champaran Satayagraha of
1917. What was the basic philosophy of Satyagraha enunciated by him? (About 250 words)

Discuss the outstanding Tribal uprising against the British rule during the nineteenth century.

What is meant by 'un-British' rule in India? How did the Indian nationalists react against it?
Evaluate the role of Dadabhai Naroji in exposing the evils of British rule in India.

What were the contributions of the Moderates in the formative stage of the Indian National
Congress?

Explain the part played by Annie Besant in the Home Rule Movement.

In what way did the international events in the late twenties of the present century influence
Jawaharlal Nehru's radical views?

In what way did the Civil Disobedience Movement affect the different provinces of India? How
did it foster peasant movement in India? (About 250 words)

Trace the emergence of Indian nationalism till the foundation of the Indian National Congress.
(About 75 words)

How did the British illustrate Lord Canning's policy in treating the Indian Princes as
'Breakwaters in the storm'?

What were the reasons that changed Gandhiji's attitude of responsive cooperation to non-
cooperation in 1920? What were its consequences?

The policies of the British Indian Government during 1858-1905 were aimed at preventing
another revolt of the masses. Eludicate. (About 250 words)

Bengal was partitioned in 1905 not for administrative reasons but for political purposes.
Elucidate.

What was the Masterly Inactivity Policy? Why was it abandoned?

What was the Macdonald Award? How was it modified? (About 150 words)?

What are Tilak's contribution towards shaping the course of the nationalist movement in India?

Why has Nehru in his Autobiography been so critical of the liberals?

What do you know about the following: (i) Butler Committee Report (ii) August Offer, 1940 (iii)
Theosophical Society of India
 25

Why have the following been famous? (i) Bhartendu Harish Chandra (ii) C. Rajagopalachari (iii)
A.O. Hume (i) Birsa Munda (About 20 words each)

Examine the causes and nature of extremism in Indian politics in the early part of the present
century.

What were the salient features of Gandhi-Irwin Pact?

What do you know about the following? (i) Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (ii) Rowlatt Act (iii) August
Declaration, 1917

Did Jawaharlal Nehru really 'speak' the 'language' of Gandhi? Locate the points of their
agreements and departures.

How did economic nationalism mirror the work of the early nationalist leadership in India?

Why did the moderates lose appeal with the Indians and failed to elicit desired response from the
British?

Trace the origins of the R.N.I. Mutiny and evaluate its impact on the political situation in India

How did the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal influence the nationalist politics?

What was the significance of the Prajamandal movements in the Indian States in the decade
preceding India's independence?

Assess the role of C. Rajagopalachari during the pre-partition years of Indian public life.

What do you know about the following: (About 20 words on each) (i) Nil Darpan (ii) Sarda
Sadan (iii) Sabarmati Ashram (iv) Hunter Commission (v) Bandi Jiwan

Why have the following become famous? (i) Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan (ii) Seth Jamanlal Bajaj
(iii) S. Satyamurti (iv) Udham Singh (v) Sarojini Naidu

What were the proposals of the Cabinet Mission ? Analyse there actions of the Congress and the
League to the proposals.

Trace the formation of the Swaraj Party. What were its demands.

'What began as a fight for religion ended as a war of independence, for there is not the slightest
doubt that the rebels wanted to get rid of the alien government and restore the old order of which
the king of Delhi was the rightful representative.' Do you support this viewpoint?

Why have the following become famous? (i) Rammanohar Lohia (ii) C. Y. Chintamani (iii)
Henry Cotton (iv) Tej Bahadur Sapru (v) Veeresalingam P.K. (vi) Bhulabhai Desai (vii)
Kamladevi Chattopadhyay

Trace the origin of the Swadeshi Movement. How did it involve the masses?
 26

What was Mountbatten Plan ? Discuss the reactions of Gandhi and Azad to the Plan.

Who established the Arya Samaj? What was its goal?

How did the terrorist movement gather strength in countries other than India?

Answer the following: (About 20 words each) (i) William Jones (ii) C.F. Andrews (iii) Narayan
Guru (iv) Tantia Tope (v) Sayyid Ahmad (vi) Margaret Noble (vii) Fort William College (viii)
Lala Amarnath (ix) Florence Nightingale

Discuss the main objectives of the Indian national movement up to 1905. What were its basic
weaknesses during this period?

What administrative changes were introduced in India after 1858? What were the objectives of
these changes?

How did the movement for the liberation of women receive a great stimulus from the rise and
growth of the nationalist movement in India?

Write about the following (About 20 words each): (i) Ghadar Party (ii) Jamnala Bajaj (iii)
Mohammad Iqbal (iv) T. Prakasam (v) Champaran Satyagraha (vi) Ali Brothers

What was the Butler Committee Report? Discuss the reactions on the report in India.

Why did Jinnah reject C.R. Formula?

Trace the growth of the Indian Home Rule Movement in Britain.

Evaluate the attitudes of different political parties towards Quit India Movement.

Review the Dickie Bird Plan

Write about the following (not exceeding 20 words each): (i) Anandmath (ii) Chamber of Princes
(iii) Divide et impera (iv) Dandi March (v) Satyagraha

The reforms of 1909 introduced a cardinal problem and ground of controversy are every revision
of Indian electoral system. Comment

The mainstay of Gandhi’s movements was rural India. Elucidate.

Discuss the character of major tribal uprisings in British India in the nineteenth Century.

Bring out the ideological basis of the Moderate-Extremist divide in the Indian National
Congress.

Answer the following: (about 20 words ) i) The Jatiya Sarkar of Tamluk ii) Punnapra-Vayalar iii)
Al-Hilal iv) Har Dayal v) Khudai Khidmatgar vi) W.W. Hunter vii) Indu Lal Yajnik viii) Achhut
Patwardhan ix) Sir William Jones x) James Wilson xi) Ghulam-giri.
 27

Discuss the major regulations enacted by the British rulers to curb the freedom of Press in India.

Form a critical assessment of the Non-cooperation Movement.

What led to the partition of Bengal in 1905?

Discuss the main findings of the Hartog committee (1929).

Write about the following (not exceeding 20 words each): (i) Sohan Singh Bhakna (ii) Alluri
Sitaramaraju (iii) Canjeevaram Natrajan Annadurai (iv) Nazir Hasan

Examine the policy of Union towards Princely States. Account for shift from the policy of
Subordinate Isolation.

In the Motague Chelmsford Report communal representation and reservations were not only
retained but considerably extended. Comment

Evaluate Subhas Chandra Bose’s contribution to India’s freedom

Why and how did the Congress come to accept the partition of the country?

Write about the following not exceeding 20 words each): (a) Baba Ram Chandra (b) Moplah
Rebellion

Regardless of distance in time, there were lots of similarties between Lord Curzon and
Jawaharlal Lal Nehru. Discuss.

How did the Government of India Act, 1935 mark a point of no return in the history of
constitutional development in India?

What was the attitude of Indian Industrialists towards the Indian National Congress in the Pre-
independent era?

Critically assess Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru’s view on Indian nationalism?

Write about the following (not exceeding 20 words each): a) Aruna Roy

The crisis of the colonial order during 1919 and 1939 was directly linked to the constitutional
reforms, disillusionment and militant anti-colonial struggles. Elucidate.

What are the salient features of the Government of India Acts of 1858 and 1909?

Do you think Mahatma Gandhi's support to Khilafat Movement had diluted his secular
credentials? Give your argument based on the ssessment of events.

Evaluate the contribution of revolutionary terrorism represented by Bhagat Singh to the cause of
India’s struggle for Independence

Non-Cooperation Movement gave new direction and energy to the national movement. Explain
 28

Write about the following (not exceeding 20 words each): (a) Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi (b)
Ilbert Bill (c) Lala Hara Dayal (d) Vaikam Satyagraha (e) Indian States Commission

Write about the following not exceeding 20 words each): Poona Sarvajanik Sabha

"Many Englishmen honestly consider themselves the trustees for India and yet to what a
condition they have reduced our country". Comment

Write about the following (not exceeding 20 words each): Kiang Nongbah

Write brief notes on each of the following, in about 20 words each: (a) Contributions of Latika
Ghosh to the freedom struggle (b) Bhai Maharaj Singh as a freedom fighter.

Trace the salient sequence of events in the popular revolt that took place in February 1964 in the
then Royal Indian Navy and bring out its significance in the freedom struggle. Do you agree with
the view that the sailors who took part in this revolt were some of the unsung heroes of the
freedom struggle?

In the context of the freedom struggle, write short notes (not exceeding 50 words each) on the
following: (a) Benoy-Badal-Dinesh Martyrdom (b) Bharat Naujawan Sabha (c) Babbar Akali
Movement

"The Indian independence movement was a mass-based movement that encompassed various
sections of the society. It also underwent the process of constant ideological evolution."
Critically examine.

The significance of Patharughat in the Indian freedom struggle

1 www.visionias.in ©Vision IAS (Supplementary Material)

Post-Independence Consolidation and Reorganization within the Country

Table of Contents

Chapter 01: Nation Building Process and its

Challenges ................................................................................................................................. 4

A. Partition and its

aftermath ................................................................................................................................. 4

B. Integration of Princely
States .................................................................................................................................. 6
 29

C. Tribal
Integration ....................................................................................................................................... 9

D. Issue of
language ........................................................................................................................................ 10

Chapter –02: From Colony to

Democracy ......................................................................................................................................... 12

A. Emergence of Electoral
Politics ......................................................................................................................................... 12

B. Dominance of Congress
System: .......................................................................................................................................... 13

Nature of Congress Dominance

……………….......................................................................................................................... 13

C. Emergence of Opposition
Parties .......................................................................................................................................... 14

Chapter: 3 Economic
Development .......................................................................................................................................... 16

Economic Development and

Planning ........................................................................................................................................... 16

A. Mixed Economy Model

(Socialism) ............................................................................................................................................ 16

B. Planning and its

Impact ............................................................................................................................................ 17

C. Green
Revolution .............................................................................................................................................. 18

D. Operation Flood and

Cooperatives ...............................................................................................................................................
20

Chapter – 4 ........................................................................................................................... 22

India's External
Relations .............................................................................................................................................. 22
 30

A. Introduction to India's Foreign

Policy: ................................................................................................................... 22
B. Non Alignment Policy
– .................................................................................................................... 23
C. B. Relations with neighbors [Pakistan &
China] .................................................................................................................... 23
D. I. Relations with
Pakistan: .................................................................................................................... 24
E. II. Relations with
China: .................................................................................................................... 25
F. C. India's Nuclear
Policy ..................................................................................................................... 25
G. Chapter–5: The crisis of Democratic
Order ..................................................................................................................... 26
H. A. Emergency ....................................,,........................................................ 26
I. I. Economic
Issues. ...................................................................................................................... 26
J. II. Tussle with
Judiciary:– ....................................................................................................................... 26
K. VISIONIAS ™ www.visionias.in 2 www.visionias.in ©Vision IAS III. Imposition of
Emergency:– ........................................................................................................................
.. 26
L. IV. Impact of
Emergency:– ........................................................................................................................
.. 26
M. V. Comparative Analysis of Emergency [Pakistan, Bangladesh,
India] ........................................................................................................................... 27
N. VI. Lessons from
Emergency: ..........................................................................................................................
.. 28
O. B. J.P.
Movement ............................................................................................................................
. 28
P. C. Naxalite
Movement: ..........................................................................................................................
... 28
Q. D.
Communalism:– ...................................................................................................................
........... 29
R. 1. Ayodhya
Dispute: ...............................................................................................................................
29
 31

S. 2. Anti Sikh
Riots:– ...............................................................................................................................
29
T. 3. Anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat
(2002) ................................................................................................................................
30
U. Chapter–6: Regional Discontent and its
Solution ................................................................................................................................
30
V. A. Basis of
Regionalism:– .......................................................................................................................
...... 30 Economic Imbalances &
Regionalism:– .......................................................................................................................
....... 30
W. Sons of Soil
Doctrine: ..............................................................................................................................
. 31
X. B. Issue of J & K,
Punjab ................................................................................................................................
31
Y. 1. Issue of J &
K ................................................................................................................................. 31
Z. 2. Punjab
Issue ..................................................................................................................................
32
AA. C. Problems with North-East
Region:– ...............................................................................................................................
... 32
BB. I. Demands for
autonomy:– ..........................................................................................................................
........ 33
CC. II. Secessionist
Movements: .........................................................................................................................
......... 33 Chapter 07: Reorganization of the
States ..................................................................................................................................
34
DD. A. Formation of Linguistic
States:– ................................................................................................................................
.. 34
EE. B. Unique cases of
reorganization:– ...................................................................................................................
.. …………..36
 32

FF. I.
Sikkim: ..................................................................................................................................
. 36
GG. II. Goa's
Liberation .............................................................................................................................
....... 36
HH. C. Contemporary Reorganizations of the
State:– ..................................................................................................................................
. 36
II. I.
Chhattisgarh:– ......................................................................................................................
.............. 36
JJ. II.
Uttarakhand .........................................................................................................................
............ 36 III.
Jharkhand:– ..........................................................................................................................
............ 37 IV.
Telengana: ............................................................................................................................
........... 37 Chapter 08: Contemporary
Developments ......................................................................................................................
................ 37 A. Politics of
Coalition: ..............................................................................................................................
......... 37 B. New Economic Policy
1991 .................................................................................................................................
39
KK. I.
Liberalization ........................................................................................................................
......... 39
LL. II.
Privatisation: ........................................................................................................................
.......... 40
MM. III.
Globalisation: .......................................................................................................................
........... 40
NN. C. Era of ICT [Information and Communication
Technology] ..........................................................................................................................
........ 40
OO. 3 www.visionias.in ©Vision IAS Chapter 09: [Popular
Movements] .........................................................................................................................
.. ……..41
 33

PP. A.
Introduction .........................................................................................................................
.......... 41
QQ. B. Environment
Movement ............................................................................................................................
........ 41
RR. I. Chipko
Movement: ..........................................................................................................................
........... 41
SS. II. Narmada Bachao
Aandolan : ............................................................................................................................
........ 41
TT. III. Silent Valley
Movement................................................................................................................... 42
IV. Fisheries
Movement: ..........................................................................................................................
........... 42
UU. C. Dalit
Movement ............................................................................................................................
......... 42
VV. D. OBC
Movements: .........................................................................................................................
............. 43 E. New Farmers
Movement ............................................................................................................................
........... 43 F. Women's
Movement ............................................................................................................................
........... 44 G. Civil Democratic
Movement: ..........................................................................................................................
............. 44 Chapter 01: Nation Building Process and its Challenges
A. Partition and its aftermath
The initial few years of independent India were full of daunting challenges and
concerns regarding national unity and territorial integrity of India. Freedom
came with Partition, which resulted in large scale communal violence and
displacement and unprecedented violence challenged the very idea of a secular
India. Independent India faced three kinds of challenges:
i. The first and immediate challenge was to shape a nation that was
united, yet accommodative of the diversity in our society. Due to
the large landscape, different cultures with different regions and
religions, variety of spoken languages, many people widely believed
that a country with such amount of diversity could not remain
together for long.
 34

ii. The second challenge was to establish democracy. India adopted

representative democracy based on the parliamentary form of
government. These features strived to ensure that the political
competition would take place in a democratic framework. The
challenge was to develop democratic practices in accordance with
the constitution.
iii. The third challenge was to ensure inclusive development and well-
being of the entire society. Due to the widespread poverty, the real
challenge now was to evolve effective polices for economic
development and eradication of poverty.

Partition: Displacement and Rehabilitation

On 14–15 August 1947, two nation states came into existence, because of 'partition' of the division of
British India into India and Pakistan. According to the "two nation theory" advanced by the Muslim
League, India consisted of two 'People' Hindus and Muslims. Due to the forceful circumstances and
several political developments in 1940's the political competition between the congress and the Muslim
League and the British role led to the decision for the creation of Pakistan. A very important task at hand
was demarcation of boundaries. After 3rd June plan of Mountbatten a British jurist Radcliff was invited
to fix the problem and to form two boundary commissions one for Bengal and one for Punjab. Four
other members were also there in commission but there was a deadlock between Congress and Muslim
league. On 17th August, 1947 he announced his award.

Limitation of this award:

a) Justice Radcliff had no prior knowledge about India.

b) He had no specialized knowledge needed for the task also.

c) He had no advisors and experts.

d) 6 week deadline that Radcliff had was also a limitation of this award. It was decided to follow the
principle of religious majorities which means that areas where the Muslims were in majority would
make up the territory of Pakistan. The remaining was to stay with India.

The principle of religious majorities had entailed with it so many difficult positions:

i. There were two areas of concentration with Muslim majority, In the West
and East part of India. Hence, it was decided that the new country. Pakistan
will comprise two territories, West and East Pakistan.
ii. ii. All the Muslims were not in favour joining Pakistan. Frontier Gandhi,
Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, the undisputed leader of the North West Frontier
Province, staunchly opposed the two nation theory. But as Khudai
khidmatgar of Abdul Ghaffar Khan boycotted the Plebiscite due to provision
of limited franchise rights in that, the lone contender in the fray, the Muslim
 35

League, won the vote by default and in the end NWFP was made to merge
with Pakistan.
iii. Two Muslims majority concentrated provinces of British India, Punjab and
Bengal had very large areas with non Muslims population in the majority.
Eventually it was decided that these two provinces would be bifurcated
according to the religious majority at the district or even lower level. The
partition of these two provinces caused the prolonged trauma of Partition.
iv. The last difficult position was of "minorities" on both the sides of the
border. Minorities then on either side lived in fear and fled from their
homes to save their lives from brutal violence unleashed during partition.
Consequence of Partition:
The year 1947, saw the one of the most abrupt and haphazard, tragic
transfer of people that human history had ever witnessed. There were
brutal killings, atrocities, rapes, on both sides of the border. The cities like
Lahore, Amritsar, Kolkata (then Calcutta) got divided into "Communal
Zones". In many cases women were killed by their own family members to
preserve the 'family honor'. Everything was divided then from tables, chairs
to government officials. It is estimated that the Partition forced about 80
lakhs people to migrate across the new border. Between five to 10 lakh
people were killed in Partition related violence. The government of India
was successful in providing relief and in resettlement and rehabilitation of
nearly six million refugees from Pakistan. A department of rehabilitation
was created. Various refugee camps were set up some notable being camp
at Kurukshetra and Kolwada camp at Bombay. Many of the Hindus and Sikhs
fleeing West Punjab were directed by the government of India to refugee
camp in Kurukshetra. A vast city of tents had grown up on the plain, to
house waves of migrants, sometimes up to 20,000 a day. Kurukshetra was
the largest of the nearly 200 camps set up to house refugees from West
Punjab. While there were five refugee camps in Mumbai for refugees from
Sindh region. Some refugees had arrived before the date of transfer of
power; among them prescient businessmen who had sold their properties in
advance and migrated with the proceeds. However, the vast majority came
after15 August 1947, and with little more than the clothes on their skin.
These were the farmers who had ‘stayed behind till the last moment, firmly
resolved to remain in Pakistan if they could be assured of an honourable
living’. But when, in September and October, the violence escalated in the
Punjab, they had to abandon that idea. The Hindus and Sikhs who were
lucky enough to escape the mobs fled to India by road, rail, sea and on foot.
Camps such as Kurukshetra were but a holding operation. The refugees had
to be found permanent homes and productive work. Thus refugees required
land for permanent settlement. As it happened, a massive migration had
also taken place the other way, into Pakistan from India. Thus, the first place
 36

to resettle the refugees was on land vacated by Muslims in the eastern part
of the Punjab. If the transfer of populations had been ‘the greatest mass
migration’ in history now commenced ‘the biggest land resettlement
operation in the world’. As against 2.7 million hectares abandoned by
Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab, there were only 1.9 million hectares left
behind by Muslims in East Punjab. The shortfall was made more acute by
the fact that the areas in the west of the province had richer soils, and were
more abundantly irrigated. To begin with, each family of refugee farmers
was given an allotment of four hectares, regardless of its holding in
Pakistan. Loans were advanced to buy seed and equipment. While
cultivation commenced on these temporary plots, applications were invited
for permanent allotments. Each family was asked to submit evidence of how
much land it had left behind. Applications were received from 10 March
1948; within a month, more than half a million claims had been filed. These
claims were then verified in open assemblies consisting of other migrants
from the same village. As each claim was read out by a government official,
the assembly approved, amended, or rejected it. Expectedly, many refugees
were at first prone to exaggeration. However, every false claim was
punished, sometimes by a reduction in the land allotted, in extreme cases
by a brief spell of imprisonment. This acted as a deterrent; still, an officer
closely associated with the process estimated that there was an overall
inflation of about 25 per cent. To collect, collate, verify and act upon the
claims a Rehabilitation Secretariat was set up in Jullundur. At its peak there
were about 7,000 officials working there; they came to constitute a kind of
refugee city of their own. The bulk of these officials were accommodated in
tents, the camp serviced by makeshift lights and latrines and with
temporary shrines, temples for Hindus and gurdwaras for Sikhs. Leading the
operations was the director general of rehabilitation, Sardar Tarlok Singh of
the Indian Civil Service. A graduate of the London School of Economics,
Tarlok Singh used his academic training to good effect, making two
innovations that proved critical in the successful settlement of the refugees.
Thus the task of rehabilitation took time to accomplish and by 1951, the
problem of the rehabilitation of the refuges from West Pakistan had been
fully tackled.
The rehabilitation on East took years and it was more difficult because of
constant exodus of Hindus from East Bengal continued for years. After
handling this worst nightmare of Partition, Indian leadership had strived to
consolidate India from within and look after its internal affairs.
Plan of consolidation:
The broad strategy for national consolidation after 1947 involved :
1. Territorial integration,
2. Mobilization of political and institutional resources
 37

3. Economic development, and

4. Adoption of polices which would promote social justice, remove glaring
inequalities and provide equal opportunities.
B. Integration of Princely States
Unifying post partition India and the princely states under one
administration was perhaps the most important task faced by then political
leadership. In colonial India, nearly 40% of the territory was occupied by five
hundred sixty five small and large states ruled by princes who enjoyed
varying degrees of autonomy under the system of British Paramountcy.
British power protected them from their own people as also from external
aggression so long as they did British bidding. As the British left, many of
565 princely states, began to dream of independence. They had claimed
that the paramountcy could not be transferred to the new states of India
and Pakistan. The ambitions were fuelled by the then British PM Clement
Attlee announcement on Feb 20, 1947 that "His Majesty's Government does
not intend to hand over their powers and obligations under paramountcy to
any government of British India". With great skill and masterful diplomacy
and using both persuasion and pressure, Sardar Patel succeeded in
integrating the hundreds of princely states. Few princely states joined
Constituent Assembly with wisdom & realism, patriotism, but other princely
states still stayed away from joining it. Princely states of Travancore, Bhopal,
and Hyderabad publicly announced their desire to claim an independent
status. On June 27, 1947, Sardar Patel assumed additional charge of the
newly created states department with V.P. Menon as its Secretary.
The government's approach was guided by three considerations. :
i. The people of most of the princely states clearly wanted to become part of the
Indian Union.
ii. The government was prepared to be flexible in giving autonomy to some regions.
The idea was to accommodate plurality & adopt a flexible approach in dealing with
the demands of the regions.
iii. In the back drop of Partition, the integration and consolidation of the territorial
boundaries of the nation had assumed supreme importance.

Patel threw a series of lunch parties where he requested his princely guests to help the
Congress in framing the new constitution for India. Patel's first step was to appeal to the
princes whose territories fell inside India to accede to the Indian Union in three subjects
which affected the common interests of the country, namely, foreign relations, defence and
communications. He also gave an implied threat he would not be able to restrain the
impatient people post August 15, 1947. States were issued an appeal with an implied threat
of anarchy and chaos. Next step of Patel was to convince Mountbatten to bat for India. 25th
July speech of Mountbatten to the Chamber of Princes finally persuaded the Princes. This
speech ranked as the most significant Act of Mountbatten in India. After this, virtually all the
 38

states except 3 signaled the instrument of accession. One was Travancore under the
Maharaja of Travancore Chithira Thirunal but the real ruler was its Diwan C. P. Ramaswamy
Aiyyer. There was an attack on C. P. Aiyyar, and after that it was Maharaja of Travancore
which wired the government that they are ready for accession. 7 www.visionias.in ©Vision
IAS Jodhpur- A young hindu king was there, it’s accession was a serious issue due to its
proximity to border. Jinnah also persuaded him but after tremendous pressure from Patel,
finally he signed the Instrument of Assession. Bhopal- Mainly hindu population and ruler
was Habibullah Khan supported by Jinnah. There was a revolt against the Bhopal ruler, he
faced pressure from Patel and communist population and finally he signed the Instrument of
Accession. Thus before August 15, 1947 peaceful negotiations has brought almost all states
whose territories were contiguous to the new boundaries of India, into the Indian Union.
The rulers of most of the states signed a document called the "Instrument of Accession"
which meant that their state agreed to become a part of the Union of India. Accession of the
princely states of Junagadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir and Manipur proved more difficult than
the rest. i. Junagadh was a small state on the coast of Saurashtra surrounded by Indian
Territory without any geographical contiguity with Pakistan. Yet it’s Nawab Mohabbat Khan
announced accession of his state to Pak on August 15, 1947 even though majority of the
people, overwhelmingly Hindu, desired to join India. People of the state organized a popular
movement and a group of Junagarhi people forced the Nawab to flee and formed Aarze
Hukumat (a temporary govt. in exile) it was led by Samal Das Gandhi. The Dewan of
Junagadh, Shah Nawaz Bhutto, the father of the more famous Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto now
decided to invite the Government of India to intervene. Indian troops marched into the
state. Later, a plebiscite was held in state in Feb 1948, which favoured joining India. ii. In the
state of Kashmir, The Hindu ruler of the state Hari Singh, did not wish to merge with India
and tried to negotiate with Indian and Pak to have an independent status for his state. Since
majority population of the state was Muslim, the Pakistani leaders thought the Kashmir
region 'belonged' to them. The popular movement in the state, led by Sheikh Abdullah of
the National Conference, wanted to get rid of the Maharaja, but was against joining Pak. He
formed an organization called National conference which was a secular organization & had a
long association with the congress. Abdullah asked Dogra dynasty to quit and hand over the
power to people. On 15th August Harisingh offered standstill agreement with both countries
which would allow the free movement of people and goods. Pakistan signed the agreement
but India didn’t and followed the policy of wait and watch. Pakistan became impatient and
started violating standstill agreement. Mehar Chand Mahajan then prime minister of
Kashmir complained this to British government for economic blockade and breach of
standstill agreement. On 22nd October several pathan tribesmen unofficially led by
Pakistan’s army officer invaded the state from north and reached up to Baramullah, were
further advancing towards Srinagar. On 24th October Hari Singh demanded military
assistance from Indian government. Mountbatten pointed out that under international law
India can send its troops only after the state sign a formal instrument of accession. V. P.
Menon went to Kashmir and on 26th October Maharaja signed instrument of accession and
also agreed upon Abdullah being appointed as the Head of the state administration. 27th
 39

Oct. morning nearly 100 planes airlifted men and weapons to Srinagar. Pakistan army left
the main valley region but continue to occupy a large chunk of territory of gilgit, baltistan
region. National conference volunteers worked with the Indian Army to drive out the
Pakistan infiltrators. Sheikh Abdullah became the Prime Minister. In November 1947
Mountbatten flew to Lahore on a peace mission. There took place a meeting with Jinnah but
no agreement could be made. Jinnah described that Kashmir accession is based upon fraud
and violence. Nehru wrote to Harisingh that he wants a final solution to Kashmir. On 1st Jan
1948 India decided to take the Kashmir issue to UN and it is said that it was on the advice of
Pakistan. Security Council was with Pakistan; both USA and Britain supported Pak and even
Nehru accepted that they were playing a dirty game. Britain’s Representative Phillip baker
vigorously supported Pakistan’s position.

Finally after a security council resolution there was a cease fire from 1st Jan 1948 and India
and pak agreed upon ceasefire line as LoC. After some days in 1951 constituent assembly
met in Srinagar to formulate a constitution for state and constituent assembly of state also
ratified the accession in 1954. In 1951 UN passed a resolution for a referendum under UN
supervision after Pak has withdrawn its troops. This resolution remains ineffective because
Pakistan never withdrew its force from what is called Azad Kashmir or Pak occupied
Kashmir. iii. Hyderabad the largest of the princely states and it was surrounded entirely by
Indian Territory. Some parts of the old Hyderabad states are today parts of Maharashtra,
Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. Its ruler was called "Nizam" and one the richest men of his
time. Rule of the Nizam was unjust and tyrannical and he had Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen
or MIM (Council of the Union of Muslims) which was a Muslim political party to safeguard
the interest of Muslims in India. The MIM advocated the set up of a Muslim dominion rather
than integration with India. Nizam Mir Osman Ali wanted an independent status for
Hyderabad. Hence, he entered into the standstill agreement with India in November 1947
for a year while negotiations with the Indian Government were going on. People's
movement against Nizam's rule gathered momentum. Particularly the peasants of
Telangana region, and women who had seen the worst of this oppression joined the
movements in great numbers. Hyderabad town was the nerve centre of this movement, and
the communists and Hyderabad congress were at the forefront. The Nizam retaliated on
popular movement by unleashing a para-military force, Razakars on the people. In total up
to 150,000 Razakar soldiers were mobilized to fight against the Indian Union and for the
independence of the Hyderabad State against Indian integration. The atrocities & communal
nature of the Razakars knew no bounds. The murdered, maimed, raped and looted,
targeting particularly the nonMuslims. The central government had to order the army to
tackle the situation. On 13th September 1948, Indian army under operation Polo (Code
name of the Hyderabad Police Action] invaded the Hyderabad state & overthrew its Nizam,
annexing the state merged it into the Indian Union. After the integration of the Hyderabad
state with India, the MIM was banned in 1948. The Razakar leader Qasim Rizvi was jailed
from 1948 to 1957, and then he was released on the condition to go to Pakistan, where he
was granted asylum. Nizam was rewarded for final submission and was made Rajpramukh.
 40

iv. Maharaja of Manipur Bodhchandra Singh signed the instrument of Accession with the
Indian government on the assurance that the internal autonomy of Manipur would be
maintained. Under the pressure of public view, the Maharaja held elections in Manipur in
June 1948 & thus the state became a constitutional monarchy. Manipur was the first part of
India to hold an election based on universal adult franchise. There were some differences
over Manipur's merger with India. The state congress was in favour, but other political
parties opposed this view. The government of India succeeded in pressurizing the Maharaja
into signing a Merger Agreement in September 1949, without consulting the popularly
elected Legislative Assembly of Manipur. The caused a lot anger and resentment in Manipur,
the consequences of which are still being felt. Smaller states were either merged with the
neighboring states or merged together to 'form centrally administered areas'. A large
number of states were consolidated into five new unions, forming Madhya Bharat,
Rajasthan, Patiala and East Punjab states Union [PEPSU], Saurashtra and Travancore-Cochin.
Mysore, Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir retained their original form as separate states
of the Union. In return of their surrender of all power and authority, the rulers of major
states were given privy purses guaranteed by the constitution. The rulers were allowed
succession to the gaddi and retained certain privileges such as keeping their titles, flying
their personal flags and gun salutes on ceremonial occasions. 9 www.visionias.in ©Vision
IAS After integration of princely states two trouble spots were French settlement and
Portuguese settlements. After prolonged negotiation Pondicherry and other French
possessions were handed over to India in 1954. Portuguese were not ready to handover
their areas. Its Nato allies supported Portugal’s position and India supported peaceful
means. There was a independence movement in Goa, India was patient, but in 1961 when
that popular movement demanded support Indian troops marched in Goa in under
Operation Vijay and Portuguese did surrendered without any fight. C. Tribal Integration The
uphill task of integrating the tribal population into the mainstream was extremely difficult
given the diverse conditions under which they dwell in different parts of the country, having
different cultures and speaking varied languages. • Tribal population was spread all over
India, their greatest concentration lies in Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, North-eastern
India, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan. Except the North-East, they
constitute minorities in their home states. Residing mostly in the hills and forest areas, in
colonial India they lived in relative isolation and their tradition, habits, cultures and ways of
life were exceptionally different with that of their non-tribal neighbours. • Radical
transformation and penetration of market forces integrated the isolated tribal people with
colonial power. A large number of money lenders, traders, revenue farmers and other
middlemen and petty officials invaded the tribal areas and disrupted the tribal's traditional
way of life. • To conserve forests and to facilitate their commercial exploitation, the colonial
authorities brought large tracts of forest lands under forest laws which forbade shifting
cultivation and put severe restrictions on the tribals' use of forest and their access to forest
products. • Loss of land, indebtness, exploitation by middlemen, denial of access to forests
and forest products, oppression and extortion by policemen, forest officials and other
government officials was to lead a series of tribal uprisings in the nineteenth & twentieth
 41

centuries, e.g. Santhal & Munda rebellion. Roots of India Tribal Policy: The preservation of
the tribal people's rich social and cultural heritage lay at the heart of Government of India's
policy of tribal integration. Jawaharlal Nehru was the main influence in shaping
government's attitude towards the tribals. Nehru stood for economic and social
development of the tribal people in multifarious ways, especially in the fields of
communications, modern medical facilities, agriculture and education. Nehru approach was
based on the nationalist policy towards tribals since the 1920s when Gandhiji set up
ashrams in the tribal areas and promoted constructive work. There were certain broad
guidelines laid down by Nehru, with the help of Verrier Elwin [British Anthropologist] which
was called as "Tribal Panchsheel". They are: 1. People should develop along the line of their
own genius & we should avoid imposing anything on them. We should try to encourage in
every way their own traditional arts and culture. 2. Tribals rights to land and forest should
be respected. 3. We should try to train and build up a team of their own people to do the
work of administration and development. Some technical personnel from outside will no
doubt, be needed, especially in the beginning. But we should avoid introducing too many
outsiders into tribal territory. 4. We should not over administer these areas or overwhelm
them with a multiplicity of schemes. We should rather work through & not in rivalry to, their
own social & cultural institutions. 5. We should judge results not by statistics or the amount
of money spent, but by the quality of human character that is involved. To give shape to
government's policy, a beginning was made in the constitution itself. 10 www.visionias.in
©Vision IAS under article 46 – the state should promote with special care the educational
and economic intersects of the tribal people & should protect them from social injustice &
all forms of exploitation. Note : [There are many special power related to tribal areas are
given to state governors by the constitution, for those articles please refer Indian Polity by
Laxmikant] In spite of the constitutional safeguards and the efforts of central & state
governments, the tribals progress and welfare has been very slow and even dismal. Except
the North East, the tribals continue to be poor, indebted, landless and often unemployed.
The problem lies in weak execution of even well intentioned measures. Reasons for dismal
performance of Tribal Policy: i. Quite often the funds allocated for tribal welfare are not
spent or are spent without corresponding results and sometimes funds are even
misappropriated. The watch dog of tribal interests, Tribal Advisory Council has not
functioned effectively. ii. Administrative personnel are either ill trained or prejudiced against
tribals. iii. A major handicap from which tribals suffer is denial of justice, often because of
their unfamiliarity with the laws & the legal system. iv. Violation of strict land transfer laws
for tribals, leading to alienation of land & eviction of tribals. v. Rapid extension of mines &
industries has worsened their conditions in many areas. vi. The progress of education among
the tribal people has been disappointingly slow. vii. Exploitations from the forest officials
and unsympathetic attitude of officials. Positive Development happened due to state's
Initiative: Certain positive developments in the tribal sphere have occurred since 1947.
Legislation to protect tribal rights & interests, activities of the tribal welfare departments,
Panchayati Raj, spread of literacy and education, reservations in government services and in
Parliament, state assemblies, reservation in higher education institutions, repeated
 42

elections have led to increasing confidence among the tribal people & greater political
participation by them, at least by growing middle classes & intelligentsia among them in the
constitutional political processes. Even though there are certain regions where reached the
benefits of positive discrimination by the states, certain regions are still lagging behind.
Protest movements have sprung up among tribals out of their frustration with the lack of
development & welfare. Some of the protest movements have taken to violence leading to
strong state action against them. D. Issue of language The language problem was the most
divisive issue in the first twenty years of independent India. Linguistic identity during first 20
years after independence had become a strong force in all societies. Due to diversity in
languages, this language issue became more difficult to tackle. The problem posed to
national consolidation by linguistic diversity has taken two major forms : 1. The dispute over
official language of the union. 2. The linguistic reorganization of the states [this issue will be
dealt separately not in this chapter] The Official Language: • Opposition to Hindi as a
national languages tended to create conflict between Hindi speaking and nonHindi speaking
regions of the country. • The issue of a national language was resolved when the
constitution-makers virtually accepted all the major languages as "languages of India". •
Being a foreign language Gandhi opposed the idea that English would be an all India
medium of communications in free India. • Sharp differences marked the initial debates as
the problem of the official language was highly political from the beginning. 11
www.visionias.in ©Vision IAS • Hindi was chosen over Hindustani [written in Devanagari or
Urdu script] to be the official language of India & but the national language. • The issue of
the time-frame for a shift from English to Hindi produced a divide between Hindi & non
Hindi areas. Proponents of Hindi wanted immediate switch over, while non Hindi areas
advocated retention of English for a long if not indefinite period. • Nehru was in favour of
making Hindi the official language, but he also favoured English to be continuing as an
additional official language. • The constitution provided that Hindi in Devanagari script with
international numerals would be India's official language. English was to continue for use in
all official purposes till 1965, when it would be replaced by Hindi in phased manner.
However, Parliament would have the power to provide for the use of English for specified
purposes even after 1965. • The constitution laid upon the government the duty to promote
the spread and development of Hindi & provides for the appointment of Commission & a
Joint Parliamentary Committee to review the progress in the respect. The state legislatures
were to divide the matter of official language at state level, though the official language of
the Union would serve as the language of communication between the states and the
centre & between one state & another. • In 1956, the report of the official language
commission set up in 1955 in terms of a constitutional provision, recommended that Hindi
should start progressively replacing English in various functions of the central government
with effective change taking place in 1965. Two members of commission, one each from
West Bengal & Tamil Nadu, dissented this while accusing other members for pro-Hindi Bias.
JPC [Joint Parliamentary Committee] reviewed the report to implement the
recommendations of JPC, President issued an order in April 1960 stating that after 1965
Hindi would be the Principal official language, but English would continue without any
 43

restriction as the associate official language. To promote Hindi, according to President's

directive, central government took a series of steps to promote Hindi. These includes the
setting up of central Hindi Directorate, publication of standards works in Hindi or in Hindi
translation in various fields, compulsory training of central government employees in Hindi
and translation of major text of law into Hindi & promotion of their use by the courts. • To
allay the fear of non Hindi speakers Nehru in the Parliament in 1959, assured them that
English would continue as alternate language as long as the people require it. In 1963,
official languages Act was passed. The object of the Act, was to remove a restriction which
had been placed by the constitution on the use of English after a certain dates namely 1965.
• Because of ambiguity in Official Languages Act due to the world "may" instead of "shall",
they criticized it. • Now, many non Hindi leaders in protest changed their line of approach to
the problem of the official language, while initially they had demanded a slowing down of
the replacement of English, now they shifted their stand and demanded that there should
be no deadline fixed for the changeover. • There was immense amount of protests in Tamil
Nadu, some students burnt themselves, Two Tamil Ministers in Union Cabinet, C.
Subramaniam & Alagesan resigned, 60 people died due to police firing during agitation. •
Later when Indira Gandhi became PM in 1966, in 1967, she moved a amendment to the
1963 official Languages Act. The amendment was passed with thumping majority. Features
of Amended Act: 1. The Act put to rest all the ambiguities regarding Nehru's assurance in
1959. It provided the use of English as an associate language in addition to Hindi for the
official work at the centre & for communication between the centre and non Hindi states
would continue as long as non Hindi states wanted it. 2. Indefinite policy of bilingualism was
adopted. 3. The states were to adopt a three language formula that is study of a modern
Indian language, preferably one of the Southern languages, apart from Hindi and English in
the Hindi speaking areas and of Hindi along with the regional languages and English in the
non-Hindi speaking areas; 4. The Parliament adopted a policy resolution laying down that
the public service exams were to be conducted in Hindi & English & in all the regional
languages with the provision that the candidates should have additional knowledge of Hindi
or English. 12 www.visionias.in ©Vision IAS The Government of India took another
important step on language in July 1967. On the basis of the report of the education
commission in 1966 it declared that Indian languages would ultimately become the medium
of education in all subjects at the University level, though the time from for the changeover
would be decided by each university to suit its convenience.

Chapter –02:
From Colony to Democracy

A. Emergence of Electoral Politics Despite the unprecedented illiterate population,

diversities, poor economic condition the national leadership were not in big quandary
regarding adoption of democratic institutions to consolidate India. Faced with such serious
challenges, other leaders from different countries resisted democracy as a form of
 44

governance. According to the leaders of different countries who gained freedom from
colonialism, their priority was national unity, which will not be sustained with democracy as
it would bring differences and conflicts. Hence, we have seen lots of non-democratic regime
in newly independent countries. While competition and power are the two most visible
things about politics, the intention of political activity should be deciding and pursuing
public interest. This is the route our leaders decided to pursue. After adoption of
constitution on January 26, 1950, It was necessary to install the first democratically elected
government of the country. The election commission of India was set up in January 1950
with a constitutional provision to conduct free and fair elections. Sukumar Sen became the
first Chief Election Commissioner [then ECI was single member body, unlike today's multi
member body]. India has adopted universal adult franchise model of democracy where any
person with prescribed condition of age, could vote without any form of discriminations.
Election commission soon realized that it was an uphill task to conduct a free and fair
election in a country of India's size. Holding an election required delimitation or drawing the
boundaries of electoral rolls. Election commission faced difficult situation. Nearly 40 lakh
woman registered themselves as wife or daughter of somebody rather registering
themselves by their names. The election commission refused to accept these entries and
ordered a revision if possible and deletion if necessary. Preparing for the first general
election was a huge exercise. No election on this scale had ever been conducted in the
world before. At that time there were 17 crores eligible voters, who had to elect about 489
MPs of Lok Sabha and 3200 MLA of state assemblies. Only 15% of these eligible voters were
literate. Hence Election Commission had sought some special method of voting, like the
candidates were to be identified by symbols, assigned to each major party and independent
candidates, painted on the ballot papers in the box assigned to a particular candidate and
ballot was secret. Election Commission trained over 3 lakhs officers and polling staff to
conduct the election. Democracy took a giant step forward with the first elections were the
biggest experiment in democracy anywhere in the world. Many people were skeptical about
the democratic elections being conducted in the caste ridden, multi religious, illiterate and
backward society like India. Over 224000 polling booths, one for almost every 1000 voters
were constructed and equipped with over 2.5 million steel ballot boxes one box for every
candidate. Nearly 620,000,000 ballot papers were printed. Whoever got the plurality or the
largest number of votes would get elected. In all, candidates of over fourteen national and
sixty three regional or local parties and a large number of independents contested the
elections. Nearly 17500 candidates in all stood for the seats to the Lok Sabha and the state
legislatures. The elections were spread out over nearly four months from Oct 25, 1951 to
Feb 21, 1952 [Later this period was reduced to nineteen days in 1957 and 07 to 10 days in
subsequent elections. Suitable conditions were created for free participation of opposition
parties in elections including Jan Sangh & communist party of India (CPI). Nehru vigorously
campaigned for the congress. He made communalism the central issue of his campaign, due
to the basic struggle at that time between secular and communal forces on the background
of 13 www.visionias.in ©Vision IAS partition inflicted communal violence and riots. The
elections were conducted in a fair, free, impartial and orderly manner with very little
 45

violence. People's response to the new political order was tremendous. They participated in
the polls with enough knowledge that their vote was a prized possession. At certain places,
people treated polling as a festival wearing festive clothes, women wearing their jewellery.
Despite higher percentage of poverty and illiteracy, the number of invalid votes cast was a
low as 0.3% to 0.4%. A remarkable feature was the wide participation of women: at least
40% of women eligible to vote did so. Thus, the faith of the leadership in the people was
fully justified. When the elections results were declared, it was realised that nearly 46% of
the eligible voters had cast their vote. There were many political parties which had
participated in country's first general elections and state assemblies elections in free India.
Starting from the Indian National Congress to Socialist Party, Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party,
Communist and allies, Jan Singh, Hindu Mahasabha, RRP [Ram Rajya Parishad] other local
parties and independents. The congress had emerged as the single largest party by winning
364 seats with 45% of total polled votes for Lok Sabha. The congress formed all the
government in all the states and at the centre too. It did not get a majority on its own in four
states–Madras, Travancore-Cochin, Orissa, PEPSU but formed governments even there with
the help of independents and smaller local parties which then merged with it. The
communist performance was big surprise and it emerged as the second largest group in the
Lok Sabha. Princes and big landlords still wielded a great deal of influence in some parts of
the country. Their party Gantantra Parishad won 31 seats in Orissa Assembly. Despite the
numerically dominant position of the congress, the opposition was quite effective in
parliament. Other forms of political participation such as trade unions, Kishan Sabha, strikes,
hartals, bands and demonstrations were available to the middle classes, organized working
class and sections of the rich and middle class peasantry. Elections were the main form of
direct political participation for the vast mass of rural and urban poor. After 1952, during the
Nehru years, two other general elections were held for the Lok Sabha and state assembles in
1957 & 1962. Voter’s turnout improved in 1957 to 47% and in 1962 to 54%. In both the
elections, the congress again emerged as a single largest party and formed government at
the centre and at states level. However, In 1957, the communist were able to form a
government in Kerala, which was the first democratically elects communist government
anywhere in the world. The fair and peaceful conduct of the polls was an indication that the
democratic system and institutions, a legacy of the national movement were beginning to
take root. The successful conduct of the polls was one of the reasons why India and Nehru,
came to be admired abroad, especially in the ex-colonial countries. Political leadership used
elections both to promote national consolidation and to legitimize its policies of integration.
Ashok Mehta said, "The parliament acted as a great unifier of the nation".

B. Dominance of Congress System: As we have discussed about emergence of electoral

politics, the congress party achieved great success in country's first general elections. Here
we will discuss how it secured such success and further will inquire into nature of such
congress dominance. In the initial three general elections, the congress gained
overwhelming majority. The congress won three out of every four seats but it did not
manage to win half the total votes polled. In 1952, for example the congress obtains 45% of
 46

the total votes, but it manages to win 74% of the seats. In the first general elections, out of
489 seats of Lok Sabha, the congress had won 364 seats. In the next two general elections of
1957 and 1962 respectively, it had secured 371 and 361 seats out of total 494. It had also
formed government at the state level throughout the country except few occasions. Nature
of Congress Dominance India is not the only exception to have experienced the dominance
of one party. We can see example of ‘one party dominance’ in other parts of the world as
well. In other countries, we have seen that there was compromise with democratic values
and norms whereas India upheld those values and norms. In some countries like China, Cuba
and Syria the constitution allows only a single party to rule the country. Some others like 14
www.visionias.in ©Vision IAS Myanmar, Belarus, Egypt and Eritrea were effectively one
party states due to legal and military measure. Until a few years ago, Mexico, South Korea
and Taiwan were also effectively one party dominant states. The congress had reached the
fruits of their diligent labor of their freedom struggle movement in ensuring post
independence general elections. It had inherited the legacy of Indian National Congress
Movements and their stalwart leaders. So, by default, due to their strong organizational
network of freedom movement, throughout the country, it reached out to the masses
instantly and connected with masses well. It was puerile to imagine other political parties
organizing themselves in such a short time and achieving the faith of the masses. During the
freedom struggle movement, INC adopted inclusive approach and accepted membership of
all strata of the society. After independence, the congress maintained the same
characteristics. The congress also remained sensitive to and functioned as the medium for
the reconciliation, accommodation and adjustment of the diverse and divergent class,
sectional and regional interests. The congress was an ideological coalition. It accommodated
the revolutionary and pacifist, conservative and radical, extremist and moderate and the
right, left and all shades of the centre. The coalitional nature of the congress party tolerated
and encouraged various factions and instead of being a weakness, internal factionalism
became the strength of the congress. The system of factions functioned as balancing
mechanism within the ruling party. In the first decade of electoral competition, the congress
acted both as the ruling party as well as the opposition. Hence, noted political scientist, Mr.
Rajni Kothari termed this period of Indian Politics as “The Congress system". C. Emergence
of Opposition Parties Due to the great performance of the congress party, all opposition
parties achieved only a token representation in the Lok Sabha and State assemblies during
the “congress system”, period. Yet these oppositions played a key role in maintaining the
democratic character of the system. The opposition parties offered a sustained and principle
criticism of the parties and policies of the congress of the practices and policies of the
congress party. By keeping democratic political alternative alive, the opposition parties
prevented the resentment with the system from turning into anti-democratic. In the
beginning of true sense of democracy in India, there was high respect between the congress
and opposition leaders. There was induction of opposition leaders in the interim
government before independence and even in the post independence government,
opposition leaders like Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee(Jan Jabha) were in the
Nehru’s Cabinet. The positive rapport between the congress and opposition leaders
 47

gradually declined when these parties in intense competition of achieving power. As the
ability of congress to accommodate all interests and all aspirants for political hour steadily
declined, other political parties started gaining greater significance. Thus, the congress
dominance constitutes only one phase in the country’s politics. Now, we will discuss the
major political parties during the “congress system” period.

Socialist party
• The foundation of the socialist party laid before independence when some leaders within
the congress party has sought more radical and egalitarian congress. So, they formed the
Congress Socialist Party (CSP) in 1934.

• Later after independence, the congress party had changed the rule regarding duel
membership and barred the C.S.P members with congress’s membership. This situation
compelled CSP leaders to form separate Socialist Party in 1948.

• The socialists believed in the ideology of democratic socialism which distinguished them
both from the congress and the communists.

• Socialist party leaders criticized congress for favouring capitalists and landlord and
ignoring teaming masses like workers, peasants.

• Socialist party was in big dilemma when the congress party in 1955 declared its goal to be
the socialist pattern of society. In such scenario, their leader Ashok Mehta offered limited
cooperation with the congress.

• Many faction emerged from the split and union of the socialist party viz. Kisan Mazdoor
Praja party, the praja socialist party, Samyukta Socialist Party

• Jayprakash Narayan, Rammanohar Lohiya, Achyut patwardhan, Ashok Mehta, Acharya

Narendra Dev, S.M. Joshi were stalwart leaders of the socialist party.

• In the contemporary times, the Samajwadi party, the Rashtriya Janta Dal (RJD), Janta Dal
(United), Janta Dal (Secular) trace their origins to the socialist party Bhartiya Jan Sangh (BJS)
• BJS was formed in 1951 by Shyama Prasad Mukharjee and trace its roots with R.S.S
(Rashtriya Sawyamsevek Singh) and the Hindu Mahasabha before independence.

• The BJS emphasised the idea of one country, one culture and one notion and believes that
the country could become modern, progressive and strong on the basis of Indian culture
and traditions.

• BJS leaders were Shyama Prasad Mukharjee, Deen Dayal Upadhayaya (He initiated the
concept of integral humanism), and Balraj Madhok.

• BJS performed very party in almost all the Lok Sabha Election.
 48

• In the contemporary times, the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) traces its roots to B.J.S The
communist party of India Taking inspiration from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, there
emerged lots of communist group advocating socialism is the solution to the problems
affecting the notion in 1920’s.

• The communists worked mainly within the congress fold, but they had separated
themselves from the congress when they supported the British in WW-II.

• It had well organized dedicated cadre and healthy machinery to run political party.

• The communist believed in violent uprising, as they thought transfer of power was not
genuine. Very few people believed in their ideology and they got crushed by the armed
force. They later abandoned violent means and participated in general elections and
emerged as second largest opposition party.

• The party’s support was more concentrated in Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, and
Kerala. • Their stalwart leaders included A.K. Gopalan, S.A. Dange, E.M.S. Namboodiripad,
P.C. Joshi, Ajay Ghosh and P. Sundarrya.

• The CPI was spilt up in 1964 and the pro-china faction formed the CPI (Marxist).

• Now, the base of both has shrunk a lot and their presence concentrates in very few states
of the country. Swatantra Party

• The swatantra party was formed in August 1959 after Nagpur resolution of the congress
which called for land ceilings, takeover of food grain trade by the state, adoption of
cooperative forming. They didn’t believe this resolution.

• The party believed lesser involvement of the government in economy. It opposed the
development strategy of state intervention in economy, central planning, nationalization,
Public sector. They opposed progressive tax regime, demanded dismantling of license Raj. It
was critical of non-alignment policy and friendly relations of India with the Soviet Union and
advocated closer ties with the U.S.A

. • The industrialist and big landlords had supported this party.

• This party has a very limited influence, lacked dedicated cadres, so it didn’t perform well.

• The stalwart of party were C. Rajagopalachari, K.M. Munshi, N.G. Ranga and Minoo
Masani.

Chapter: 3
Economic Development Economic Development and Planning A. Mixed Economy Model
(Socialism) Post Independence, apart from extreme poverty, illiteracy, a ruined agriculture
and industry, the structural distortions created by colonialism in Indian economy and society
 49

made the future transition to self sustained growth much more difficult. Ensuring well being
and economic development were the important challenges for the Indian leadership and to
pursue these goals, they had two model of economic development, the liberal – capitalist
model followed in U.S.A. and Europe, another was the socialist model followed in U.S.S.R.
During the debate of model of economic development, Almost everyone agreed that the
development of India means economic growth and social and economic justice. Hence very
few people supported the American style of capitalist development. There were many who
got impressed by the Soviet model of development. India had to abandon the colonial style
of functioning for commercial gains only; and strive for poverty alleviation and social-
economic redistribution was primary responsibility of the then government. Therefore India
adopted the mixed model of economic development, which has features of both the
capitalist and socialist models.

The things which helped Indian economy to revive itself after years of exploitation:

1. There was a mature indigenous entrepreneurial class (Birlas, Tatas, Singhanias, Dalmia-
Jains) that developed an independent economic base which was an asset for post
independence planned development.

2. Wider societal consensus on the nature and path of development. Everyone from the
staunch Gandhian to the Socialists, the capitalists as well as the communists were more or
less agreed on following agenda: a. Multi pronged strategy of economic development based
on self reliance. b. Rapid industrialization based on import-substitution including capital
goods industries. c. Prevention of imperialist or foreign capital domination. d. Land reforms
involving tenancy reforms. e. Abolition of Zamindari system. f. Introduction of cooperatives
especially of service cooperatives like marketing, credit, etc. Note: What are the Leftists and
Rightist Party? Leftist: refers to those who are in favour of the poor, down trodden sections
and support government policies for the benefit of these sections. Rightist: refers to those
who believe that free competition and market economy alone to ensure progress and that
the government should not unnecessarily intervene in the economy] Why India completely
rejected the capitalist style of Modernization? During that era, it was common for people to
refer 'West' as the standard for measuring development. Development meant becoming
more and more modern was like industrialised countries of the West. India rejected such
model because majority of the people were illiterate and to become modern, it was
required the breakdown of traditional social structures which was highly impossible.
Modernisation was also associated with the ideas of growth, material progress and scientific
rationality, but due to lack of resources and education right away it was not possible in India
which was fully dyed in the wool of caste based mentality. Indian Parliament in December
1954 accepted ' the socialist pattern of society as the objective of social and economic
policy. In fact the model projected was of a "mixed economy" where the public and the
private sectors were not only to co-exist but where to be complementary to each other and
the private sector was to be encouraged to grow with as much freedom as possible within
the broad objectives of the national plan.
 50

B. Planning and its Impact There was consensus on one point that ‘the government’ should
plan for the development, not the private sector. In fact the idea of planning as a process of
rebuilding economy earned a good deal of public support in the 1940's and 1950's all over in
the world. The experience of great depression in Europe, the inter-war reconstruction of
Japan and Germany, most of all spectacular economic growth against heavy odds in the
Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s contributed to this consensus. Generally, it is assumed
that the big business entrepreneurs are averse to the idea of planning. Contrary to this, a
section of big industrialists came together in 1944 and drafted a joint proposal for setting up
a planned economy in the country. It was called the Bombay Plan. After the Independence,
the Planning Commission was set up in March 1950 by a simple resolution of the
Government of India. It has an advisory role and its recommendation become effective only
when the Union cabinet approves these.

The scope of the resolution by which Planning Commission was formed:

1. Every individual should have the right to an adequate means of livelihood.

2. Material resources of community their ownership and control should served the common
good.

3. Economic system should operate in such a way that use of ‘means of production’ and
‘wealth’ should not result in well being of particular community and to the detriment of the
society. As in the then U.S.S.R [United Soviet Socialist Republic], the Planning Commission of
India opted for five year plan. The government of India prepares a document that has a plan
for all its income and expenditure for the next 5 years.

Accordingly the budget of the central and all the state governments is divided into parts:

i. Non 'Planned' Budget – This is spent on routine items on a yearly basis.

ii. Planned Budget – This is spent on a Five year basis as per the priorities fixed by the
plan. A five years plan has the advantage of permitting the government to focus on
the larger picture and make long term intervention in the economy.

The First Five Year Plan: The draft of the first five year plan and the actual plan document
was released in December 1951. People from all walks of life-academics, journalists,
government and private sector employees, industrialists, farmers, politicians etc. discussed
and debated the documents extremely. The first five year plan (1951-56) sought to get
economy out of the vicious cycle of poverty. The prominent young economist K.N. Raj
argued for "hasten slowly" for the development for the first two decades as a fast rate of
development might endanger democracy. The First Five Year Plan addressed mainly the
agrarian sector including investment in dams and irrigation. Due to the bitter Partition,
Agricultural sector was hit hardest and needed urgent attention. Huge allocations were
made for "Modern Temples of India" like the Bhakhra Nangal Dam. The First Five Year Plan
also focused on land reform for the country's development. One of the basic aims of the
 51

planners was to raise the level of national income. Basic level of spending was very low in
the 1950's. Hence planners sought to push savings up. Due to the efforts of the planners,
savings did rise up and that rise continued till the Third Five Year Plan, but later it declined
sharply. Second Five Year Plan The second plan stressed on heavy industries and it was
drafted by a team of economists and planners under the strong leadership of P.C.
Mahalanobis. Contrary to the patience preached in first plan, second plan aspired to bring
about quick structural transformation by making changes as all possible directions. The
congress party passed a resolution in Avadi near Madras before finalization of the draft of
the second plan and declared its goal of "Socialist pattern of society". This was visible in
Second Plan document. The government imposed substantial tariffs on imports to protect
domestic industries, which helped them to grow. Savings and investments were growing,
bulk of these industries like electricity, railways, steel, machineries and communication
could be developed in the public sectors. The push for industrialization marked a turning
point in India development. Achievements of Plans From 1947–65 1. Stepping up the rate of
growth required a substantial increase in the investment rate. An important achievement in
this period was the rise in the savings and investment rates.

On the agrarian front, the comprehensive land reforms measures initiated soon after
independence, the setting of a massive network for agricultural extension and community
development at village level, the large infrastructural investment in irrigation, power, and
agricultural research created favorable conditions for agricultural growth.

3. Industry during the first three plans, grew more rapidly than agriculture. The industrial
growth was based on rapid import substitution of both consumer goods and capital good
and intermediate goods. This helped India in reducing India's total dependence on the
advances countries for basic goods and capital equipment's.

4. Apart from industry and agriculture, the early planners gave utmost priority to the
development of social infrastructure including education and health, areas greatly neglected
in the colonial past. 5. Nehru's temples of Modern India' consisted not only of steel and
power plants, irrigation dams, etc. but included institutions of higher learning particularly in
the scientific field. During first Five year Plan, high powered national laboratories and
institutes were set up by the council of scientific and industrial research for conducing
fundamental and applied research in each of following areas : Physics, chemistry, fuel, glass
and ceramics food technology drugs, electro-chemistry, roads, leather and building. In 1948,
the Atomic Energy Commission was set up laying the foundations of the creditable advances
India was to make in the sphere of nuclear Science and related areas. India's scientific and
technical manpower increased more than 12 times from 190,000 to 2.32 million. Key
controversies regarding 5 year plans: The strategy of development followed in the early
years raised several important questions. 1. Agriculture vs. Industry Many thought that the
second Plan lacked an agrarian strategy for development and the stress on industry caused
agriculture and rural India to suffer badly. Veteran Gandhian economists like J.C. Kumarappa
proposed an alternative blueprint that put greater emphasis on rural industrialisation. The
 52

stress on rapid industrialisation required import of technology for which India has to spend
precious foreign exchange to buy from global market. It was the industry that attracted
more investment than agriculture, the possibility of food shortage loomed large. 2) Public
vs. Private Sector: The state controlled key heavy industries, provided industrial
infrastructure, regulated trade and made some crucial interventions in agriculture. Critics
argued that the planners refused to provide the private sector with enough space and the
stimulus to grow. The enlarged public sector produced powerful vested interests that
created enough hurdles for private capital by installing systems of licenses and permits for
investment. With the restriction on imports, of goods, Production of such goods in domestic
market with little or no competition in addition to no incentive to improve the quality of
products. The state controlled more things than required which led to inefficiency and
corruption.

C. Green Revolution Green Revolution in India is known to reduce the dependence of India
on foreign aids for the supply for good grains during the agricultural crises like droughts,
floods etc. and envisaged to make India self dependent and self sustained nation in terms of
food grains availability.

Prevailing Conditions before the introduction of Green Revolution:

• The focus for Indian agriculture was only on institutional reforms, not on the technological
base for agriculture.

• Despite very credible growth of agriculture output during 1949 to 65 of 3% per annum
India had been facing food shortages since the mid 1950's.

• The massive jump in population growth rates after independence, steady rise in per capita
income, huge outlays towards planned industrialisation put long term pressures on Indian
agriculture which resulted in massive demand.

• To meet food shortage, India was forced to import food in greater amount.

• Two wars, one with China (1962) and another with Pak (1965) and successive drought in
years 1965– 1966, led to fall in agriculture output massively. Food prices shot up.

• Arm twisting policies of U.S.A. Government due to India stand on Vietnam and India's
denial of accepting an economy policy package. [During shortage of food, India was
importing food from U.S.A. under the PL-480 Scheme].

• Due to the grim Scenario of the mid 1960's economic self reliance and food self sufficiency
became top priority objectives of Indian leadership.

Initiatives prior to Green Revolution to boost Agriculture:

 53

• There was wrong perception prevailed during the Nehru's era that he had neglected the
agriculture sector and instead focused too much on rapid industrialisation. But contrary to
this perception, Nehru had placed great importance to create the physical and scientific
infrastructure essential for Indian agriculture. There was massive large scale irrigation and
power projects like Bhakra Nangal, various agricultural Universities and research
laboratories fertilizer plant were set up. Introduction of Green Revolution in India Green
Revolution took place in three different phases in India in various regions of the country at
different point of time. First phase of the Green Revolution: This happened from 1962–65 to
1970-73 with the sharp increases in yield in wheat in the north-western region of Punjab,
Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh. Second phase of the Green Revolution: This happened
from 1970-73 to 1980-83 with the extension of HYV [High Yielding Variety] seed technology
from wheat to rice, this time the technology spread was in Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh
particularly the coastal areas, parts of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and soon regions like
Maharashtra, Gujarat, improved their production too. Third Phase: Third phase was from
1980-83, to 1992-95 showed very significant and encouraging results. This time Green
Revolution spread to the low growth areas like Orissa, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, and
Rajasthan. During the last phase, Southern region registered higher rate of growth than
Northern region. By the end of this phase, the ‘coefficient of variation’ of the output growth
levels and yield [per hectare] level between the various states dropped down substantially
compared to earlier decades. By the end of the last phase, there was considerable reduction
in regional inequality by increase in the prosperity in rural India.

Government's other positive initiative during Green Revolution Period:

• Government investment in agriculture rose significantly. Institutional finance in agriculture

sector doubled from 1968 to 1973.

• The agricultural prices commission was set up in 1965 and efforts were made to assure
the farmers a sustained remunerative price.

• Public investment, institutional Credit remunerative prices and availability of the new
technology at low prices raised the profitability of private investment by farmers.

• The result of government's initiative was that the rate of increase in the gross irrigated
area rose from 1 million hectares per annum in Pre Green Revolution to about 2.5 million
hectares per annum during the 1970s.

Positive impact of Green Revolution:

• Throughout the three phases of Green Revolution food grain production rose significantly.
By the 1980's not only was India self sufficient in food with buffer food stocks of over 30
million tonnes, but also it was exporting food to pay back its earlier loans and to loan to
deficit countries.
 54

• The critical impact of the Green Revolution was it maintained the agricultural growth rates
plus it generated a rapid increase in the marketable surplus of food grains.

• The liberation from dependence on PL–480 or other imports was a major step in the
direction of self reliant independent development for India.

• The new Green Revolution technology proved not only scale neutral but also evolved an
inverse relationship between scale and productivity. Small farmers applied more inputs per
unit of land compared to large farmers.

• Small farmers became relatively more viable and did not sell out their land to large land
holding farmers in distress.

• The Green Revolution not only generated employment in agriculture but also non
agricultural rural and semi-urban employment through the development of agro industries,
transport industry, and other agriculturally allied sectors. Increase in income of farmers led
to the demand for factory produced consumer durables like radios, watches, TVS, Sewing
machines etc.

• The surplus stocks of food-grain helped government to launch employment generating

poverty alleviation programmes in backward areas.

• In conclusion, the Green Revolution had a major impact on rural poverty level which
declined sharply through food availability, and it resulted in decline in relative prices of food,
generating employment in agricultural sector and agriculturally allied areas, rises in wages
etc.

Negative impacts of the Green Revolution:

• Huge disparity and polarization between classes and regions resulted in favourable
conditions for left wing organisations to organise the poor peasants to follow extreme paths
(seeds of Left Wing Extremism) for their rights; the green revolution also resulted in the rise
of middle peasant sections. These middle peasants with medium size holding hugely
benefitted from the changes and later emerged as politically influential in many parts of the
country.

• The negative environmental impact of excessive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides
as well as plateauing of the growth rates in areas like Punjab. The excessive withdrawal of
groundwater for irrigation in many areas without adequate recharging of the sub soil
aquifers is environmentally unsustainable.

• Tenants and share croppers who did not have security of tenure were perhaps the only
losers.
 55

• To appease the Farming Community in Green Revolution belt, many political parties
provided electrical power with subsidy or totally free which led to misuse of it and adversely
affected the overall health of the Indian economy. D. Operation Flood and Cooperatives
Background to operation flood: Peasants of Kaira [Kheda] district, Gujarat which supplied
milk to Bombay felt cheated by the milk traders and then they met Sardar Patel who was
from the same region to redress their grievances. At the initiative of Patel & Morarji Desai,
the farmers organized themselves into a cooperative union, pressurize the Bombay
government with "Milk Strike" to buy milk directly from their Union. These farmers
registered themselves in Anand, Gujarat in Dec, 1946. Gandhian freedom fighter
Tribhuvandas K.Patel, convinced the farmers to form milk cooperatives, later became its
chairman and remained so for 25 years. Dr. Verghese Kurien was CEO of this Union from
1950 to 1973. Meanwhile in 1955, the Union chose "Amul" the name for its range of
products, which competed with MNC companies of dairy products like Glaxo and Nestle.
The "Anand Pattern" of Kaira cooperative union gradually spread to other districts in Gujarat
in 1974. The Gujarat cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd. Anand was formed as an
apex organisation of the unions in the district to look after marketing, According to one
estimate, due to the activities of cooperative, 48% of the income of rural households came
from dairying. The Kaira cooperative success made the movements spread to the rest of the
country inevitable. In the 1964, the then PM Shastriji wrote to the all (CM's of the country to
set up cooperative dairies on the "Anand Pattern" to perform this task NDDB (National Dairy
Development Board) was created in 1965–Mr. Verghese Kurien was at its helm as its
honorary chairman. 21 www.visionias.in ©Vision IAS Beginning of Operation Flood: Drawing
heavily from the Kaira Union for personnel, expertise and much more, the NDDB launched
"Operation Flood", a programme to replicate the "Anand Pattern" in other milkshed of
country. Operation Flood had organised cooperatives of milk producers into a nation-wide
milk grid with the purpose of increasing milk production, bringing the producers and
consumers closer by eliminating middlemen and assuring the producers a regular income
throughout the year. It was not just a dairy programme, but a path to development,
generating employment & income of rural households and alleviating poverty. By 1995
there were 69,875 village dairy cooperatives spread over 170 milkshed all over the country
with a total membership of 8.9 million farmers. Impact of operation Flood

• The obvious impact of operation Flood was the considerable increase in milk supply and
consequent increase in income of the milk producers, particularly the poor. It was estimated
that 60% of the beneficiaries were marginal or small farmers and landless labourers. Milk
cooperatives proved to be a significant anti-poverty measure. Cooperatives All the leader of
Indian freedom struggle, from Mahatama Gandhi to Nehru, the socialists, communists, past
independence agreed that co-operativization would lead to major improvement in Indian
agriculture and benefit the poor. The congress Agrarian Reforms Committee also known as
Kumarappa Committee made the recommendation for compulsory promoting cooperatives.
The congress party in their 1959's Nagpur Session passed Nagpur Resolution which visulaize
an agrarian pattern based on Joint cooperative farming in the future, it specified that such a
 56

pattern was to be achieved within three years, However, there were some leaders like C.
Rajagopalachari, N.G. Ranga and Charan Singh who opposed such move hence Nehru in Feb
1959 assures the Parliament of not using any coercion to introduce cooperatives.

• The chief beneficiaries of this scheme were the landless people from SC &ST communities
and deprived sections of other communities. Operation Flood and the accompanying dairy
expansion has been instrumental in the establishment of an indigenous dairy equipment
manufacturing industry ; an impressive body of indigenous expertise that includes animal
nutrition, animal health, artificial insemination management information systems (MIS),
dairy engineering, food technology.

• Operation flood was instrumental in empowerment of women. Operation flood with the
help of NGOs like SEWA helped in establishing about 6,000 Women dairy cooperative
societies.

• Operation Flood had spillover effect on other cooperatives too. Cooperatives for fruits and
vegetable producers, oilseeds cultivators, small scale salt makers and tree grower were
doing excellently well which were initiated by NDDB. Limitations of Co-operativization
Danial Thorner, the noted economist during his observation of cooperatives between Dec
1958 to May 1959 found many weaknesses on the cooperative movements. He observed
two types cooperatives movements. He observed two types cooperatives in case of joint
farming. One was of rich and landowning farmers. They formed such cooperatives to evade
land reforms and access incentives offered by the state. These were bogus kind of
cooperatives where big farmers enrolled their labourers and ex-tenants as members. The
other, second type of cooperatives was state sponsored cooperative forms where
uncultivated lands of the government made available to the landless labourers and
underprivileged groups. These cooperatives didn't live up to their expectations in terms of
benefits of scale. The service cooperatives fared better than the farming cooperatives. There
were many shortcomings too in service cooperatives. Service cooperatives reinforced the
casted based hierarchical structure. Leaders of such cooperatives mostly drawn from traders
and money lending communities. Hence no benefits to poor.

In 1971, the National Commission on Agriculture confirmed the virtual exclusion of the
landless from securing credits from credit cooperatives. Instead of promoting people's
participation in cooperative movement, very soon it became overstaffed with government
officials and became inefficient. Credit cooperatives suffered from major drawback of failure
of repayment of loans, which led to large percentage of over-dues. Contrary to common
perception, rich and landowning community were largest defaulters than the poor and small
farmers.

Chapter – 4
 57

A. Introduction to India's Foreign Policy: At the world level, situation around the world in
general was very grim. The world had just witnessed the devastating World War II, attempt of creating
new international body for peace, emergence of new nations with the collapse of colonialism, twin
challenges face by new countries; welfare and democracy for all. In Indian context, the bitter partition,
the legacy of British India left behind many difficult challenges. India's efforts to pursue an independent
foreign policy were highlight of post 1947 politics. Nehru used foreign policy as an instrument to defend
and strengthen India's independence and to safeguard her national interests, to develop the self
reliance, self confidence and pride of the masses while serving the cause of world peace and anti
colonialism. India decided to conduct its foreign relations with an aim to respect the sovereignty of all
other nations and to achieve security through the maintenance of peace. This aim finds an echo in the
Directive principles of state Policy, in the Article 51 of constitution: "Promotion of international peace
and security" The state shall Endeavour to: a) Promote international peace and security. b) Maintain just
and honourable relations between nations. c) Foster respect for international law and treaty obligations
in the dealings of organised people with one another. d) Encourage settlement or international disputes
by arbitration. The three major objectives of Nehru's foreign policy were: i. To preserve hard earned
sovereignty. ii. Protect territorial integrity. iii. Promote rapid economic development. During Nehru's
era, a basic objective of India's foreign policy was extending support to colonial and ex colonial countries
in their struggle against colonialism. Another objective was that of promoting peace. Nehru constantly
emphasized that peaceful co-existence of countries with different ideologies, differing systems, was a
necessity and believed that nobody had a monopoly on the truth and pluralism was a fact of life. In this
context, he outlined five principles which were called "Panchsheel" of India's Foreign Policy;

these were

1. mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty,

2. nonaggression,

3. non-interference in each other's internal affairs,

4. equality and mutual benefit, and 5. Peaceful co-existence. Major function of Indian foreign policy was
to promote and protect Indian economic interests. Nehru played a crucial role in setting the national
agenda. He was his own foreign minister hence, both as the Prime Minister.

Political philosophies like communism,

capitalism, socialism etc. - their forms
and effect on the society
Political Philosophy is a broad foreword to the major intellectuals and themes in political
philosophy. It discovers the philosophical beliefs which have formed and continue to inform
 58

political judgements of people. Dudley Knowles introduces the ideas of major political thinkers
such as Hobbes, Locke, Marx and Mill and dominant modern philosophers such as Berlin, Rawls
and Nozick. Basically, Political philosophy is concerned with the concepts and arguments
involved in political opinion.

Communism
Communism is considered as vital framework in political philosophy. It is a socio-economic scaffold that assists in
supporting the establishment of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of
production. It boosts the formation of a democratic state in order to overcome the class structures and alienation of
labour that characterize capitalistic societies and their inheritance of imperialism and nationalism. According to the
principle of communism, main process of resolving problems of classless and other favouritism in society for the
working class is to replace the prosperous ruling class, through radical action, in order to establish a diplomatic, free
society, without classes or government. Communism, basically, is the idea of a free society with no division or
estrangement, where humankind is free from oppression and insufficiency, and where there is no need for
governments or countries and no class divisions. It imagines a world in which each person gives according to their
abilities, and receives according to their needs. It is usually deliberated as a division of extensive Socialist movement.
The main forms of Communism, such as Leninism, Trotskyism and Luxemburgism, are based on Marxism, but non-
Marxist versions of Communism (such as Christian Communism and Anarchist Communism).

In the era of late 19th Century, major philosophical terms like socialism and communism were
often used simultaneously. Communism was considered as an economic-political philosophy
which was evolved by famous philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels during this period.
Marx and Engels wrote and published "The Communist Manifesto" in 1848. They had a wish to
stop thinking a capitalism feeling that it was the social class system which led to the
mistreatment of labours. The workers that were treated badly had developed class awareness and
it resulted in a fundamental process of class conflict. In this conflict, the public may rise up
against the bourgeoisie and establish a communist society. Marx and Engels supposed of the
proletariat as the individuals with labour power, and the bourgeoisie as those who own the means
of production in a capitalist society. The state would pass through a phase, often thought of as
socialism, and ultimately developed a pure communist society. In a communist society, all
private ownership would be obliterated, and the ways of production would belong to the whole
community. In the communist movement, a popular motto was that everyone contributes
according to their competence and received according to their requirements. Therefore, the needs
of a society would be put above and beyond the specific needs of an individual. Though, there
are numerous arguments for Marxist theory such as communism would not emerge from
Capitalism in a fully developed state, but would pass through a first phase (Socialism) in which
most productive property was owned in common, but there were some class differences. This
would finally develop into a "higher phase" that was termed as Communism in which class
differences were abolished, and a state was no longer needed and would wither away. It was
argued by many philosophers that radical activity by the working classes was required to bring
about these changes.
History of Communism: It was documented in historical records that initially, Communist
philosophy was the history of Socialism. In its modern version, Communism evolved of the
Socialist movements of 19th Century Europe and the critics of Capitalism during the Industrial
Rebellion. Main critics were the German philosopher Karl Marx and his associate Friedrich
Engels (1820 - 1895), and their pioneering "Communist Manifesto" of 1848, the defining
document of the movement, presented a novel explanation of Communism and promoted the
 59

phrase communism. The practice of the terms "communism" and "socialism" changed after the
Russian Revolution of 1917, when the admittedly Marxist Bolshevik Party in Russia changed
their name to the Communist Party and formed a single party regime that was dedicated to the
implementation of socialist policies under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870 - 1924). Lenin created the
Third International (or Communist International or Comintern) in 1919 and set the twenty-one
conditions (including democratic centralism) for any European socialist parties willing to join.
With awareness of the Russian Civil War, the Union of Soviet Socialist was established in 1922.
Other communism movement related to Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) which was lasted
until 1928, when Joseph Stalin (1878 - 1953) party leader under the banner of "socialism in one
country" and proceeded down the way of isolationism and Totalitarianism with the first of many
Five Year Plans. Remarkably Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940) Marxist critics of the Soviet Union,
referred to the Soviet system as a "degenerated" or "deformed" workers' state, argued that it fell
far short of Marx's communist model, and claimed that the working class was politically
expelled. Post World War II, the Warsaw Pact saw Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East
Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania joined the Soviet Union in an economic and military
coalition under firm Soviet Control. However, relations were very tough, and the Soviet Union
was forced into military interventions to supress popular rebellions in Hungary (1956) and
Czechoslovakia (1968), and Albania withdrew from the Pact in 1968 due to philosophical
dissimilarities.
In the decade of 1070s, although never officially unified as a single political entity, almost one-
third of the world's populace lived in Communist states, including the People's Republic of
China, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe, as well Cuba, North
Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, and Mozambique. However, the Warsaw Pact
countries had all abandoned Communist rule by 1990, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself
dissolved, leaving China, Cuba and some isolated states in Asia and Africa as the remaining
bastions of Communism. In most cases significantly dampened down and changed from its
original philosophy.
Types of Communism: Marxism is the main theoretical-practical structure on which dogmas of
Socialism and Communism are based.
Marxism: Marxism is a perspective that involves a number of differing "sub-perspectives" that
is, whilst there tends to be a general agreement about the need to construct a critique of Capitalist
society, there are major differences between theorists working within this viewpoint. Main
Marxist ideas can be explained in the following terms:

1. Marxism stresses the notion that social life is based upon "conflicts of interest". Most significant and basic
conflict is that between the Bourgeoisie, those who own and control the means of production in society and
the Proletariat, those who simply sell their labour power in the market place of Capitalism.
2. Dissimilar of the Functionalist version of Structuralist sociology, the idea of social class is more than an
evocative category, social class is used to clarify how and why societies change. Class conflict signifies a
process whereby change comes about through the opposition of social classes as they follow what they see
to be their (different and opposed) collective interests in society.
3. Marxism is a political philosophy whose main concern is to expose the political and economic contradictions
in-built in Capitalism such as the fact that while people co-operate to produce goods, a Capitalist class
appropriates these goods for its private profit and to point the way towards the establishment of a future
Communist society.

Marxism-Leninism is the Communist philosophical field that emerged as the conventional

tendency amongst Communist parties in the 1920's as it was accepted as the conceptual
 60

foundation of the Communist International during the era of Joseph Stalin (1878 - 1953), with
whom it is mainly associated. The term "Marxism-Leninism" is mostly used by those who
consider that Lenin's legacy was effectively carried forward by Stalin, although it is arguable to
what extent it actually follows the principles of either Marx or Lenin.
Philosophy of Leninism was built upon and extended the ideas of Marxism, and served as the
theoretical foundation for the ideology of Soviet Communism after the Russian Revolution of
1917 and the establishment of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870 - 1924) argued in
his leaflet "What is to be Done?" of 1902 that the proletariat can only realise a successful radical
consciousness through the efforts of a "vanguard party" composed of full-time professional
revolutionaries and through a form of controlled organization generally called "democratic
centralism" (whereby decisions are made with internal democracy but then all party members
must externally support and actively promote that decision). It maintains that Capitalism can
only be conquered by innovatory ways and any attempts to improve Capitalism from within are
destined to fail. The objective of a Leninist party is to coordinate the overthrow of the existing
government by force and grab power on behalf of the proletariat, and then implement a autocracy
of the proletariat, a kind of direct equality in which workers hold political power through local
councils known as soviets.
Stalinism is a more judgemental phrase for Joseph Stalin's vision of Communism. Supporters of
this ideology argue that it includes widespread use of publicity to establish a personality cult
around an absolute ruler, as well as extensive use of a secret police to maintain social proposal
and silence political opposition, all of which are trappings of Totalitarianism.
Trotskyism is the philosophical model of Marxism that was supported by Leon Trotsky (1879 -
1940), who considered himself a conformist Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, and squabbled for
the establishment of a frontline party. His politics differed sharply from the Marxism-Leninism
of Joseph Stalin, with respect to declare the need for an international proletarian revolution and
firm support for a true dictatorship of the proletariat based on direct autonomous ideologies.
Most dominant characteristics of Trotskyism is the theory of permanent uprising to explain how
socialist revolutions could happen in societies that had not yet attained advanced Capitalism.
Marx explained it as a prerequisite for socialist revolution.
Luxemburgism is a particular innovative theoretical model under the category of Communism,
which is based on the texts of Rosa Luxemburg (1870 - 1919). Her politics deviated from those
of Lenin and Trotsky mainly in her discrepancy with their concept of "democratic centralism",
which she visualized as unsatisfactorily democratic. Luxemburgism looks like Anarchism in its
averting of an authoritarian society by relying on the people themselves as opposed to their
leaders. However, it also sees the significance of a revolutionary party and the centrality of the
working class in the radical struggle. It resembles Trotskyism in its resistance to the
Totalitarianism of Stalin and to the crusader politics of modern social classlessness, but differs in
arguing that Lenin and Trotsky also made inequitable mistakes.
Thoughts of Maoism are different of Communism derived from the teachings of the Chinese
leader Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-tung) (1893 - 1976), and practised in the People's Republic of
China after the Chinese Revolution of 1949. Maoism evolved from the Marxism-Leninism of
Stalin, but introduced new ideas such as Social-Imperialism (Mao accused the Soviet Union of
dominating and exploiting the smaller countries in its scope to the point of organising their
economies around Soviet, not domestic, needs), the Mass Line (a method of leadership that seeks
 61

to learn from the masses and immerse the political headship in the concerns and conditions of the
masses - "from the masses, to the masses"), people's war and new democracy.
Left Communism is a range of Communist perspectives held by the Communist Left, which
asserts to be more truly Marxist and proletarian than the views of Leninism and its successors.
Left Communists advocated the Russian Revolution, but did not agree to the methods of the
Bolsheviks. The Russian, Dutch-German and the Italian traditions of Left Communism all share
an opposition to nationalism, all kinds of national liberation movements, frontism parliamentary
systems.
Council Communism is a far-reaching left movement that emanated in Germany and the
Netherlands in the decade of 1920s, and continues today as a theoretic and activist position
within both left-wing Marxism and Libertarian Socialism. It visualized workers' councils, arising
in factories and municipalities, as the natural form of working class organization and
governmental power. This philosophical viewpoint opposes the notion of a "revolutionary party"
on the basis that a revolution led by a party unavoidably produces a party despotism.
Anarchist Communism promotes the complete elimination of the state and Capitalism in favour
of a horizontal network of voluntary associations, workers' councils and/or commons through
which everyone is free to satisfy their needs. The movement was led by the Russians Mikhail
Bakunin (1814 - 1876) and Peter Kropotkin (1842 - 1921).
Euro communism was flourished in the decades of1970's and 1980's within various Western
European Communist parties to develop a philosophy and practice of social change that was
more applicable in a Western European egalitarianism and less allied to the party line of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Religious Communism is a type of Communism that focus centred on religious attitudes, such as
Christian, Taoist, Jain, Hindu or Buddhist. It usually denotes to a number of classless and
utopian religious societies practicing the voluntary dissolution of private property, so that
society's benefits are distributed according to a person's needs, and every person performs labour
according to their abilities.
Benefit of communism: Communism philosophy upkeeps extensive universal social welfare,
such as enhancements in public health and education. Its theoretical dogmas are beneficial to
build equality and strong social communities. Communist ideology promotes universal education
with a focus on developing the proletariat with knowledge, class realisation, and historical
understanding. Communism also supports the liberation of women and to end their exploitation.
Communist philosophy emphasizes the development of a "New Man"a class-conscious,
knowledgeable, daring, democratic person dedicated to work and social consistency in contrast
to the antithetic "bourgeois individualist" related with cultural backwardness and social
atomisation.
Criticisms of Communism: There are numerous criticisms of Communism.
Many philosophers have argued that Communism offers an idea of unattainable perfect future,
and keeps its subjects in thrall to it by devaluing the past and the present. It asserts to represent a
universal truth which explains everything and can cure every ill and any apparent deviations or
under-performance are explained away by casuistry and emotional appeals.
 62

Philosophy of communism is incomplete. Marx and Engels never devoted much work to show
how exactly a Communist economy would function in practice, leaving Socialism a "negative
ideology". The supposition that human nature is totally determined by the environment; Some
Communists, such as Trotsky, believed that all the social, political and intellectual life processes
in general are conditioned by the socio-economic base and the mode of production of material
life, which rather devalues humanity and the importance of the lives and rights of human beings.
Many Anarchists and Libertarian Socialists throwaway the need for a transitory state phase and
often disapprove Marxism and Communism for being too authoritarian. Some Anarcho-
Primitivists reject left wing politics in general, seeing it as unethical and claiming that
civilization is unreformable.
Some opponents have argued that Marx's concept of freedom is really just a defence of
dictatorship and oppression, and not an expansion of liberties as he claimed.
Some critics have construed many of Marx's pronouncements on Jews as being anti-Semitic,
claiming that he saw Jews as the embodiment of Capitalism and the creators of all its evils.
Others, however, hotly dispute this interpretation.
Many Socialist reformists take issue with the Marxist requirement for a fierce proletarian
revolution and argued that Capitalism can be reformed by steady democratic changes. Some
theorists criticized communism philosophy on the ground that the concept of Historical
Materialism which underlies much of Marxist theory is faulty, or that such a method can be
twisted into trying to force the course of history in a particular direction, or that in practice it
leads to Nihilism. In short, Historical Materialism is the notion that for human beings to survive,
they need to produce and reproduce the material requirements of life, and this production is
carried out through a division of labour based on very definite production relations between
people. These relations form the financial base of society, and are themselves determined by the
mode of production which is in force such as tribal society, ancient society, feudalism,
capitalism, socialism and societies, and their cultural and institutional superstructures, naturally
move from stage to stage as the foremost class is displaced by a new developing class in a social
and political turmoil.
Other critics disapproved the ideology of Marxist class and argued that class is not the most
important inequality in history, and that thorough analysis of many historical periods fails to find
support for class or social development as used by Marxists. Some critics have argued that the
growing spread of liberal democracy around the world, and the apparent lack of major
revolutionary movements developing in them, suggest that Capitalism or social democracy is
likely to be the effective form of human government instead of Marxism, which claims to be an
"end of history" philosophy. According to Pope Pius XI, "Communism is intrinsically evil, and
no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking
whatsoever" (Encyclical letter Divini Redemptoris, 58).
Effect of communism on society:
The main objective of Communism is to develop society without rulers, a society where the
people oversee themselves. But until this is accomplished, a superior government has absolute
power. The people do not have any private belongings and all assets belong to the government.
Therefore it has some disastrous effect on society. It can be illustrated from one of communism's
effects was in 1933. Cruel ruler, Hitler was a communist dictator. Under his instructions, the
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holocaust began. Reports indicated that approximately, six million Jewish people died.
Communists consider their goal, their party, and the state more vital than the rights and
autonomy of individual. In communist nations, there are usually huge gaps between official
claims of freedom and conditions in which they actually exist.
To summarize, Communism is an economic system where the government owns most of the
factors of production and decides the allocation of resources and what products and services will
be provided. The most significant theorists who evolved the ideologies of communism were Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels. They wanted to end the exploitation of the masses by the few. The
capitalist system at that time required workers to work under harsh and dangerous conditions for
little pay. According to economic scholars, communism is concept, in that ownership of land,
capital and industry cannot be owned or controlled by the individual. However, under
Communism the control of these things is not by a local community but by the State
Government. Under this system, the government has total control of everything produced and
control what is made, and who will receive the goods and services produced. The end goal of
communism was to eradicate class distinctions among people, where everyone shared equally in
the proceeds of society, when government would no longer be needed. In basic form,
Communism is an ideology and a political and economic system to manage economies and
countries. The core dogmas of communism are that all capital or means of production are owned
and operated by the society or the government rather than by individuals as their private
property. It is documented in theories that Communism is one of the most far-reaching political
concepts but became popular throughout the world. It provided answer to the problems of
capitalist and to establish a classless stateless society on a rational basis, where there is no
exploitation and all live in peace, comfort and harmony getting full opportunity to develop their
personality.

Capitalism
Capitalism is a type of social system that follows the belief of individual rights. From political perspective, capitalism is
the system of laissez-faire (freedom). Lawfully, it is a system of objective laws that is rule of law in contrast to rule of
man. In financial terms, when such freedom is applied to the domain of production its result is the free-market.
Earlier, this notion was not clearly explained. Several economists and theorists assumed that capitalism has existed
for most of human history. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase Capitalism was first used by novelist William
Makepeace Thackeray, in 1854 in his novel 'The Newcomes', where he described capitalism as "having ownership of
capital and not as a system of production". During 19th century, capitalism was described by numerous theorists as
"an economic system characterized by private or corporation ownership of capital goods, by investments that are
determined by private decision rather than by state control, and by prices, production and the distribution of goods
that are determined mainly in free market" Capitalism is commonly elucidated as an economic system where private
actors are permitted to own and control the use of property according to their own interests, and where the invisible
hand of the pricing mechanism coordinates supply and demand in markets in a way that is automatically in the best
interests of civilisation. In this system, Government is responsible for peace, justice, and tolerable taxes.

Basically, Capitalism is a private ownership based on the ways of production and distribution of
goods categorised by a free competitive market and incentive by profit. It can be said that it is an
economics system based on survival of the fittest.
Historical review of Capitalism: In theoretical review, it has been described by numerous
theorists that there are three periods of Capitalism such as early, middle and late periods, while
others academicians consider capitalism to be a social characteristic that cannot be confined by
historical period, but rather by the recognition of unending elements of the human condition.
Earlier, capitalism was originated in the fourteenth century emergency, a conflict that developed
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between the land-owning aristocracy (the lords) and the agricultural producers (the serfs).
Feudalism subdued the development of capitalism in numerous ways. The serfs were forced to
produce sufficient food for the lords as a result of this the lords had no interest in the
advancement of technology, but rather expanded their power and wealth through military means.
There was no competitive pressure for them to revolutionize because they were not producing to
sell on the market. The changeover from feudalism to capitalism was mainly driven by the
mechanic of war and not by the politics of prosperity and production methods. Conversely, in
current period, modern capitalism ascended in the early middle ages, between the 16th and 18th
century, when mercantilism was established. Mercantilism is described as a distribution of goods
that are bought at a certain price and sold at a higher price in order to generate profits. It
provided the basic principles of capitalism in that it was the "large-scale realization of a profit by
acquiring goods for lower prices than to the sell them". During the period of 18th century,
mercantilism weakened when a group of economic theorists led by Adam Smith challenged
mercantilist principles. They supposed that a state could only escalate its wealth at the expense of
another state's wealth while the amount of the world's wealth remained constant. After the
decline in mercantilism, Industrial capitalism emerged in the mid-18th century due to the huge
accretion of capital under the period of merchant capitalism and its investment in machinery.
Industrial capitalism marked development of manufacturing factory system and led to the global
supremacy of capitalist mode of production. In the 19th century, capitalism allowed great
increase in efficiency. It generated great social changes, which remained in place during the
twentieth century where it was established as the world's most predominant financial model after
the failure of the USSR. In the twenty-first century, capitalism had become an extensively
universal economic system at global scale.
It is commonly visualized that capitalism broadly corresponds to that developed by the classical
economists and by Marx. In this view, capitalism is an economic system in which control of
production and the allocation of real and financial resources are based on private ownership of
the means of production. It is a theory expounded through observation of the economic system
prevailing in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Capitalism is an
indirect system of governance based on a multifarious and continually evolving political bargain
in which private actors are endowed by a political authority to own and control the use of
property for private gain under definite laws and regulations. Workforces are free to work for
incomes, capital is free to earn a return, and both labour and capital are allowed to enter and exit
from various business. Capitalism depends upon the pricing mechanism to balance supply and
demand in market. It relies on the profit motivation to assign opportunities and resources among
contending suppliers and it relies upon a political authority to establish the rules and regulations
so that they include all applicable societal costs and benefits. Government and its representatives
are responsible to deliver physical security for persons and property as well as the laws and
regulations. Capitalist development is built from investment in advanced technologies that enable
to enhance productivity, where various initiatives are selected through a Darwinian process that
favours productive uses of those resources, and from the periodic modernization of the legal and
regulatory framework as specified by altering market conditions and societal urgencies.
To develop capitalism, government must have to perform many roles such as administrative role,
in which providing and maintaining the institutions that support capitalism. Capitalism contrasts
with previous economic systems characterized by forced labour, self-sufficiency, barter, and/or
reciprocal relationships based upon family, tribe, or locally known relationships. It is also
dissimilar with modern systems where governments have acted directly through ownership
 65

and/or central planning to control of the use of resources. Government's approach of intervention
in a capitalist system is mainly indirectly. It creates, legitimates, administers and intermittently
updates the various market frameworks that elucidate the conditions in which the economic
actors may obtain and employ capital and labour to produce, distribute, and sell goods and
services. Consequently, economic players receive the right to use their power in competition
with others, subject to predominant laws and regulations.
The market structures can have quite dissimilar policy priorities, from protecting the status quo
to the advancement of growth and development, from protecting consumers to protecting
producers, and from protecting labour to protecting capital. Governments identify the
responsibilities of the various participants in these transactions such as for the safety and
serviceability of the products, as well as the conditions under which they are produced and
distributed. Therefore, this indirect system of governance certainly exemplifies a strategy, though
this strategy is often largely implicit rather than overt and created progressively over time instead
of huge plan. While positive capitalism depends upon the granting of power to private companies
to enter, compete in, and exit from markets, it also depends upon the state's power to confine the
private actors so that they do not abuse these powers. To be authentic as well as productive,
private economic actors must be bound by the rule of law, and this rule of law must be backed by
the coercive powers of the state. The powers of the state are engaged to confine the private
players from breaking the rules and, if need be, to settle clashes. Efficacious capitalism is reliant
upon a state control of forced powers. Capitalist systems typically rely on the state to make direct
provision of certain public goods, such as highways, schools and law enforcement, as well as to
refrain from the temptation to own, operate, or directly control the economic actors. If the state
does become a direct economic player, it becomes a player as well as a referee. This puts state
agents in roles that conflict for example, as a regulator and as player that need not be subject to
the discipline of the markets.
Capitalism as a three level system: Capitalism has three level systems. On the first level, the
markets, firms compete to secure their labour and capital as well as to serve their customers. In
second level, there is basic institutional foundations, including physical and social infrastructure;
physical infrastructure includes, among other things, transportation and communications, and
social infrastructure includes the educational, public health, and legal systems. Additionally, the
second level consists of the agents of the state who enforce the rules and regulations, including
specialized regulators who oversee behaviour in certain industries, such as those that deal with
food and drugs or transportation, and those who protect societal resources such as the physical
environment or safety in the workplace. The third level comprises of a political authority
typically one with specialized functions such as executive, legislative, and judicial branches. In
turn, a set of political institutions connect the political authority to the political markets and
ultimately to civil society, to which such an authority is finally responsible.
level of capitalism
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Capitalism is planned to uphold the industrious use of public resources in order fulfil consumer
needs in the short period and to enhance living style of people through time. As a result, its
supervisory frameworks give priority to promoting productivity instead of equalizing
competitive resources on a given day or during a given season. Same time, it is established that
capitalism is controlled after the fact, and not in real time the way organized sports are. The
regulators do not stop the play to assess a foul, nor halt the competition to scrutinise a
controversial event via "instant replay." The economy moves on and disputes are settled after the
fact, in court if need be.
Figure: Capitalistic system: Level1 and 2 (Source: Bruce R. Scott)
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Types of capitalism:
There are many alternatives of capitalism that differ according to country and region. They vary
in their institutional character and by their economic policies. The common features among all
the dissimilar forms of capitalism is that they are based on the production of merchandises and
services for profit, predominately market-based allocation of resources, and they are structured
upon the accretion of capital. The major types of capitalism are mentioned below.
Mercantilism: Mercantilism is a nationalist system of initial capitalism that was practiced in the
later phase of 16th century. It is characterized by the interweaving of national business interests
to state-interest and imperialism, and subsequently, the state apparatus is utilized to improve
national business interests abroad. Mercantilism was determined by the conviction that the
prosperity of a nation is increased through a positive balance of trade with other nations. It
relates to the phase of capitalist development and sometimes called the Primitive accumulation
of capital. Mercantilist arguments for protectionist policies and their central concept of profit
upon alienation, obtained in circulation, often tied to unstable transitory and immature character
of capitalist economy of their age (Makoto Ito, 1988). Mercantilist capitalism involves more
cooperation and coordination between government and economic entities including large
cooperation and sometimes whole sectors of economy (Mattern, 2006).
Free-market economy: Free-market economy is described as a capitalist economic system
where prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces of supply and demand and are
allowed to reach their point of equilibrium without interference by government plan. It
characteristically involves in support for highly competitive markets, private ownership of
productive enterprises. Laissez-faire is a more extensive form of free-market economy where the
role of the state is limited to protecting property rights.
Social market and Nordic model: A social-market economy is a supposedly free-market
system where government involvement in price formation is kept to a minimum but the state
provides substantial services in the area of social security, unemployment benefits and
recognition of labour rights through national collective bargaining arrangements. The social
market economy forms an essential part of free and open society, which is also characterised by
solidarity. It has proven itself as an economic system that allows for prosperity and full
employment whilst also providing welfare and promoting a strong social system. This model is
conspicuous in Western and Northern European countries, and Japan, although in slightly
different configurations. The huge majority of enterprises are privately owned in this economic
model.
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Rhine capitalism: It is described as the modern model of capitalism and adaptation of the social
market model that exists in continental Western Europe today. State capitalism: State capitalism
includes state ownership of the means of production within a state, and the organization of state
enterprises as commercial, profit-seeking businesses. The argument between proponents of
private versus state capitalism is focused on issues of managerial efficacy, productive efficiency,
and fair distribution of wealth.
Aldo Musacchio, leading expert stated that state capitalism is a system in which governments,
whether democratic or autocratic, exercise an extensive influence on the economy, through either
direct ownership or various subsidies. Musacchio also said that there is a significant difference
between today's state capitalism and its predecessors. In his views, earlier, governments
appointed bureaucrats to run companies but in present situation, the world's largest state-owned
enterprises are now traded on the public markets and kept in good health by large institutional
investors.
Corporate capitalism: Corporate capitalism refers to a free or mixed-market economy
categorised by the supremacy of hierarchical, bureaucratic corporations.
Mixed economy: Mixed economy is a mainly market-based economy consisting of both private
and public ownership of the means of production and economic interventionism through
macroeconomic policies intended to correct market failures, reduce unemployment and keep
inflation low. The degree of involvement in markets differs among different countries. Some
mixed economies, such as France under dirigisme, also featured a degree of indirect economic
planning over a largely capitalist-based economy. Contemporary capitalist economies are
described as "mixed economies".
Characteristics of Capitalism:
Capitalism, generally referred to a free enterprise economy, is considered as an economic system
distinguished by some traits, whose development is condition by still other elements. The main
characteristics of capitalism are mentioned below.

1. Private Ownership: Private individuals are the owners of the means of production, which is, land, labour,
capital, entrepreneurship (as opposed to state ownership and communist ownership). These owners decide
what to produce, in what quantities, how it is going to be produced, and the rewards of labour. It is demand
and supply that determines the price of the finished good (s).
2. Decentralized Decision Making: In a capitalist economy, the process of decision making takes the
structure of devious decentralization. Individuals, make the decision with their self-interest. However, the
government controls these decisions by manipulating its respective environment that is, affecting prices,
taxes, subsides.
3. Freedom of Choice: Capitalism also referred to as a market economy, which highlights on the freedom of
the individual, both as a consumer and as an owner of the factors of production. Principally, an individual
can work wherever he or she wants, while entrepreneurs are also free to set up enterprises of their own
choice. Within a market economy, decisions or choices are mainly determined by material encouragements.

It is found in vast literature that Capitalism is an economic system in which each individual in
his capacity as a consumer, producer and resource owner is engaged in economic activity with a
great degree of economic freedom. The factors of production are privately owned and managed
by individuals. The main purpose of the capitalist system is the profit motive. The entrepreneurs
initiate production with a view to maximize profits. Income is received in financial form through
the sale of services of the factors of production and from profits of private enterprise. Capitalist
economy is not planned, controlled or regulated by the government. In this system, economic
decisions and activities are guided by price mechanism which operates automatically without any
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direction and control by the central authorities. In capitalist economy, competition is the most
important element. It means the existence of large number of buyers and sellers in the market
who are motivated by their self-interest but cannot influence market decisions by their individual
actions.
Benefits of Capitalism: Capitalist economic system has many benefits.
This is an economic growth through open competitive market that provides individuals with far
better opportunities of raising their own income. Capitalism results in a decentralized economic
system which is major advantages of capitalism where individuals are exposed to various options
which can lead to competition hence leading to firms producing only the best, and a capitalist
economy is believed to encourage innovations in technology and industry. The advantages of
capitalism entail;
Consumer choice where Individuals choose what to consume, and this choice leads to more
competition and better products and services.
Efficiency of economics in which Goods and services produced based on demand creates
incentives to cut costs and avoid waste.
Economic growth and expansion. Capitalistic economy increases the gross national product and
leads to improved living standards.
General Drawbacks of Capitalism: Besides numerous advantages, capitalistic economy has
several disadvantages.

1. Inequality: There tends to be a rise in disparity as benefits of capitalism are not fairly distributed. As wealth
tends to redound to a small percentage of the population, the demand for luxury goods is often limited to a
small percentage of the workforce, one of the main capitalism disadvantages.
2. Irrational Behaviour: People tend to get caught up in hypothetical suds but disregard economic
fundamentals, leading to illogical behaviour.
3. Monopoly Behaviour: Other major drawback of capitalism is that companies gain monopoly over power in a
free market allows and exploit customers by charging higher prices. They often pay lower salaries to
labours.
4. Immobility: Main issue of capitalism is that a free market is supposed to be able to easily move factors of
from an unprofitable sector to a new profitable industry. However, this is much more difficult practically.

Other drawbacks are that there is extravagant competition which does not confer any corresponding social benefit.
Effect of capitalism on society: Capitalism has some good consequences on habitants.
High Standard of Living: Capitalism is the artefact of industrialization. Industrialization has
amplified production.
Economic Progress: Capitalism encourages society to utilize the natural resources more and
more. The people exert themselves maximum for earning money. This had led to many
inventions in the field of industry, agriculture and business which have contributed to economic
growth.
Exchange of Culture: Capitalism intends to encourage all people to partake in activities that
appear beneficial to them. Capitalism facilitates international trade and exchange of know-how.
People of different countries have come close to each other. The development of the means of
transport and communication has facilitated contacts among the peoples of the world thus
leading to exchange of ideas and culture.
Progress of Civilization: Capitalism is tool to explore new machines and increasing the
production of material goods. Man is today more civilized than his ancestors. Decreasing of
Racial Differences: Capitalism has also led to diminish the differences based on race, doctrine,
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caste and nationality.

Major effect of capitalism includes, profit for owners of production/business, industrial vs
agricultural economies, market competition, increased supply of "things"/goods and focus on
personal responsibility.
To summarize, the capitalist system is reflection of the aspirations of human nature. Actually,
capitalism can be described as a system that identifies and protects private property, free
enterprise, freedom of choice for the human person, the authority of consumers over the
objectives of production through free markets of the products chosen or ordered by the
consumers, guide the programs of production. Capitalism makes economy money oriented.
Businesses look at the economy with a materialistic point of view. Huge business companies
take over smaller companies. Employment rights are compensated with the aim of higher
productivity and some believe that because of fierce competition in capitalist economies it can
give rise to unfair competition.
There are different views about capitalism. Some experts believe in its strengths, while others
criticise about the unfair distribution of wealth it may lead to. The opposition of capitalism is
Marxian Economics, named after Karl Marx. He believes that capitalism brings about class
segregation i.e. there are two classes the capitalist class and the working class. Under capitalism,
economic personal property, such as commodities or the means of production may be withheld
from others by its owners. This is done so as to yield higher profit margins. Reviewing major
facts about capitalism, it is found that in Capitalism economy, individuals own and control land,
capital, and production of industry. Individuals are free to purchase and own their own homes,
cars, furniture, and other goods People have liberty to live where they want and what type of job
field they want to pursue.
Socialism: Socialism is political philosophy considered by public ownership and centralized
planning of all major industries which include manufacturing, services, and energy, banks and
insurance companies, agribusiness, transportation, the media, and medical facilities. In
capitalism, these huge enterprises control the economy but are privately owned and operated to
create wealth for their owners by extracting it from working people who are paid only a small
fraction of what their labour produces. Socialism turns this around so that the class that produces
the wealth can jointly decide how it will be used for the benefit of all. Real socialism is
characterized as democratic. It is economic as well as political democracy. Many capitalist
countries claim of their democratic institutions, but this is a deception because all the political
power is in control of officers who hold the wealth. Socialism prioritizes human needs and
eliminates the profit motive that drives war, ecological destruction, and inequalities based on
gender, race, nationality and sexuality. Simply, socialism is social ownership of means of
production, impartiality of income and opportunities for all members. Under social and political
system, Socialism depends altogether upon the history of mankind for a record of its growth in
the past, and bases its future upon knowledge of that history in so far as it can be accurately
traced up to the present time. The basis of the whole theory is that since ancient period of their
existence, human beings have been channelled by the power they possessed over the forces of
nature to supply the wants arising as individual members of any society. Thus, Socialism
depends upon political economy in its broadest sense. It is dependent upon the manner in which
wealth is produced and distributed by those who form part of society at a given time.
Socialism initiated in the late 18th-century from an knowledgeable and working class political
movement that disapproved the effects of industrialization and private ownership on civilisation
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Theoretical framework of socialism:Vast literature is available to describe nature of socialism

as a political philosophy. Theorist D. Dickinson stated that "Socialism is an economic
organisation of society in which the material means of production are owned by the whole
community and operated by organs representative of and responsible to the community
according to a general economic plan, all members of the community being entitled to benefit
from the results of such socialized planned production on the basis of equal rights." According to
Loucks, "Socialism refers to that movement which aims to vest in society as a whole, rather than
in individuals, the ownership and management of all nature-made and man-made producers
goods used in large-scale production, to the end that an increased national income may be more
equally distributed without materially destroying the individuals economic motivation or his
freedom of occupation."
Other experts like Pigou explained the term socialism as "A socialised industry is one in which
the material instruments of production are owned by a public authority or voluntary association,
and operated not with a view to profit by sale to other people, but for the direct service of those
whom the authority or association represents. A socialised system is one the main part of whose
resources are engaged in socialised industries," Paul M. Sweezy asserted that "In its primary
meaning is a complete social system which differs from capitalism not only in the absence of
private ownership of the means of production but also in its basic structure and mode of
functioning." Schaffle also elaborated principles of socialism and stated that, "The alfa and
omega of socialism is the transformation of private competing capital into a united collective
capital." G.D.H. Cole perceived that "Socialism means four closely connected things of a human
fellowship which denies and expels distinction of class, a social system in which no one is so
much richer or poorer than his neighbours as to be unable to mix with them on equal term, the
common ownership and use of all the vital instruments of production and an obligation on all
citizens to serve one another according to their capacities in promoting the common wellbeing."
Similar to capitalism, socialism must be worldwide so that global resources can be shared. To
attain the objectives of socialism, it is necessary to any country being able to determine its own
intention.
Features of Socialism: The main features of this system are described as under.

1. Public Ownership: First prominent characteristic is socialist economy which is determined by public
ownership of the means of production and distribution. There is shared ownership whereby all mines, farms,
factories, financial institutions, distributing agencies, means of transport and communications, are owned,
controlled, and regulated by government departments and state corporations. A small private sector also
exists as small business units which are carried on in the villages by local artistes for local consumption.
2. Central Planning: Second feature of socialism is centrally planned which functions under the direction of a
central planning authority. It develops various objectives and targets to be realized during the plan period.
Central economic planning means the making of major economic decisions what and how much is to be
produced, how, when and where it is to be produced, and to whom it is to be allocated by the mindful
decision of a determinate authority, on the basis of a comprehensive survey of the economic system as a
whole. The central planning authority organises and operates the financial resources by deliberate direction
and control of the economy in order to accomplish certain objectives and targets laid down in the plan during
a specified period of time.
3. Definite Objectives: Another characteristic of socialism is that a socialist economy operates within definite
socio-economic objectives. These objectives may concern aggregate demand, full employment, and
satisfaction of communal demand, allocation of factors of production, distribution of the national income, the
amount of capital accumulation, economic development and so forth.
4. Freedom of Consumption: In socialism system, consumer's dominance infers that production in state owned
industries is generally governed by the likings of consumers, and the available merchandises are distributed
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to the customers at fixed prices through the state-run department stores. Consumer's dominion under
socialism is limited to the choice of socially beneficial commodities.
5. Equality of Income Distribution: In a socialist system, there is great impartiality of income distribution in
comparison a free market economy. The removal of private ownership in the means of production, private
capital accumulation, and profit motive under socialism avert the accrual of large wealth in the hands of a
few wealthy persons. The unearned incomes in the form of rent, interest and profit go to the state which
utilises them in providing free education, public health facilities, and social security to the masses.
6. Planning and the Pricing Process: Other feature of socialism is that the pricing process under socialism does
not operate spontaneously but works under the control and regulation of the central planning authority.
There are administered prices which are fixed by the central planning authority. There are also the market
prices at which consumer goods are sold. There are also the accountings prices on the basis of which the
managers decide about the production of consumer goods and investment goods, and also about the choice
of production methods. Theoretical studies have documented that socialism aims at establishing a classless
society, free from exploitation. It presupposes public ownership of means of production (Laybourn, 1988).
Majority of socialists recognise their philosophy of socialism as Marxists in acknowledgement of Karl Marx,
who revealed the economic laws of capitalism. Marx and his co-worker Frederick Engels evolved the
foundation of Marxist economics, the philosophical thought of dialectical materialism, and the method of
social analysis known as historical materialism. Leninism signifies the concepts of a disciplined, radical party
and the principled, intransigent vision of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, key leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Lenin's contribution on imperialism, the nature of the state, and the rights of national minorities are vital
components of the socialist practice. Another form of socialism, Socialist feminism was developed in the
decades of late 1960s and early 1970s by originators of the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women. It
is a Marxist, Leninist, and Trotskyist tendency. These philosophers recognised that the most oppressed
sector of the current working class is composed of women, particularly women of colour, whose life
experience of exploitation gives them the strength and determination to carry through a revolution against all
forms of oppression. Socialist feminists identified the activist leadership of working-class women, people of
colour, and queers, and others multiply plagued by capitalism. Socialist feminists orient to common, rank-
and-file women and men instead of the predominantly white male aristocrats of labour who make up the
union bureaucracy.

Types of Socialism: There are many types of socialism.

Democratic Socialism promotes the principles of Socialism as an economic principle which
signifies that the means of production should be in the hands of ordinary working people and
equality as a governing principle. It attempts to bring about Socialism through nonviolent
democratic means as opposed to violent insurgence, and represents the improver practice of
Socialism. Democratic Socialism infers a philosophy that is more left-wing and supportive of a
fully socialist system, established either by progressively reforming Capitalism from within, or
by some form of revolutionary transformation.
Marxian socialism: In theoretical framework of Marxism, socialism denotes to a particular
historical phase of financial development and its corresponding set of social relations that
ultimately overtake capitalism in the plan of historical materialism. From this perspective,
socialism is described as a mode of production where the principle for production is use-value,
where production for use is coordinated through conscious economic planning and the law of
value no longer directs economic activity. The Marxian idea of socialism was against other early
forms of socialism, most remarkably early forms of market socialism based on classical
economics including Mutualism and Ricardian socialism, which is dissimilar to the Marxian
conception, retained commodity exchange and markets for labour and the means of production.
The Marxian conception also contradicted Utopian socialism.
Another type of socialism is revolutionary Socialism which supports the need for essential social
change through revolution or revolution instead of gradual reform as a strategy to attain a
socialist society. Trotskyism is the continuance of the Marxist and Leninist. When the Stalinist
bureaucracy rose to power in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, Trotsky rallied an international
Left Opposition against the unfaithfulness of the revolution's goals. Trotskyism means
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Permanent Revolution, internationalism, and the strategy of the united front against fascism. .
Luxemburgism is another Revolutionary Socialist custom, based on the works of Rosa
Luxemburg (1970 - 1919). It is analogous to Trotskyism in its opposition to the Totalitarianism
of Stalin, while simultaneously avoiding the reformist politics of modern Social Egalitarianism.
Utopian Socialism describes the first streams of modern socialist thought in the first quarter of
the 19th Century. Usually, it was used by later socialist thinkers to define early socialist, or
quasi-socialist, intellectuals who created hypothetical visions of perfect egalitarian and
communalist societies without actually concerning themselves with the manner in which these
societies could be created or sustained. They disallowed all political and especially all
revolutionary action, and wished to achieve their ends by nonviolent means and small
experiments, which was observed by famous socialist, Karl Marx as necessarily doomed to
failure.
The objective of Libertarian Socialism is to develop a society without political, economic or
social hierarchies, in which every person would have free, equal access to tools of information
and production. This would be accomplished through the eradication of authoritarian institutions
and private property, so that direct control of the means of production and resources is gained by
the working class and society as a whole. Most Libertarian Socialists supports abolishing the
state altogether, in much the same way as Utopian Socialists and Anarchism.
Market Socialism is a type of an economic system in which there is a market economy directed
and guided by socialist developers, and where prices would be set through trial and error rather
than relying on a free price tool.
Eco-Socialism is philosophies combine aspects of Marxism, Socialism, Green politics, ecology
and the anti-globalization movement. They promote the non-violent dismantling of Capitalism
and the State, focusing on collective ownership of the means of production, in order to alleviate
the social barring, poverty and environmental deprivation brought about by the capitalist system,
globalization and colonialism.
Christian socialism: It is a form of religious socialism which is based on the traditions of Jesus
of Nazareth. Many Christian socialists consider capitalism to be idolatrous and rooted in greed,
which some Christian denominations consider a worldly evil. Christian socialists recognise the
cause of unfairness to be associated with the greed that they associate with capitalism.
Guild Socialism: This type of socialism was basically an English movement that fascinated a
modest during the first two decades of the 20th century. An association of craftsmen motivated
by the medieval guild, determined their own working conditions and activities. Theorists,
Samuel G. Hobson and G.D.H. Cole supported the public ownership of industries and their
organization into guilds, each of which would be under the autonomous control of its trade
union. The role of the state was less clear. Some guild socialists envisioned it as a coordinator of
the guilds' activities, while other theorists held that its functions should be restricted to protection
or policing. In general, however, the guild socialists were less inclined to invest power in the
state than were their Fabian compatriots.
Fabian socialism: In this form of socialism, the Society adopted the name Fabian as a
representation of a plan formulated to infiltrate civic and social units and to find means to
spread contemporary social ideas, concentrating on concrete objectives rather than on principles
(Fabianism In The Political Life of Britain, p. 4). The Fabians did not constitute themselves as a
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political party as such but developed the technique of "socialistic 'permeation' of existing
political institutions" (Fabian Society," Columbia Encyclopedia, 2nd Ed.). According to
theorists, The Fabians were more realistic as compared to the Marxian socialists. They
understood that it is much easier to overthrow sons, daughters and wives of the prominent and
well-to-do than it is to impress the labouring classes. They also understood, that socialist
movement's spring from the middle and upper classes and not from the proletariat (Sidney Webb,
1989). A major belief of Fabianism is to collect a Brain Trust as an elite class to plan and direct
all of society. Shaw designated briefly that "The Fabian Society succeeded because it addressed
itself to its own class in order that it might set about doing the necessary brain work of planning
socialist organization for all classes, meanwhile accepting, instead of trying to supersede, the
existing political organizations which it intended to permeate with the Socialist conception of
human society" (Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, p. 186).
Merits of Socialism: Socialism has many benefits for society. Prof. Schumpeter was supported of
this thought and gave four arguments to promote socialism that include greater economic
efficiency, welfare due to less inequality, absence of monopolistic practices and absence of
business fluctuations.

1. Greater Economic Efficiency: It has been established through theoretical studies that Economic competence
under socialism system is better as compared to capitalism system. The means of production are controlled
and regulated by the central planning authority towards chosen ends. The central planning authority makes
comprehensive survey of resources and utilises them in the most efficient manner. Increased productivity is
secured by avoiding the wastes of competition and by undertaking expensive research and production
processes in a coordinated manner. Economic efficiency is also realized by utilising resources in producing
socially useful goods and services which satisfy the basic wants of the people such as cheap food, cloth,
and housing.
2. Greater Welfare due to Less Inequality of Income: In a socialist economy, it is observed that there is less
disparity of income as compared with a capitalist economy because of the absence of private ownership of
the means of production, private capital accumulation, and private profit. All inhabitants work for the
wellbeing of the state and each is compensated his payment according to his capability, education and
training. All rents, interests and profits from various sources go to the state which spends them for public
welfare in providing free education, cheap and congenial housing, free public health amenities, and social
security to the people.
3. Absence of Monopolistic Practices: Main benefit of socialism is that it is free from monopolistic practices
which are to be found in a capitalist society. Since under socialism, all means of production are owned by
the state, both competition and monopoly are eradicated. The misuse by the monopolistic is absent. Instead
of private monopoly, there is the state monopoly of the productive system but this is operated for the welfare
of the people. In the state-owned factories, socially useful commodities are produced which are of high
quality and are also reasonably priced.
4. Absence of Business Fluctuations: A socialist system is free from business variations. There is economic
constancy because production and consumption of goods and services are controlled by the central
planning authority according to the objectives, targets and priorities of the plan. Thus there is neither
overproduction nor joblessness.

Demerits of Socialism: A socialist economy has several drawbacks:

1. Loss of Consumers' Dominance: Researchers have observed that there is loss of consumer's dominion in a
socialist approach. Consumers do not have the liberty to buy whatever commodities they want. They can
consume only those commodities which are available in department stores. Often the quantities which they
can buy are fixed by the state.
2. No Freedom of Occupation: It is also found that people do not have liberty of occupation in such a society.
Every person is provided job by the state. But he cannot leave or change it. Even the place of work is
allotted by the state. All occupational movements are sanctioned by the state.
3. Malallocation of Resources: In socialist, there is random allocation of resources. The central planning
authority often commits mistakes in resource allocation because the entire work is done on trial and error
basis.
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4. Bureaucratic: A socialist economy is considered as rigid economy. It is operated like a machine. Therefore, it
does not provide the necessary initiative to the people to work hard. People work due to the fear of higher
authorities and not for any personal gain or self-interest.

In current circumstances, socialism has become the most popular, economic philosophy. During
the decades succeeding the Second World War, the worldwide progression of socialism has been
quite theatrical and unparalleled. Socialism is a standard of expediency which accommodates
politicians of all hues. It incorporates all types of political system, detectorships, democracies,
republics and monarchies. It holds such dissimilar systems as an Islamic socialism practiced by
Libya and Algeria, democratic socialism of Norway or Sweden, the Baathist Socialism of Syria
and Iraq, the 'Ujamaa' socialism of Tanzania. It is observed that various nations around the world
have adopted socialist philosophy in the light of their peculiar conditions. Sometimes even
within a country, different political parties interpreted the socialist philosophies to fit into their
own political viewpoint. Socialist ideas have considerably influenced the formulation of the
means and objectives of Indian economic policies. This has happened in different ways such as
through the impact of external, socialist ideologies on the economic and political notions held by
Blite groups influencing policy-making in India.
To summarize, Socialism is a thought that individuals should not have ownership of land,
capital, or industry, but rather the whole community jointly owns and controls property, goods,
and production. Preferably, in this system all share correspondingly in work and the results of
their labour. After thorough appraisal of principles of socialism, it is established that Socialism is
a socio-economic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to control
by the workforces, either directly through popular collectives or indirectly exercised on behalf of
the people by the state, and in which Classlessness is an important objective.

World History Colonization and De-

colonization
In all parts of the world, Historians had great interest in the colonial past, decolonization, and
post-colonial theory which offers significant challenges for history didactics and the teaching of
history. It has been observed that there are massive transnational migration movements and the
increase in the number of culturally and religiously diverse states which have stemmed from the
processes of decolonization and globalization. It means that the history of colonialism and
decolonization as well as post-colonial perspectives have become important elements of
historical dialogue and perception.

Colonization: Colonialism is a political-economic fact whereby different nations discovered,

conquered, settled, and exploited large zones of the world. The term is originated from the Latin
 76

word colere, which means to "to inhabit" (Rockman, 2003). Past reports indicated that
colonialism has been practiced throughout history and all over the world. Generally, colonialism
happens when people from one terrain establish or acquire, maintain, and develop colonies in
another region. In colonialism, the metropole or colonizing power claims dominance over the
colony.
Colonialism is a procedure of temporally extended domination by people over other people and
as such part of the historical cosmos of forms of intergroup domination, subjugation, oppression,
and exploitation (Horvath 1972). From a world-systems viewpoint, much of the history of the
capitalist world-economy is a history of colonialism, consisting of repeated and more or less
successful attempts by the core to create a periphery, to control it politically in order to exploit it
economically ( Sanderson 2005: 186f). Both the capitalist and pre-capitalist world-systems have
had colonial empires (Chase-Dunn/Hall 1997). Colonialism brings a totally new existence to the
colonies. Cultural which are unfamiliar to one another are brought together and forced to interact
and coexist. The subjugation of lands and forceful coexistence of peoples of different
backgrounds (as a result of the conquest) with different beliefs and philosophies has brought
about many changes, both negative and positive, especially in the colonies.
Records have shown that the age of modern colonialism started around 1500, following the
European discoveries of a sea route around Africa's southern coast (1488) and of America
(1492). With these events, sea power shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and to the
developing nation-states of Portugal, Spain, the Dutch Republic, France, and England. Often,
colonization is determined by a desire for economic development. In the period of sixteenth
century, European colonization of Africa had significant role in development of European
economy. European colonization strengthened because Europeans had just developed galleons or
ships that could navigate more easily all the way to Africa. There was easy access to foreign
lands which encouraged European aristocracies and merchants to discover new terrains in an
effort to obtain raw materials and develop new markets. Obtaining raw materials from overseas
lands led to the Industrial Revolution, and the practice of bondage. This created a new source of
labour power for Europeans. This type of colonialism promoted European economies but at the
same time, it had harmful consequences for African economies. Colonized terrains were forced
to depend on colonizers for trade. Local institutions and political structures were dismantled and
substituted with ones imposed by colonial influences.
These nations extended and colonized throughout the world through discovery, conquest, and
settlement, spreading European institutions and culture. Today, Colonialism has been recognized
with rule over peoples of different race occupying lands separated by salt water from the
imperial centre. Especially, it indicates direct political control by European states or states
established by Europeans, as the United States or Australia, over peoples of other races,
particularly over Asians and Africans. It has been documented that the most remarkable
colonial powers were Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark,
whose shared empires covered at various times the whole of North, Central and South America,
Africa, Australia, much of Indonesia, the countries lying in the Levant, much of the Indian
subcontinent as well as most of the countries lying in between. In short, most of the world.
Germany as a colonial power is often considered a minor aspect of Europe's imperialist
development.
Other features of the "colonial situation" are, domination of an alien minority, asserting racial
and cultural superiority, over a materially inferior native majority, contact between a machine-
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oriented civilization with Christian origins, a powerful economy, and a rapid rhythm of life and a
non-Christian civilization that lacks machines and is marked by a backward economy and a slow
rhythm of life, and the imposition of the first civilization upon the second.

Advantages of Colonialism
Religion: Colonialism has assisted to spread religion especially the Christian religion. The
European missionaries brought Christian religion to their colonies and communicated the people
of the colonies the religion very well. In the process of learning the religion the colonial masters
also made the people attain new skills. This brought about a development in the people as they
were being liberated from the illiteracy which had kept them in the dark for many years. The
initiation of the Christian religion brought many modifications to the colonies. For example, in
Southern Nigeria, Christianity helped stop the killing of twins as the religion addressed equality
and encouraged education for all people.
Modernization and technological advancement: Colonialism had contributed in modernization of
underdeveloped regions. Progressive technological equipment and amenities necessary for
improvements in medical and healthcare services, building of railroads and other developments
in transportation, modern education, all have helped in the development of the colonies. These
developments have improved the status of the colonies internationally. The improvements in
education have provided opportunities for competition in different disciplines like literature,
mathematics, art and science. This is apparent in Africa with people like Wole Soyinka, Chinua
Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo and other communities.
Discovery of natural resources: Colonisations helps in exploring natural resources which was due
to the provision of new technology known to the colonies by their colonial leaders. The use of
new technology made investigation of natural resources easier and more efficient. This resulted
in the development and progress of the colonies. It also increases job opportunities for the
people, even though they were not well paying jobs, and this added to the experience of the
people as they acquired knowledge and learned new skills which is beneficial to them. This
meant cheap labour for the colonial masters.
Expansion of land: Colonialism also brought about the enlargement of land for their colonies.
For example, before colonialism, there was no terrain known as Nigeria. There were only towns
and villages, which were more or less restricted to their areas, living on their own. With the
initiation of colonization, colonial masters expanded the land for all ethnic groups, towns and
villages. Members of any ethnic group can now move to and live in any part of the country and
call the place home. Language: The implementation of the language of the colonial masters by
the colonies have promoted unity to an extent in most multilingual and multicultural nations. It is
apparent in Nigeria which has well over five hundred languages. Since no language is considered
superior to the other, it would be difficult for any of the native languages to be made the lingua
franca. The adoption of English language has made things easier for Nigerians as the language is
foreign and does not belong to any particular ethnic group or people in the country (Schaefer,
2008).

Disadvantages of Colonialism
Unfamiliar system of government: The colonial masters brought new and unfamiliar systems of
government which the inhabitants were not familiar with. These systems of government gave
less importance to, and had less regard for the systems of government of the colonies. The
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methods of ruling which were introduced to the colonies were completely different from what
the natives were used to.
Loss and destruction of culture and land: Colonialism contributed vastly to the loss and
destruction of cultural norms and values of inhabitants. First of all the native languages of the
colonies were made lower to the languages of the colonial masters. The mode of dressing of the
people changed. Natives of the colonies started to dress and speak like the colonial masters as
they were made to believe that their colonial masters were superior human beings.

The Impact of Colonialism

There is great impacts of colonialism in the political, economic, and social spheres.
The Political Impact of Colonialism:
In the political area, colonialism affects the pre-colonial leaders, although domination took
different forms. One impact of colonialism was the political control of regions having no central
government or, where centralization already existed, the foreign take-over or domination of pre-
colonial central government (Bockstette, Chanda, and Putterman 2002). The extent of political
control was different from colony to colony, and often within colony from region to region
(Bergesen and Schoenberg 1980). Many writers differentiate between an allegedly British style
of indirect rule and an allegedly French style of direct administration. According to Herbst,
British faithfulness to indirect rule is overstated and "the notion of a single-minded colonial
approach to ruling Africa is therefore unsupported by the evidence" (2000: 82). Coleman draws
these styles as polar extremes of a continuum instead of as contradiction and puts them in
standpoint. "In practice these forms have not been applied consistently either over time or to the
different traditional authority systems within single territories" (1960: 265). Where there was the
most effective indirect rule, the political incorporation was more problematic and the tension
between old and new elites were more obvious. In contrast, where direct rule was most effective,
the political integration has been easier and less clogged by old elites. Lange (2004) analysed the
variation in British colonialism and debated that direct rule provided an administrative structure
based on formal rules and had a centralized legal-administrative structure with a formal chain of
command that interrelated the diverse state actors throughout the colony to the central colonial
administration in the metropole. Indirect rule encouraged local tyranny by allowing traditional
rulers to be "rent-seekers extraordinaire." Consequently, "the colonial state in indirectly ruled
colonies lacked the competences to implement policy outside of the capital city and often had no
option for following policy other than compulsion" (Lange 2004).
In places where colonialists had to manage with high mortality rates, they established less and
created extractive institutions (Acemoglu et al. 2001, 2002). In contrast to settler colonies, these
extractive institutions concentrate power and are prone to expropriation of property. Grier stated
that Institutions as educational facilities and infrastructure are more established where
colonization lasted longer (1999). She also highlights constitutional differences within the British
Empire. La Porta et al. (2008) are less concerned with constitutional differences between the
areas ruled by one colonial power, but rather between different colonial powers. According to
this investigation, the legal systems established in British colonies are based on common law,
which allows less state interference than the French legal system established in other colonies. In
between the two are the German, Scandinavian, and Socialist legal systems.
The Economic Impact of Colonialism:
The main urgings for economic impact of colonialism are the 'drain of wealth,' expropriation
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(mainly of land), the control over production and trade, the exploitation of natural resources, and
the improvement of infrastructure. Tomlinson summarizes about India that By the last quarter of
the nineteenth century India was the largest purchaser of British exports, a major employer of
British civil servants at high salaries, the provider of half of the Empire's military might, all paid
for from local revenues, and a significant recipient of British capital (Tomlinson 1993, Pp: 13).
Colonialism led to a considerable outflow of financial resources. It is best recognised in the case
of British India, where a controversy between Indian historians and protectors of British
colonialism still has not been settled. The so called "Home Charges," the official transfers of
funds by the colonial government to Britain between 1858 and 1947, consisted mainly of debt
service, pensions, India Office expenses in Britain, purchases of military items and railway
equipment.
The Social Impact of Colonialism:
With the development of colonialism in India, new middle class also arose which consisted of
people who get a modern education and would become interested in public services. Another
significant group which emerged was a group of trained professionals such as doctors, lawyers,
teachers, journalists. This group became very important in society and was able to develop
because of the British influence on education in the country following the defeat of the British
East India Company. This class was more liberal in its viewpoint because it drew its position and
strength from professional competence rather than hereditary privilege (History Tuition 2014).
It is established from reviewing the colonialism process that colonialism is the strategy of one
nation who use its powers over other terrains, buy extending and occupying the other territories
through colonization, which is the process of controlling and inhabiting other territories. In the
18th and 19th centuries, during the industrial revolution, European countries became powerful
and wealthier through industrialization as the other countries outside of Europe became weaker
since they failed to industrialize. Colonialism greatly impact on the cultural, political, religious,
economic and social aspects in the colony (Schaefer, 2008).
After World War II, colonial systems were pull to bits in a process called decolonization.

Decolonization
Decolonisation is the downfall of colonialism, where a nation establishes and maintains its
supremacy over dependent terrains. Decolonization is described as the collapse of colonialism, or
the claim of a previously colonized people for independence and self-determination. In part,
decolonization was the consequence of independence movements in colonized territories. It was
also the result of an intended economic decision made by colonial authorities. The cost of
maintaining colonial empires had begun to surpass their value for the European powers. The
Oxford English Dictionary explains decolonization as "the withdrawal from its colonies of a
colonial power; the acquisition of political or economic independence by such colonies." Etemad
(2000) affirmed that decolonization led to emigration of colony-born Europeans thereby
reducing the amount of human capital in the newly independent nation.
Other experts define decolonization as a polity's movement from a status of political dependence
or subordination to a status of formal autonomy or sovereignty. In modern practice, it is
generally supposed that the regal or metropolitan centre is physically separated from the
dependency and that the two societies are culturally distinct. The term, Decolonization refers
specifically to the fragmentation of western overseas empires and their replacement by sovereign
states in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. It can be assumed politically (attaining independence,
autonomous home rule, union with the metropole or another state), or culturally (removal of
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pernicious colonial effects). The term refers predominantly to the dismantlement, in the years
after World War II, of the colonial empires established earlier to World War I all over the world.
The United Nations Special Committee on decolonization has specified that in the process of
decolonization there is no alternative to the colonizer allowing a process of self-determination
but in practice decolonization may involve either peaceful rebellion or national liberation wars
by pro-independence groups. It may be internal or involve the interference of foreign
supremacies acting individually or through international bodies such as the United Nations.
Many examples of decolonization can be found in the literatures of Thucydides, but there have
been several particularly active periods of decolonization in modern times. These include the
breakup of the Spanish Empire in the 19th century; of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman,
and Russian Empires following World War I; of the British, French, Dutch, Japanese,
Portuguese, Belgian and Italian colonial empires following World War II; and of the Soviet
Union (successor to the Russian Empire) following the Cold War. It is shown in studies that
decolonization refers to the ability to view and discuss non-European cultures from an impartial,
non-western viewpoint.
There are many ways by which decolonization can occur. Most commonly, the dependency
becomes a new independent state, a political entity recognized in the international field as
independent of other states and as possessing final jurisdiction over a defined territory and
population. Less often, decolonization may occur through the dependency's full incorporation
into an existing polity, such that it is no longer separate and subordinate.
In historical records, it is not clearly mentioned that when decolonization has occurred. Puerto
Rico's relation to the United States can be defined as one of colonial dependency or as free
association. In the 1960s, Portugal claimed to have no colonies, only foreign territories formally
combined into a unitary Portuguese state (Nogueira 1963). And where political relations are not
challenged, the absence of overt conflict makes it problematic to know when independence has
been achieved. There were three major elements that played massive role in this decolonization
process. First was the colonized peoples' hunger for independence, secondly was the Second
World War itself which established that colonial powers were no longer indestructible, and
thirdly was the new focus on anti-colonialism in United Nations. The first upsurge of
decolonization started with the liberation of Britain's thirteen continental colonies as the United
States of America. The French Revolution touched off a slave uprising that led finally to the
independence of the French colony of Saint Domingue as Haiti. Portuguese Brazil and Spanish
Central and South America became self-governing after the Napoleonic Wars, which had cut
Latin America off from the Iberian peninsula.
While the first period of decolonization was restricted to the Americas. In twentieth-century,
decolonization was global. It encompassed the freedom of most of the Indian subcontinent,
Southeast Asia and Australasia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean. Between the world
wars, some of Britain's settler colonies and a number of insecurely held protectorates became
fully independent. After World War II, the major Asian colonies such as India, Indonesia,
Indochina, and the Philippines gained independence. This change rapidly speeded during the
1960s, which saw the decolonization of approximately all of Africa. In the decade of the 1980s,
nearly all Western colonies had become self-governing or had been fully integrated into
sovereign states. One important difference between the two periods of decolonization has to do
with who sought independence. Early American decolonization were creole revolutions, as the
offspring of European settlers sought political independence from their mother country. The
 81

American Revolution and the Spanish Wars for Independence were political instead of social
revolutions. Slave revolt in Haiti provided the sole exception, to the revulsion of creole
nationalists as well as loyalists elsewhere.
On the contrary, twentieth-century decolonization was deep-rooted in aboriginal rather than
creole movements for independence, as decolonization came to mean autonomy from racially
foreign rule. After World War II, settler subgroups opposed decolonization, since national
independence spelled an end to their privileged political, economic, and social position. Only in
South Africa did a racialist minority government survived decolonization.
The first and second influences of decolonization also varied importantly terms of violence
involved. Early decolonization in the America was gained through military battle between settler
and imperial forces. Wars for independence fumed in Britain's thirteen continental colonies, in
Spanish Central and South America, and in Haiti. Only in Portuguese Brazil was independence
attained without a battle because Brazil was richer and more populated than Portugal.
During the twentieth century, prolonged wars for independence were fought in Indochina,
Indonesia, Algeria, and Angola. But these were the exceptions to the rule. Most colonies became
independent without organized violence between the imperial state and colonial nationalists. In
much of Africa, imperial powers practically abandoned colonies at the first sign of antagonism to
the colonial regime. In the middle of 1960s, decolonization had become a rather routine activity
for many imperial powers, often attained through institutionalized expressions of popular will.
Decolonization has greatly affected on the economies of the newly formed states. It was
observed that newly independent African states had to improve an economic system.
Furthermore, even though the previous colonies were now formally independent, they were still
rather dependent on the West for support in developing economic and political structures.
Therefore, western companies still had a significant amount of control over the new states.
Newly independent states borrowed money from the Western countries in order to fund their
own development which created a new system of debt. For decades, this debt has been politically
not possible for many countries to pay off and still exists. The consequences of decolonization
for more general notions of international supremacy or mistreatment are strongly contested.
Dependency and world systems thinkers visualized decolonization as producing modification in
the mere form, but not the content, of core-periphery relations (Chase-Dunn and Rubinson 1979).
The main debate is that contact between more and less developed economies tends generally to
strengthen the differential between them, even in the absence of explicit political controls.
Dependency on overseas capital has been contended to slow long-term economic development
(Bornschier et al. 1978) and more generally to shape the political and economic structure of the
dependent society (Cardoso and Faletto 1979).
Regardless of these apprehensions, it is established that decolonization involves a fundamental
change in the structures regulating international exchange, especially in the post-World War II
period. Contemporary states are equipped with broadly accepted rights to control economic
activity within their boundaries, including rights to nationalize foreign-owned industries and
renegotiate contracts with multinational corporations (Lipson 1985). Third World nations
mobilize around these rights (Krasner 1985), and the negative impact of economic dependency
seems to fall when the bordering state is strong (Delacroix and Ragin 1981).
To summarize, the process of colonialism typically involved the relocation of populace to a new
terrain, where the arrivals lived as permanent settlers while maintaining political fidelity to their
 82

country of origin. Colonialism is a practice of authority, which involves the suppression of one
people to another. Decolonization is the opposing of colonialism. In this process, one nation
establishes itself self-governing and separate from the state it had emerged from.

World History: Industrial revolution from

18th century
In history, it is documented that the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th
centuries was radical because it changed the industrious capability of England, Europe and
United States. These revolutionary changes were in seen in development of new machines,
smoke-belching factories, increased productivity and an augmented standard of living. The
Industrial Revolution was an era during which principally agrarian, rural societies in Europe and
America became industrialised and metropolitan. Earlier to the Industrial Revolution,
manufacturing was done in homes. People used hand tools or basic machines. Industrialization
was observed as a period of shifting to powered, special-purpose machinery, factories and mass
production. The iron and textile industries, along with the development of the steam engine,
played vital roles in the Industrial Revolution, which also saw advanced systems of
transportation, communication and banking. Though industrialization brought advancement of
technology and variety of manufactured goods and enhanced standard of living for particular
group of people but it also caused in unemployment and living conditions for the poor and
working classes.

With industrial revolution, English, European, and American society transformed to a deep level.
Like the Improvement or the French Revolution, no one was left unaffected. Everyone was
affected in one way or another peasant and noble, parent and child, artisan and captain of
industry. The Industrial Revolution created modern Western society. Harold Perkin has
witnessed that "the Industrial Revolution was no mere sequence of changes in industrial
techniques and production, but a social revolution with social causes as well as profound social
effects" (The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (1969). Many intellectuals
explained that The Industrial Revolution was the changeover to new manufacturing processes in
the period from about 1760 to between 1820 and 1840. This evolution included going from hand
production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes,
improved efficiency of water power, the increasing use of steam power, and the development of
machine tools. It also comprised the change from wood and other bio-fuels to coal. Textiles were
the foremost industry of the Industrial Revolution as it offers huge employment, value of output
and capital invested. It was observed that the textile industry was also the first to use modern
production methods (Landes 1969).
Historical evidences signified that the Industrial Revolution results a major defining moment in
history; as every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way. Particularly, average income
and population began to reveal unparalleled sustained growth. Several economists stated that the
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major impact of the Industrial Revolution was enhancement of living standard for the general
population. Although other group of scholars have said that it did not begin to profoundly
improve until the late 19th and 20th centuries (Feinstein, 1998).
It has been documented in studies that the Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain, and
spread to Western Europe and North America within a few decades (Landes 1969). The exact
start and end of the Industrial Revolution is still disputed among historians, as is the speed of
economic and social changes (Berg, 1998). GDP per capita was generally stable before the
Industrial Revolution and the advent of the modern capitalist economy, while the Industrial
Revolution began a period of per-capita economic development in capitalist economies (Lucas,
2003). Economic historians agreed that the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is significant
event in the history of humankind since the domestication of animals, plants and fire.
The First Industrial Revolution progressed into the Second Industrial Revolution in the transition
years between 1840 and 1870, when technological and economic development sustained with the
increasing acceptance of steam transport (steam-powered railways, boats and ships), the large-
scale manufacture of machine tools and the increasing use of machinery in steam-powered
factories. Many modern historian observed that the industrial revolution was basically a
technological revolution, and progress in understanding it can be made by focussing on the
sources of invention.

Causes:
There were heated debate among historians, intellectuals and scholars to understand the causes of
industrial revolution as it is very complicated issue. It is established that some historians
visualized the Revolution as a consequence of social and institutional changes brought by the end
of feudalism in Britain after the English Civil War in the 17th century. As national border
controls became more effective and it also prevent in transmission of various deadly disease. The
percentage of children who lived past infancy rose significantly and it resulted in creating huge
workforce. The Enclosure movement and the British Agricultural Revolution made food
production more effective and less labour-intensive, forcing the excess population who could no
longer find employment in agriculture into cottage industry. The colonial expansion of the 17th
century with the associated development of international trade, creation of financial markets and
accumulation of capital are also mentioned as factors, as is the scientific revolution of the 17th
century.
Primary cause of industrial revolution is the population's increase. Since the XVIII century,
epidemics of plague were vanishing and the development of agriculture allowed the growth of
food production and then there was a decline in catastrophic mortality (hunger, wars and
epidemics). In addition, population's increase augmented demand for goods and services. It
promoted technical innovations that increased production and profits. Several technological
invention also led to the industrial revolution and major enabling technology was the invention
and development of the steam engine. These inventions began in England in the textile sector, at
the beginning they were very simple inventions, they were built of wood and made by artisans
and people without scientific preparation, but after that, this technological development in the
industry made possible the emergence of factory. It is a place where a high production is
achieved through the division of labour because each worker takes charge of only in a portion of
the process.
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Another cause for the industrial revolution was the expansion of foreign trade. The foreign trade
led to get inexpensive and plentiful raw materials and achieved broad market for industrial
products. So, people generated revenues through reducing of production costs and expanding of
their market, take advantage of that opportunity was unquestionably the best option. Although
primarily the countries of northern Europe had organized a global trade for their benefit and their
privileged status was delaying the industrialization of the rest of the world, the discovery of the
optimization of profits through the purchase of raw materials in other markets led to countries
realized that it was essential to establish stable relations with markets elsewhere in the world.
Other important ground for the industrial revolution is the need to develop effective means of
transportation. The increase of population and agricultural production and also the development
of trade had created big markets in which it was needed to bring the products from one place to
another. Therefore, it was imperative to develop and improve means of transport. Moreover,
improving the means of transport was not an easy task because it was a slow and tortuous
process. However the growing need for efficient and effective means of transport, it led to the
invention of railways and steamboats. All these aspects incontestably reinforced the development
of the industrial revolution
The existence of a big domestic market should also be deliberated an important cause of the
Industrial Revolution especially in Britain. In other nations, such as France, markets were
divided up by local regions, which often imposed tolls and tariffs on goods traded amongst them.
Causes for industrial revolution happened in Europe:
Many historians wanted to explore the reason for eruption of the Industrial Revolution in the
beginning of 18th century of Europe only and not rest of the world in the 18th century,
particularly China, India, and the Middle East, or at other times like in Classical Antiquity or the
middle Ages. Several factors have been proposed, including ecology, government, and culture.
Benjamin Elman debated that China was in a high level symmetry trap in which the non-
industrial methods were well-organized enough to avert use of industrial methods with high costs
of capital. Kenneth Pomeranz, in the Great Divergence, claimed that Europe and China were
remarkably similar in 1700, and that the crucial transformations which produced the Industrial
Revolution in Europe were sources of coal near manufacturing centres, and raw materials such as
food and wood from the New World, which permitted Europe to expand economically in a way
that China could not rise. However, most historians challenge the statement that Europe and
China were approximately equal because modern estimates of per capita income on Western
Europe in the late 18th century are of roughly 1,500 dollars in purchasing power parity (and
Britain had a per capita income of nearly 2,000 dollars ) whereas China, by comparison, had only
450 dollars.
Other historians such as David Landes and Max Weber gave different causes for industrial
revolution in China and Europe. The religion and beliefs of Europe were mainly products of
Judaeo-Christianity, and Greek thought. On the contrary, Chinese society was founded on men
like Confucius, Mencius, Han Feizi (Legalism), Lao Tzu (Taoism), and Buddha (Buddhism).
The major difference between these belief systems was that those from Europe focused on the
individual, while Chinese philosophies focused on relationships between people. The family unit
was more important than the individual for the large majority of Chinese history, and this may
have important role for the occurrence of the Industrial Revolution in China. There was the
additional difference as to whether people looked backwards to a supposedly magnificent past
for answers to their questions or looked optimistically to the future. Additionally, Western
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European peoples had experienced the Resurgence and Improvement; other parts of the world
had not had a similar knowledgeable breakout, a condition that holds factual even into the 21st
century.
With reference to India, the Marxist historian Rajani Palme Dutt had stated that "The capital to
finance the Industrial Revolution in India instead went into financing the Industrial Revolution in
England." In contrast to China, India was split up into many rival kingdoms, such as the
Marathas, Sikhs and the Mughals. Additionally, the economy was highly dependent on two
sectors that include agriculture of subsistence and cotton, and technical innovation was non-
existent. Huge wealth were stored away in palace treasuries, and as such, were easily moved to
Britain.
Causes for occurrence in Britain:
Historians stated that the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain was due to
abundant natural or financial resources that Britain received from its many foreign colonies or
that profits from the British slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean assisted fuel industrial
investment. It has been designated that bondage provided only 5% of the British national income
during the years of the Industrial Revolution. A major cause for the Industrial Revolution was the
huge spurt of population growth in England. Alongside the fast growth in population, medical
systems had also enhanced, thus there was a reduction in the number of epidemics that spread
resulting in less of a death toll through lack of medical knowledge.
Otherwise, the greater liberalisation of trade from a large merchant base may have permitted
Britain to produce and use emerging scientific and technological developments more efficiently
as compared to countries with stronger kingdoms, particularly China and Russia. Britain arose
from the Napoleonic wars as the only European nation not ravaged by financial plunder and
economic downfall, and possessing the only merchant fleet of any useful size. Britain's wide-
ranging exporting cottage industries also safeguarded markets which were already available for
many early forms of manufactured goods. The struggle resulted in most British warfare being
conducted overseas, reducing the disturbing effects of territorial conquest that affected much of
Europe.
Industrial revolution happened in Britain because of a dense population for its small
geographical size. Enclosure of common land and the related Agricultural Revolution made a
supply of this labour readily available. There was also a local coincidence of natural resources in
the North of England, the English Midlands, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands. Local
supplies of coal, iron, lead, copper, tin, limestone and water power, resulted in excellent
conditions for the development and development of industry. Also, the damp, mild weather
conditions of the North West of England provided perfect conditions for the spinning of cotton,
providing a natural starting point for the birth of the textiles industry. Another ground for
industrial revolution in Britain was the stable political situation from around 1688, and British
society's greater receptivity to change was major factors to favour the Industrial Revolution.

Innovations in the period of industrial revolution:

In the beginning, the Industrial Revolution was closely related to a small number of innovations,
made in the second half of the 18th century: Textiles: The progression of the textile industry was
major development in Britain's industrialization. Cotton spinning started by using Richard
Arkwright's water frame. This was patented in 1769 and so came out of patent in 1783. The end
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of the patent was rapidly followed by the creation of many cotton mills. Similar technology was
afterward applied to spinning worsted yarn for various textiles and flax for linen.
Inventions in the Textile Industry:
1733 - Flying shuttle invented by John Kay - an improvement to looms that enabled weavers to
weave faster.
1742 - Cotton mills were first opened in England.
1764 - Spinning jenny invented by James Hargreaves - the first machine to improve upon the
spinning wheel.
1764 - Water frame invented by Richard Arkwright - the first powered textile machine.
1769 - Arkwright patented the water frame.
1770 - Hargreaves patented the Spinning Jenny.
1773 - The first all-cotton textiles were produced in factories.
1779 - Crompton invented the spinning mule that allowed for greater control over the weaving
process.
1785 - Cartwright patented the power loom. It was improved upon by William Horrocks, known
for his invention of the variable speed batton in 1813.
1787 - Cotton goods production had increased 10 fold since 1770.
1789 - Samuel Slater brought textile machinery design to the US.
1790 - Arkwright built the first steam powered textile factory in Nottingham, England.
1792 - Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin - a machine that automated the separation of
cottonseed from the short-staple cotton fibre.
1804 - Joseph Marie Jacquard invented the Jacquard Loom that weaved complex designs.
Jacquard invented a way of automatically controlling the warp and weft threads on a silk loom
by recording patterns of holes in a string of cards.
1813 - William Horrocks invented the variable speed batton (for an improved power loom).
1856 - William Perkin invented the first synthetic dye (Bellis).
Steam power: The enhanced steam engine developed by James Watt which was mainly used for
pumping out mines, but from the 1780s, it was applied to power machines. This permitted rapid
development of efficient semi-automated factories on an earlier unimaginable scale in places
where waterpower was not available.
Iron founding: In the Iron industry, coke was finally applied to all stages of iron smelting,
replacing charcoal. This had been attained much earlier for lead and copper as well as for
producing pig iron in a blast furnace, but the second stage in the production of bar iron depended
on the use of potting and stamping. These signify three major sectors in which innovations were
recognized and which allowed the economic launch by which the Industrial Revolution is usually
demarcated. Later inventions such as the power loom and Richard Trevithick's high pressure
steam engine were also become important in the development of industrialisation in Britain.

Transfer of knowledge:
There were various means to transfer knowledge of new innovation. Employees who were
trained in the technique might move to another employer or might be stolen. A common method
was for someone to make a study tour, gathering information where he could. During the
Industrial Revolution and for the century before, all European countries and America involved in
study-touring; some nations, like Sweden and France, even trained civil servants or technicians
to assume it as a matter of state policy. In other countries, particularly Britain and America, this
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practice was done by individual manufacturers anxious to improve their own methods. Study
tours were common then, as now, as was the keeping of travel records. Records made by
industrialists and technicians of the period are an unparalleled source of information about their
methods.
Another way to the transmit innovation was by the network of informal philosophical societies,
like the Lunar Society of Birmingham, in which members met to discuss 'natural philosophy' and
often its application to manufacturing. The Lunar Society succeeded from 1765 to 1809, and it
has been said of them, "They were, if you like, the revolutionary committee of that most far
reaching of all the eighteenth century revolutions, the Industrial Revolution".
There were publications that explains technology. Encyclopaedias such as Harris's Lexicon
technicum (1704) and Dr Abraham Rees's Cyclopaedia (1802-1819) encompass much of value.
Cyclopaedia contains huge information about the science and technology of the first half of the
Industrial Revolution, very well illustrated by fine engravings. Foreign printed sources such as
the Descriptions des Arts et Metiers and Diderot's Encyclopedie explained foreign methods with
fine engraved plates. Periodical publications about manufacturing and technology began to
appear in the last decade of the 18th century, and many frequently included notice of the latest
patents. Foreign periodicals, such as the Annales des Mines, published accounts of travels made
by French engineers who observed British methods on study tours.

Technological developments in Britain:

In Britain, there were huge technical progression in every field due to industrial revolution.
Textile manufacture: In the beginning of 18th century, British textile manufacture was based on
wool which was processed by individual artisans. They performed spinning and weaving task at
their own premises. This system is called a cottage industry. Flax and cotton were also used for
fine materials, but the processing was problematic because of the pre-processing needed, and
thus small quantity of goods in these materials were produced. Use of the spinning wheel and
hand loom limited the manufacture capacity of the industry, but incremental advances increased
efficiency to the extent that manufactured cotton goods became the dominant British export by
the early decades of the 19th century. India was displaced as the leading supplier of cotton
merchandises.
Metallurgy:
In the period of industrial revolution, the major change in the metal industries was the
replacement of organic fuels based on wood with fossil fuel based on coal. Much of this occurred
before the Industrial Revolution, based on innovations by Sir Clement Clerke and others from
1678, using coal reverberator furnaces known as cupolas. These were operated by the flames,
which contained carbon monoxide, playing on the ore and reducing the oxide to metal. This has
the benefit that impurities (such as sulphur) in the coal do not migrate into the metal. This
technology was useful to lead from 1678 and to copper from 1687. It was also applied to iron
foundry work in the 1690s, but in this case the reverberatory furnace was known as an air
furnace. The foundry cupola is a different invention.
Other innovation was done by Abraham Darby, who made great strides using coke to fuel his
blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale in 1709. Nevertheless, the coke pig iron he made was used
mostly for the production of cast iron goods such as pots and kettles. He had the advantage over
his competitors in that his pots, cast by his patented process, were thinner and cheaper than
theirs. Coke pig iron was hardly used to produce bar iron in forges until the mid 1750s, when his
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son Abraham Darby II built Horsehay and Ketley furnaces (not far from Coalbrookdale). By
then, coke pig iron was inexpensive than charcoal pig iron.
Till that time, British iron industrialists had used considerable amounts of imported iron to
supplement native supplies. This came principally from Sweden from the mid 17th century and
later also from Russia from the end of the 1720s. However, from 1785, imports reduced because
of the new iron making technology, and Britain became an exporter of bar iron as well as
manufactured wrought iron consumer goods. Since iron was becoming cheaper and more
abundant, it also became a major structural material following the building of the innovative Iron
Bridge in 1778 by Abraham Darby III. Upgrading was made in the production of steel, which
was luxurious commodity and used only where iron would not do, such as for the cutting edge of
tools and for springs. Benjamin Huntsman developed his crucible steel technique in the 1740s.
The raw material for this was blister steel, made by the cementation process.
The supply of cheaper iron and steel aided the development of boilers and steam engines, and
eventually railways. Developments in machine tools permitted better working of iron and steel
and further enhanced the industrial progression of Britain.
Mining:
Coal mining in Britain, especially in South Wales began early. Before the steam engine, pits
were often narrow bell pits following a seam of coal along the surface which were abandoned as
the coal was extracted. Shaft mining was done in some areas, but the limiting factor was the
problem of removing water. It could be done by carrying buckets of water up the shaft or to a
sough (a tunnel driven into a hill to drain a mine). In either case, the water had to be discharged
into a stream or ditch at a level where it could flow away by gravity. The introduction of the
steam engine greatly enabled the removal of water and allowed shafts to be made deeper,
enabling more coal to be extracted. These were developments that had begun before the
Industrial Revolution, but the acceptance of James Watt's more efficient steam engine from the
1770s reduced the fuel costs of engines, making mines more lucrative.
Steam power:
In the beginning of industrial revolution, there was development of the stationary steam engine
however, for most of the period of the Industrial Revolution, the majority of industries still
depend on wind and water power as well as horse and man-power for driving small machines.
The industrial use of steam power began with Thomas Savery in 1698. He created and patented
in London the first engine, which he called the "Miner's Friend" since he intended it to pump
water from mines. The first successful machine was the atmospheric engine, a low performance
steam engine developed by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Newcomen actually conceived his
machine quite independently of Savery. His engines used a piston and cylinder, and it operated
with steam just above atmospheric pressure which was used to produce a partial vacuum in the
cylinder when condensed by jets of cold water. The vacuum sucked a piston into the cylinder
which moved under pressure from the atmosphere. The engine produced a succession of power
strokes which could work a pump but could not drive a rotating wheel. They were effectively put
to use for pumping out mines in Britain, with the engine on the surface working a pump at the
bottom of the mine by a long connecting rod. These were large machines, requiring a lot of
capital to build, but produced about 5 hp. They were incompetent, but when located where coal
was inexpensive at pit heads, they were usefully employed in pumping water from mines.
Despite using a lot of fuel, Newcomen engines continued to be used in the coalfields until the
early period of the nineteenth century because they were trustworthy and easy to maintain.
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Around 1800, the most common pattern of steam engine was the beam engine, which was built
within a stone or brick engine-house, but during that time various patterns of portable (readily
removable engines, but not on wheels) engines were invented such as the table engine. Richard
Trevithick, a Cornish blacksmith, began to use high pressure steam with improved boilers in
1799. This permitted engines to be compact enough to be used on mobile road and rail
locomotives and steam boats. In the beginning of 19th century after the expiration of Watt's
patent, the steam engine had many enhancements by a host of inventors and engineers.
Chemicals:
During the Industrial Revolution, huge number of chemicals were produced. The first of these
was the production of sulphuric acid by the lead chamber process developed by the Englishman
John Roebuck (James Watt's first partner) in 1746. He was able to greatly increase the scale of
the manufacture by substituting the relatively expensive glass vessels formerly used with larger,
less expensive chambers made of riveted sheets of lead.
The production of an alkali on a large scale became an important goal as well, and Nicolas
Leblanc succeeded in 1791 to introduce a method for the production of sodium carbonate. These
two chemicals were very important because they enabled the introduction of a host of other
inventions, replacing many small-scale operations with more lucrative and controllable
processes. Sodium carbonate had many uses in the glass, textile, soap, and paper industries.
Early uses for sulphuric acid included pickling (removing rust) iron and steel, and for bleaching
cloth.
Scottish chemist Charles Tennant developed the chemical component bleaching powder (calcium
hypochlorite) in about 1800, based on the discoveries of French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet
which revolutionised the bleaching processes in the textile industry by radically reducing the
time required (from months to days) for the traditional process then in use, which required
repeated exposure to the sun in bleach fields after soaking the textiles with alkali or sour milk.
In 1824 Joseph Aspdin, patented a chemical process for making portland cement which was an
important development in the building trades. This process involves sintering a mixture of clay
and limestone to about 1400 �C, then grinding it into a fine powder which is then mixed with
water, sand and gravel to produce concrete. It was used several years later by the famous English
engineer, Marc Isambard Brunel, who used it in the Thames Tunnel. Cement was used on a large
scale in the construction of the London sewerage system by next generation.
Machine tools:
In the era of the Industrial Revolution, several machine tools were developed. They have their
origins in the tools developed in the 18th century by makers of clocks and watches and scientific
instrument makers to assist them to batch-produce small mechanisms. The mechanical parts of
early textile machines were sometimes called 'clockwork' because of the metal spindles and gears
they integrated. The manufacture of textile machines drew craftsmen from these trades and is the
basis of the modern engineering manufacturing. Machines were built by various craftsmen such
as carpenters made wooden framings, and smiths and turners made metal parts. Machine tools
changed manufacturing process in Birmingham, England, in 1830. The invention of a new
machine by William Joseph Gillott, William Mitchell and James Stephen Perry permitted mass
manufacture of vigorous, inexpensive steel pen nibs. The process had been laborious and
expensive. Due to difficulty in manipulating metal and the lack of machine tools, the use of
metal was kept to a minimum. Wood framing had the drawback of changing dimensions with
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temperature and humidity, and the various joints tended to rack (work loose) over time. As the
Industrial Revolution advanced, machines with metal frames became more common, but they
required machine tools to make them economically. Before the initiation of machine tools, metal
was worked manually using the basic hand tools of hammers, files, scrapers, saws and chisels.
Besides workshop lathes used by craftsmen, the first big machine tool was the cylinder boring
machine used for boring the large-diameter cylinders on early steam engines. The planing
machine, the slotting machine and the shaping machine were developed in the early period of the
19th century. Although the milling machine was developed at this time, it was not developed as
an important workshop tool until during the Second Industrial Revolution.
Gas lighting:
In the later period of industrial revolution, another major industry was gas lighting. Though
others made a similar invention elsewhere, the large scale introduction of this was the work of
William Murdoch, an employee of Boulton and Watt, the Birmingham steam engine pioneers.
The process consisted of the large scale gasification of coal in furnaces, the purification of the
gas (removal of sulphur, ammonium, and heavy hydrocarbons), and its storage and distribution.
The first gas-lighting utilities were established in London between 1812 to 1820. They soon
became one of the major customers of coal in the UK. Gas-lighting had immense impact on
social and industrial organisation because it permitted factories and stores to remain open longer
than with tallow candles or oil.
Transport in Britain:
In the start of the Industrial Revolution, inland transport was by navigable rivers and roads, with
coastal vessels employed to move heavy goods by sea. Railways or wagon ways were used for
carrying coal to rivers for further shipment, but canals had not yet been built. Animals supplied
all of the motive power on land, with sails providing the motive power on the sea. The Industrial
Revolution enhanced transport infrastructure of Britain with a turnpike road network, a canal,
and waterway network, and a railway network. Raw materials and finished products could be
transported more rapidly and inexpensively than earlier period.
Coastal sail:
Coastal sail were improved during industrial revolution period. Sailing vessels had been used for
moving goods round the British coast since long time. The trade transporting coal to London
from Newcastle had begun in mediaeval times. The major international seaports such as London,
Bristol, and Liverpool, were the means by which raw materials such as cotton might be imported
and finished goods exported. Transporting goods onwards within Britain by sea was common
during the whole of the Industrial Revolution and become down with the development of the
railways at the end of the period.
Navigable rivers:
In the period of the Industrial Revolution, all the major rivers of the United Kingdom were
navigable. Some were anciently navigable, particularly the Severn, Thames, and Trent. Some
were enhanced, or had navigation extended upstream. River, The Severn mainly used for the
transportation of goods to the Midlands which had been imported into Bristol from abroad, and
for the export of goods from centres of production in Shropshire and the Black Country.
Canals:
Another development in Britain during industrial revolution era was construction of canals.
Canals began to be built in the late eighteenth century to connect the major manufacturing
centres in the Midlands and north with seaports and with London, at that time itself the largest
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manufacturing centre in the country. Canals were the first technology to allow bulk materials to
be easily transported across nation. By the 1820s, a national network was in existence. Canal
construction served as a model for the organisation and methods later used to build the railways.
Roads:
The original British road system was poorly maintained well by thousands of local communities,
but from the 1720s, turnpike trusts were established to charge tolls and maintain some roads.
Increasing numbers of main roads were turnpiked from the 1750s to the extent that almost every
main road in England and Wales was the responsibility of some turnpike trust. New planned
roads were constructed by John Metcalf, Thomas Telford and John Macadam. The major
turnpikes radiated from London and were the means by which the Royal Mail was able to reach
the rest of the country. Heavy goods transport on these roads was by means of slow broad
wheeled carts dragged by teams of horses. Lighter goods were transported by smaller carts or by
teams of pack horses.
Railways:
Wagon ways to transport coal in the mining areas had begun in the 17th century and were often
related with canal or river systems for the further movement of coal. These were all horse drawn
or relied on gravity, with a stationary steam engine to drag the wagons back to the top of the
incline. The first applications of the steam locomotive were on wagon or plate ways. Horse-
drawn public railways did not begin until the beginning of the 19th century. Steam-hauled public
railways began with the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825 and the Liverpool and
Manchester Railway in 1830. The building of major railways which connected big cities and
towns began in the 1830s but started at the end of the first Industrial Revolution.

Social effects of industrial revolution:

With reference to social structure, the Industrial Revolution perceived the success of a middle
class of industrialists and businessmen over a landed class of dignity and gentry. Normal
working people found greater opportunities for employment in the new mills and factories, but
these were often under strict working conditions with long hours of labour dominated by a pace
set by machines. Nevertheless, harsh working conditions were widespread long before the
industrial revolution took place as well. Pre-industrial society was very static and often cruel.
Child labour, dirty living conditions and long working hours were as predominant before the
Industrial Revolution.
Factories and urbanization:
Industrialisation resulted in emergence of many factories. Debatably, the first was John Lombe's
water-powered silk mill at Derby was operational by 1721. However, the rise of the factory came
somewhat later when cotton spinning was automatic. The factory system was mainly responsible
for the development of the modern city, as workers travelled into the cities in search for getting
employment in the factories. For much of the 19th century, production was done in small mills,
which were typically powered by water and built to serve local needs. Later each mill had its
own steam engine and a tall chimney to give an efficient draft through its boiler. The changeover
to industrialisation was not solely smooth. It was observed that a group of English workers
known as Luddites formed to protest against industrialisation and sometimes damaged factories.
One of the earliest campaigners of factory conditions was Robert Owen.
Child labour:
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Due to the Industrial Revolution, there was increase in population. Industrial workers were better
paid than those in agriculture. With more money, women took nutritious diet and had healthier
babies, who were themselves better fed. Death rates weakened, and the distribution of age in the
population became more youthful. In the age of industrial revolution, there was limited
opportunity for education, and children were expected to work. Employers could pay a child less
than an adult even though their productivity was comparable. There was no need for strength to
operate an industrial machine, and since the industrial system was completely new and
experienced adult labourers were not available. This increased recruitment of child labour for
manufacturing in the early phases of the industrial revolution. Child labour had existed before
the Industrial Revolution, but with the increase in population and education it became more
noticeable. Before the passing of laws protecting children, many were forced to work in awful
conditions for much lower pay than their elders.
Politicians and the government took major initiative to curb the practice of child labour by law,
but factory owners resisted. They rationalized that they were helping the poor by giving their
children money to buy food to avoid starvation, and others simply welcomed the cheap labour. In
1833 and 1844, the first general laws against child labour, the Factory Acts, were passed in
England. Children younger than nine were not allowed to work, children were not allowed to
work at night, and the work day of youth under the age of 18 was limited to twelve hours.
Factory inspectors administered the implementation of the law. About ten years later, the
employment of children and women in mining was prohibited. These laws reduced the number
of child labourers. However, child labour remained in Europe up to the 20th century.
Housing:
In the period of the Industrial Revolution, life style of people varied from the magnificence of
the homes of the owners to the foulness of the lives of the workers. Poor people lived in very
small houses in overcrowded streets. These homes would share toilet facilities, have open sewers
and would be at risk of damp. Disease was transmitted through a contaminated water supply.
Conditions did improve during the 19th century as public health acts were introduced covering
things such as sewage, hygiene and making some boundaries upon the construction of homes.
The Industrial Revolution created a better living for middle class of professionals such as
lawyers and doctors. The conditions for the poor improved over the course of the 19th century
because of government and local plans which led to cities becoming cleaner places, still life had
not been improved for the poor before industrialisation. However, after the revolution, huge
numbers of the working class died due to disease spreading through the cramped living
conditions. Chest diseases from the mines, cholera from polluted water and typhoid were also
extremely common, as was smallpox. Accidents in factories with child and female workers were
common.
Luddites:
The speedy industrialisation of the English economy disrupted job opportunities to craft workers.
The textile industry in particular industrialised primary, and many weavers found themselves
abruptly jobless since they could no longer compete with machines which only required
relatively limited (and unskilled) labour to produce more cloth than a single weaver. Many such
unemployed labours, weavers and others, turned their hostility towards the machines that had
taken their jobs and began destroying factories and machinery. These assailants became known
as Luddites, supposedly followers of Ned Ludd, a folklore figure. The first attacks of the Luddite
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movement began in 1811. The Luddites rapidly gained popularity, and the British government
had to take strict measures to shield industry.
Organisation of labour:
The Industrial Revolution focused labour into mills, factories and mines, therefore facilitating the
organisation of combinations or trade unions to help advance the interests of working people.
The power of a union could demand better terms by extracting all labour and causing a
consequent termination of production. Employers had to decide between giving in to the union
demands at a cost to themselves or suffer the cost of the lost production. Capable workers were
difficult to replace, and these were the first groups to effectively advance their conditions
through this kind of negotiation.
The main method the unions used to effect change was strike action. Strikes were throbbing
events for both sides, the unions and the management. In England, the Combination Act
prohibited workers to form any kind of trade union from 1799 until its repeal in 1824. Even after
this, unions were still severely controlled. In the 1830s and 1840s, the Chartist movement was
the first large scale organised working class political movement which electioneered for political
impartiality and social justice. Its Charter of reforms received over three million signatures but
was overruled by Parliament without consideration. Unions gradually overcame the legal
restrictions on the right to strike. In 1842, a General Strike involving cotton workers and colliers
was organised through the Chartist movement which stopped production across Great Britain.
Ultimately, effective political organisation for working people was attained through the trades
unions who, after the extensions of the franchise in 1867 and 1885, began to support socialist
political parties that later merged to became the British Labour Party.

Other effects:
The application of steam power to the industrial processes of printing supported enormous
expansion of newspaper and popular book publishing, which strengthened rising literacy and
demands for mass political participation. During the Industrial Revolution, the life expectancy of
children increased dramatically.

Industrial revolution in United States:

The Industrial Revolution in America had impacted greatly in every aspect of society.
The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in 1750. At the beginning of the 19th century,
America was generally an agrarian (agricultural) society. About six out of seven workers were
involved in some type of farming. In 1820, the United States shifted from an agricultural society
to one based on wage labour, which was called the American Industrial Revolution. As the
number of states increased from 16 to 34 in 1860, the percentage of farmers reduced to half of
the workforce.
The main influences for industrialization were the Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812.
The Embargo Act was passed by Congress to cease the export of American goods and restrict the
importation of certain British products. This generated a greater need for America to produce
goods nationally. Also, when America and Great Britain went to war with each other in 1812, the
lack of sufficient transportation and communication caused great difficulties for both sides.
Industrialization in the United States initiated by borrowing technology from English inventors
and innovators. The first textile factory to use a water-powered spinning machine was started by
Samuel Slater, a British immigrant, in 1790. Soon, American technology surpassed the British
 94

machines they had copied. Besides an incursion of British technology, several other key features
led to the manufacturing boom after 1860.
The use of huge deposits of coal in states such as Pennsylvania and West Virginia created a
source of fuel for factories. Inventions in railroad technology and communication contributed in
creating jobs and allowed goods to be sold to the greater market. The increase in factories led to
a higher demand for workers. Competition between businesses to cut costs and win customers
led to a drop in prices overall. The money supply could not keep up with the production, which
ultimately caused high interest and less credit availability.
There was need for better transportation for the United States. Therefore, Miles of roads and new
canals were built to connect the vast open areas of America. The steamboat was an important
means of transportation in the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. Nonetheless, the railroad
rapidly dominated the steamboat in the transportation revolution.
Historical reports signified that in 1830, the U.S. only had an estimated 100 miles of track. The
railroads expanded rapidly after that. By 1860, 27,000 miles of track were built, and by 1900,
193,000 miles of track were completed. Importantly, these new tracks connected the eastern and
western United States, made selling goods more affordable, and allowed a network of national
supply distribution.
As in Britain, the United States initially used water power to run its factories, as a result that
industrialisation was essentially limited to New England and the rest of the Northeastern United
States, where fast-moving rivers were located. However, the raw materials (cotton) came from
the Southern United States. It was not until after the American Civil War in the 1860s that steam-
powered manufacturing overtook water-powered manufacturing, allowing the industry to fully
spread across the nation. The Steel Industry: It was observed that there were rapid growth of the
railroad industry which required huge quantity of steel tracks, the steel industry also profited
during the Industrial Revolution. Andrew Carnegie was involved in the development and
streamlining of the American steel industry. A Scottish immigrant who moved to the U.S. in
1848, his first job was bobbin boy in a textile factory. He finally became one of the wealthiest
men of the 19th century.
In United States, The Industrial Revolution was period of growth and transformation. There were
numerous changes that were occurred during this time that had remarkable impacts on culture,
manufacturing, trade, agriculture, etc. One major change was that people earned more as
compared to earlier period. There was a supply and demand now and people were generally
earning more money because there were more jobs, although there were people who earned little
money and were poor. People started shifted to the cities because that is where the centre of
manufacturing was. Cities were prosperous and the populations increased. Many times living
conditions were very poor because of congestion.

Continental Europe:
The Industrial Revolution on Continental Europe emerged late than in Great Britain. In many
industries, this involved the application of technology developed in Britain in new places. Often
the technology was bought from Britain or British engineers and entrepreneurs travelled overseas
to explore new opportunities. By 1809 part of the Ruhr Valley in Westphalia were being called
Miniature England because of its similarities to the industrial areas of England. The German,
Russian and Belgian governments did all they could to sponsor the new industries by the
 95

provisions of state funding. In some cases (such as iron), the different availability of resources
locally meant that only some aspects of the British technology were implemented.

Industrial revolution in Japan:

Through the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese Wars, Japan moved its industrial structure
from light industry to heavy and chemical industries. Although Europe had played vital role as
the "factory of the world," up until then, the region became a battleground when World War I
broke out in 1914 and their supply of commodities declined. In the meantime, Japan got amount
of orders that prompted the industrial revolution of the country to progress at a rapid rate. Japan
became a net creditor during the war, and recognized itself as a nation based on trade. In 1871 a
group of Japanese politicians known as the Iwakura Mission visited Europe and the USA to learn
western policies of business. The result was a thoughtful state led industrialisation policy to stop
Japan from falling behind. The Bank of Japan, founded in 1877, used taxes to fund model steel
and textile factories. Education was extended and Japanese students were sent to study in the
west.

Second Industrial Revolution:

The ravenous demand of the railways for more durable rail led to the development of the means
to inexpensively mass-produce steel. Steel is often named as the first of several new areas for
industrial mass-production, which are said to symbolize a "Second Industrial Revolution",
beginning around 1850. This second Industrial Revolution slowly grew to include the chemical
industries, petroleum refining and distribution, electrical industries, and, in the twentieth century,
the automotive industries, and was noticeable by a changeover of technological leadership from
Britain to the United States and Germany.
Creation of hydroelectric power generation in the Alps supported the rapid industrialisation of
coal-deprived northern Italy, beginning in the 1890s. The increasing availability of economical
petroleum products also reduced the importance of coal and further broadened the prospective
for industrialisation.

The far Americans:

The American Revolution (1775-83) is also called the American Revolutionary War and the U.S.
War of Independence. The struggle arose from increasing tensions between residents of Great
Britain's 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which characterised the
British crown. Battles between British troops and colonial militiamen in Lexington and Concord
in April 1775 kicked off the armed struggle, and after that, the insurgents were conducting a full-
scale war for their independence. France entered the American Revolution on the side of the
colonists in 1778, turning civil war into an international skirmish. After that the Americans had
effectively won their independence, though fighting would not formally end until 1783.

The history of French revolution:

A turning point event in modern world history, the French Revolution began in 1789 and
terminated in the late 1790s with the rise of Napolean Bonaparte. During this period, French
citizens destroyed and reshaped their country's political scene, displacing century's old
institutions such as absolute kingdom and the outdated system. Like the American Revolution
before it, the French Revolution was influenced by Illumination ideals, particularly the concepts
of popular dominance and unchallengeable rights. Although it failed to realise all of its goals and
 96

at times deteriorated into a disordered massacre, the crusade played a critical role to redesign
modern nations by showing the world the power inherent in the will of the people.
It can be established from above review that the revolution of industry and the economy in
Britain between the 1780s and the 1850s is termed as the 'industrial revolution'. The industrial
development in Britain is intensely associated with new machinery and technologies. These
enabled country to produce goods on a huge scale compared to handicraft and handloom
industries. This had sweeping effects in Britain. Afterwards, similar changes happened in
European countries and in the USA. These were to have a major influence on the society and
financial system of those countries and also on the rest of the world. Industrialization led to
greater affluence for some, but in the early stages it was related with poor living and working
conditions of millions of people, including women and children. This flashed off remonstrations,
which forced the government to endorse laws for regulating conditions of work. But the
Industrial Revolution and the huge wealth it created was irresistible.

Advantages and drawbacks of Industrial Revolution:

Many historians and intellectuals have observed that the Industrial revolution was period of
speedy growth and modification all over America and Europe. Numerous innovations in
machinery, methods, and techniques of producing goods created new world. There were
progressions in architecture, agriculture, transportation, and communication. It provided huge
jobs for people, enhancing the lifestyle of people.
Major benefits of industrial revolution were as under:

1. With the impact of industrialization, classes in the wellbeing of people increased. Nations started to
recognize national pride and identities. It increased prosperity.
2. Factories that produce superior products have increased in numbers rapidly. The production rate increased
because of the invention in machinery. As a result of the mass production of goods, the price of products
reduced resulting to enhanced quality living.
3. Comfortable, strong and cheaper houses were built every day. Cheaper and fashionable houses were
growing.
4. The means of transportation reformed extremely. It became cheaper, faster and very comfortable. Easier
travel opened up new areas to many people.
5. The increase in production was related to the hike in trade. It offered new jobs and it increased the
employment rate.
6. Cities developed and offered a lot of work and opportunity.

Disadvantages of Industrial Revolution:

1. Industrialization in contemporary cities fascinates immigrants. It promises a good life but not all were lucky. It
causes congested cities and slum areas developed which created other issues.
2. Industrialization create pollution. Factories, automobiles and aircrafts produces unconceivable air pollution to
some progressive cities in the world. Chemicals and wastes that were not properly disposed causes water
and land pollution. Such polluted environment degrade the life of humans around the globe.
3. Another negative consequence of industrialization is that it brought a negative influence on culture, values
and morality of mankind. Technology drives the change in philosophies, beliefs and faith.

In Britain, industrial revolution had many disadvantages as there were poor living conditions,
poor working conditions, and class tensions. A large dissimilarity developed between the
industrialized west and the rest of the world. Britain led in exploiting its foreign colonies for
resources and markets. As a result, other European countries, the United States, Russia, and
Japan followed Britain's lead, grabbing colonies for their economic resources. Imperialism was
 97

born out of the cycle of industrialization, the development of new markets around the worked,
and the need for resources to supply the factories of Europe.
To summarise, the Industrial Revolution was a major change of technological, socioeconomic,
and cultural conditions that happened in the late 18th century and early 19th century in some
Western countries. It initiated in Britain and then blowout throughout the world, a process that
continued as industrialisation. The start of the Industrial Revolution marked a major defining
moment in human social history, similar to the invention of farming or the rise of the first city-
states, almost every facet of daily life and human society is, ultimately, in some way influenced.
Major grounds for industrial development was explosion of population, extension of foreign
trade and the need to develop efficient means of transportation.

World War I
HISTORY.COM EDITORS





CONTENTS

1. Archduke Franz Ferdinand

2. Kaiser Wilhelm II

3. World War I Begins

4. The Western Front

5. First Battle of the Marne

6. World War I Books and Art

7. The Eastern Front

8. Russian Revolution

9. America Enters World War I

10. Gallipoli Campaign

11. Battle of the Isonzo

 98

12. World War I at Sea

13. World War I Planes

14. Second Battle of the Marne

15. Toward Armistice

16. Treaty of Versailles

17. World War I Casualties

18. Legacy of World War I

19. Photo Galleries

World War I began in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and lasted
until 1918. During the conflict, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman
Empire (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania,
Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers). Thanks to new military technologies and
the horrors of trench warfare, World War I saw unprecedented levels of carnage and
destruction. By the time the war was over and the Allied Powers claimed victory, more than
16 million people—soldiers and civilians alike—were dead.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Tensions had been brewing throughout Europe—especially in the troubled Balkan region of
southeast Europe—for years before World War I actually broke out.

A number of alliances involving European powers, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and other
parties had existed for years, but political instability in the Balkans (particularly Bosnia,
Serbia and Herzegovina) threatened to destroy these agreements.

The spark that ignited World War I was struck in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Archduke Franz
Ferdinand—heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire—was shot to death along with his wife,
Sophie, by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. Princip and other
nationalists were struggling to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina.
 99

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand set off a rapidly escalating chain of events: Austria-
Hungary, like many countries around the world, blamed the Serbian government for the
attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the question of Serbian
nationalism once and for all.

Kaiser Wilhelm II
Because mighty Russia supported Serbia, Austria-Hungary waited to declare war until its
leaders received assurance from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would
support their cause. Austro-Hungarian leaders feared that a Russian intervention would
involve Russia’s ally, France, and possibly Great Britain as well.

On July 5, Kaiser Wilhelm secretly pledged his support, giving Austria-Hungary a so-called
carte blanche, or “blank check” assurance of Germany’s backing in the case of war. The
Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary then sent an ultimatum to Serbia, with such harsh terms
as to make it almost impossible to accept.

World War I Begins

Convinced that Austria-Hungary was readying for war, the Serbian government ordered the
Serbian army to mobilize and appealed to Russia for assistance. On July 28, Austria-
Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s great powers
quickly collapsed.

Within a week, Russia, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Serbia had lined up against
Austria-Hungary and Germany, and World War I had begun.

The Western Front

According to an aggressive military strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan (named for its
mastermind, German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen), Germany began fighting World
War I on two fronts, invading France through neutral Belgium in the west and confronting
Russia in the east.
 100

On August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the border into Belgium. In the first battle of
World War I, the Germans assaulted the heavily fortified city of Liege, using the most
powerful weapons in their arsenal—enormous siege cannons—to capture the city by August
15. The Germans left death and destruction in their wake as they advanced through
Belgium toward France, shooting civilians and executing a Belgian priest they had accused
of inciting civilian resistance. 

First Battle of the Marne

In the First Battle of the Marne, fought from September 6-9, 1914, French and British forces
confronted the invading Germany army, which had by then penetrated deep into
northeastern France, within 30 miles of Paris. The Allied troops checked the German
advance and mounted a successful counterattack, driving the Germans back to north of the
Aisne River.

The defeat meant the end of German plans for a quick victory in France. Both sides dug
into trenches, and the Western Front was the setting for a hellish war of attrition that would
last more than three years.

Particularly long and costly battles in this campaign were fought at Verdun (February-
December 1916) and the Battle of the Somme (July-November 1916). German and French
troops suffered close to a million casualties in the Battle of Verdun alone.

World War I Books and Art

The bloodshed on the battlefields of the Western Front, and the difficulties its soldiers had
for years after the fighting had ended, inspired such works of art as “All Quiet on the
Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque and “In Flanders Fields” by Canadian doctor
Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. In the latter poem, McCrae writes from the perspective of
the fallen soldiers:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
 101

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.
Published in 1915, the poem inspired the use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance.

Visual artists like Otto Dix of Germany and British painters Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash and
David Bomberg used their firsthand experience as soldiers in World War I to create their art,
capturing the anguish of trench warfare and exploring the themes of technology, violence
and landscapes decimated by war.
102
 103

The Eastern Front

On the Eastern Front of World War I, Russian forces invaded the German-held regions of
East Prussia and Poland, but were stopped short by German and Austrian forces at
the Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914.

Despite that victory, Russia’s assault had forced Germany to move two corps from the
Western Front to the Eastern, contributing to the German loss in the Battle of the Marne.

Combined with the fierce Allied resistance in France, the ability of Russia’s huge war
machine to mobilize relatively quickly in the east ensured a longer, more grueling conflict
instead of the quick victory Germany had hoped to win under the Schlieffen Plan.

Russian Revolution
From 1914 to 1916, Russia’s army mounted several offensives on World War I’s Eastern
Front, but was unable to break through German lines.

Defeat on the battlefield, combined with economic instability and the scarcity of food and
other essentials, led to mounting discontent among the bulk of Russia’s population,
especially the poverty-stricken workers and peasants. This increased hostility was directed
toward the imperial regime of Czar Nicholas II and his unpopular German-born wife,
Alexandra.

Russia’s simmering instability exploded in the Russian Revolution of 1917, spearheaded

by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which ended czarist rule and brought a halt to
Russian participation in World War I.

Russia reached an armistice with the Central Powers in early December 1917, freeing
German troops to face the remaining Allies on the Western Front.

America Enters World War I

At the outbreak of fighting in 1914, the United States remained on the sidelines of World
War I, adopting the policy of neutrality favored by President Woodrow Wilson while
 104

continuing to engage in commerce and shipping with European countries on both sides of
the conflict.

Neutrality, however, was increasing difficult to maintain in the face of Germany’s unchecked
submarine aggression against neutral ships, including those carrying passengers. In 1915,
Germany declared the waters surrounding the British Isles to be a war zone, and German
U-boats sunk several commercial and passenger vessels, including some U.S. ships.

Widespread protest over the sinking by U-boat of the British ocean liner Lusitania—traveling
from New York to Liverpool, England with hundreds of American passengers onboard—in
May 1915 helped turn the tide of American public opinion against Germany. In February
1917, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United
States ready for war.

Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships the following month, and on April 2 Woodrow
Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany.

Gallipoli Campaign
With World War I having effectively settled into a stalemate in Europe, the Allies attempted
to score a victory against the Ottoman Empire, which entered the conflict on the side of the
Central Powers in late 1914.

After a failed attack on the Dardanelles (the strait linking the Sea of Marmara with the
Aegean Sea), Allied forces led by Britain launched a large-scale land invasion of
the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915. The invasion also proved a dismal failure, and in
January 1916 Allied forces staged a full retreat from the shores of the peninsula after
suffering 250,000 casualties.

Did you know? The young Winston Churchill, then first lord of the British Admiralty, resigned
his command after the failed Gallipoli campaign in 1916, accepting a commission with an
infantry battalion in France.
 105

British-led forces also combated the Ottoman Turks in Egypt and Mesopotamia, while in
northern Italy, Austrian and Italian troops faced off in a series of 12 battles along the Isonzo
River, located at the border between the two nations.

Battle of the Isonzo

The First Battle of the Isonzo took place in the late spring of 1915, soon after Italy’s
entrance into the war on the Allied side. In the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, also known as
the Battle of Caporetto (October 1917), German reinforcements helped Austria-Hungary win
a decisive victory.

After Caporetto, Italy’s allies jumped in to offer increased assistance. British and French—
and later, American—troops arrived in the region, and the Allies began to take back the
Italian Front.

World War I at Sea

In the years before World War I, the superiority of Britain’s Royal Navy was unchallenged by
any other nation’s fleet, but the Imperial German Navy had made substantial strides in
closing the gap between the two naval powers. Germany’s strength on the high seas was
also aided by its lethal fleet of U-boat submarines.

After the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915, in which the British mounted a surprise
attack on German ships in the North Sea, the German navy chose not to confront Britain’s
mighty Royal Navy in a major battle for more than a year, preferring to rest the bulk of its
naval strategy on its U-boats.

The biggest naval engagement of World War I, the Battle of Jutland (May 1916) left British
naval superiority on the North Sea intact, and Germany would make no further attempts to
break an Allied naval blockade for the remainder of the war.
 106

World War I Planes

World War I was the first major conflict to harness the power of planes. Though not as
impactful as the British Royal Navy or Germany’s U-Boats, the use of planes in World War I
presaged their later, pivotal role in military conflicts around the globe.

At the dawn of World War I, aviation was a relatively new field; the Wright brothers took
their first sustained flight just eleven years before, in 1903. Aircraft were initially used
primarily for reconnaissance missions. During the First Battle of the Marne, information
passed from pilots allowed the allies to exploit weak spots in the German lines, helping the
Allies to push Germany out of France.

The first machine guns were successfully mounted on planes in June of 1912 in the United
States, but were imperfect; if timed incorrectly, a bullet could easily fell the propeller of the
plane it came from. The Morane-Saulnier L, a French plane, provided a solution: The
propeller was armored with deflector wedges that prevented bullets from hitting it. The
Morane-Saulnier Type L was used by the French, the British Royal Flying Corps (part of the
Army), the British Royal Navy Air Service and the Imperial Russian Air Service. The British
Bristol Type 22 was another popular model used for both reconnaissance work and as a
fighter plane.

Dutch inventor Anthony Fokker improved upon the French deflector system in 1915. His
“interrupter” synchronized the firing of the guns with the plane’s propeller to avoid collisions.
Though his most popular plane during WWI was the single-seat Fokker Eindecker, Fokker
created over 40 kinds of airplanes for the Germans.

The Allies debuted the Handley-Page HP O/400, the first two-engine bomber, in 1915. As
aerial technology progressed, long-range heavy bombers like Germany’s Gotha G.V. (first
introduced in 1917) were used to strike cities like London. Their speed and maneuverability
proved to be far deadlier than Germany’s earlier Zeppelin raids.
 107

By war’s end, the Allies were producing five times more aircraft than the Germans. On April
1, 1918, the British created the Royal Air Force, or RAF, the first air force to be a separate
military branch independent from the navy or army. 

Second Battle of the Marne

With Germany able to build up its strength on the Western Front after the armistice with
Russia, Allied troops struggled to hold off another German offensive until promised
reinforcements from the United States were able to arrive.

On July 15, 1918, German troops launched what would become the last German offensive
of the war, attacking French forces (joined by 85,000 American troops as well as some of
the British Expeditionary Force) in the Second Battle of the Marne. The Allies successfully
pushed back the German offensive and launched their own counteroffensive just three days
later.

After suffering massive casualties, Germany was forced to call off a planned offensive
further north, in the Flanders region stretching between France and Belgium, which was
envisioned as Germany’s best hope of victory.

The Second Battle of the Marne turned the tide of war decisively towards the Allies, who
were able to regain much of France and Belgium in the months that followed.

Toward Armistice
By the fall of 1918, the Central Powers were unraveling on all fronts.

Despite the Turkish victory at Gallipoli, later defeats by invading forces and an Arab revolt
had combined to destroy the Ottoman economy and devastate its land, and the Turks
signed a treaty with the Allies in late October 1918.

Austria-Hungary, dissolving from within due to growing nationalist movements among its
diverse population, reached an armistice on November 4. Facing dwindling resources on
 108

the battlefield, discontent on the homefront and the surrender of its allies, Germany was
finally forced to seek an armistice on November 11, 1918, ending World War I.

Treaty of Versailles
At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Allied leaders stated their desire to build a post-war
world that would safeguard itself against future conflicts of such devastating scale.

Some hopeful participants had even begun calling World War I “the War to End All Wars.”
But the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, would not achieve that lofty goal.

Saddled with war guilt, heavy reparations and denied entrance into the League of Nations,
Germany felt tricked into signing the treaty, having believed any peace would be a “peace
without victory,” as put forward by Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points speech of January
1918.

As the years passed, hatred of the Versailles treaty and its authors settled into a smoldering
resentment in Germany that would, two decades later, be counted among the causes
of World War II.

World War I Casualties

World War I took the lives of more than 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were wounded.
Civilian casualties caused indirectly by the war numbered close to 10 million. The two
nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of
their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle.

The political disruption surrounding World War I also contributed to the fall of four venerable
imperial dynasties: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey.

Legacy of World War I

World War I brought about massive social upheaval, as millions of women entered the
workforce to support men who went to war and to replace those who never came back. The
 109

first global war also helped to spread one of the world’s deadliest global pandemics,
the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people.

World War I has also been referred to as “the first modern war.” Many of the technologies
we now associate with military conflict—machine guns, tanks, aerial combat and radio
communications—were introduced on a massive scale during World War I.

The severe effects that chemical weapons such as mustard gas and phosgene had on
soldiers and civilians during World War I galvanized public and military attitudes against
their continued use. The Geneva Convention agreements, signed in 1925, restricted the use
of chemical and biological agents in warfare and remains in effect today.

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World War II
1939–1945

WRITTEN BY: 

 John Graham Royde-Smith

 114

 Thomas A. Hughes
LAST UPDATED: Sep 20, 2019 See Article History

Alternative Titles: Second World War, WWII

World War II, also called Second World War, conflict that involved virtually every part of the
world during the years 1939–45. The principal belligerents were the Axis powers—Germany, Italy,
and Japan—and the Allies—France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a
lesser extent, China. The war was in many respects a continuation, after an uneasy 20-year hiatus, of
the disputes left unsettled by World War I. The 40,000,000–50,000,000 deaths incurred in World
War II make it the bloodiest conflict, as well as the largest war, in history.



 115

World War IIWorld War II explained in five questions.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

World War II: Battle of StalingradIn the Battle of Stalingrad (1942–43), the advancing Germans were finally stopped by the Red Army in
desperate house-to-house fighting. From The Second World War: Allied Victory (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational
Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

World War II: Pacific Theatre of OperationsThe Pacific Theatre of Operations, 1941–45.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
 116

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How did the war end?
Along with World War I, World War II was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical
history. It resulted in the extension of the Soviet Union’s power to nations of eastern Europe, enabled
a communist movement to eventually achieve power in China, and marked the decisive shift of
power in the world away from the states of western Europe and toward the United States and the
Soviet Union.
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Churchill, Winston; Truman, Harry; Stalin, JosephBritish Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. Pres. Harry S. Truman, and Soviet Premier
Joseph Stalin meeting at Potsdam, Germany, in July 1945 to discuss the postwar order in Europe. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

atomic bombing of HiroshimaA gigantic mushroom cloud rising above Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, after a U.S. aircraft dropped an
atomic bomb on the city, immediately killing more than 70,000 people.U.S. Air Force photograph

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Axis Initiative And Allied Reaction

The outbreak of war

By the early part of 1939 the German dictator Adolf Hitler had become determined to invade and
occupy Poland. Poland, for its part, had guarantees of French and British military support should it be
attacked by Germany. Hitler intended to invade Poland anyway, but first he had to neutralize the
possibility that the Soviet Union would resist the invasion of its western neighbour. Secret
negotiations led on August 23–24 to the signing of the German-Soviet Nonaggression
Pact in Moscow. In a secret protocol of this pact, the Germans and the Soviets agreed that Poland
 118

should be divided between them, with the western third of the country going to Germany and the
eastern two-thirds being taken over by the U.S.S.R.

Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, having negotiated the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939, is greeted by German
foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and other officials in Berlin. From “The Second World War: Prelude to Conflict” (1963), a documentary
by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

00:0003:22

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Having achieved this cynical agreement, the other provisions of which stupefied Europe even
without divulgence of the secret protocol, Hitler thought that Germany could attack Poland with no
danger of Soviet or British intervention and gave orders for the invasion to start on August 26. News
 119

of the signing, on August 25, of a formal treaty of mutual assistance between Great Britain and
Poland (to supersede a previous though temporary agreement) caused him to postpone the start of
hostilities for a few days. He was still determined, however, to ignore the diplomatic efforts of the
western powers to restrain him. Finally, at 12:40 PM on August 31, 1939, Hitler ordered hostilities
against Poland to start at 4:45 the next morning. The invasion began as ordered. In response, Great
Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3, at 11:00 AM and at 5:00 PM,
respectively. World War II had begun.
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World War II: German invasion of PolandOverview of the German invasion of Poland (1939), which marked the beginning of World War
II.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

World War II: Invasion of PolandIn September 1939 the Germans overrun Poland, forcing all of Europe into a state of war. From “The Second
World War: Prelude to Conflict” (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

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World War II

QUICK FACTS

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DATE

 September 3, 1939 - September 2, 1945

PARTICIPANTS
 Axis powers
 Canada
 China
 Cuba
 France
 Free French
 Iraq
 Italy
 United States
 Allied powers

KEY PEOPLE

 Winston Churchill
 Dwight D. Eisenhower
 Charles de Gaulle
 Adolf Hitler
 Benito Mussolini
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 Alessandro Pertini
 Franklin D. Roosevelt
 Joseph Stalin
 Harry S. Truman
 Chesty Puller

RELATED TOPICS

 Blitzkrieg
 Sherman tank
 Colossus
 Lancaster
 Panzer

DID YOU KNOW?

 About 70 million total soldiers fought on behalf of the Allied or Axis countries.

 Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Sweden all declared themselves neutral during WWII.

 Some scholars argue that the "start" of WWII was in 1937 when Japan invaded China instead of when Germany
invaded Poland.

Forces and resources of the European combatants, 1939

In September 1939 the Allies, namely Great Britain, France, and Poland, were together superior in
industrial resources, population, and military manpower, but the German Army, or Wehrmacht,
because of its armament, training, doctrine, discipline, and fighting spirit, was the most efficient and
effective fighting force for its size in the world. The index of military strength in September 1939
was the number of divisions that each nation could mobilize. Against Germany’s 100 infantry
divisions and six armoured divisions, France had 90 infantry divisions in metropolitan France, Great
Britain had 10 infantry divisions, and Poland had 30 infantry divisions, 12 cavalry brigades, and one
armoured brigade (Poland had also 30 reserve infantry divisions, but these could not be mobilized
quickly). A division contained from 12,000 to 25,000 men.
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Adolf Hitler reviewing troops on the Eastern Front, 1939.Heinrich Hoffmann, Munich

WORLD WAR II EVENTS

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Holocaust

1933 - 1945

Battle of the Atlantic

September 3, 1939 - May 8, 1945

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Dunkirk evacuation

May 26, 1940 - June 4, 1940

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Battle of Britain

June 1940 - April 1941

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North Africa campaigns

June 1940 - May 13, 1943

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Vichy France

July 1940 - September 1944

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The Blitz

September 7, 1940 - May 11, 1941

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Operation Barbarossa

June 22, 1941

Siege of Leningrad

September 8, 1941 - January 27, 1944

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Pearl Harbor attack

December 7, 1941
 131

Battle of Wake Island

December 8, 1941 - December 23, 1941

 132

Pacific War

December 8, 1941 - September 2, 1945

 133

Bataan Death March

April 9, 1942

Battle of Midway
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June 3, 1942 - June 6, 1942

Kokoda Track Campaign

July 1942 - January 1943

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Battle of Guadalcanal

August 1942 - February 1943

Battle of Stalingrad

August 22, 1942 - February 2, 1943

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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

April 19, 1943 - May 16, 1943

Normandy Massacres

June 1944
 137

Normandy Invasion

June 6, 1944 - July 9, 1944

 138

Warsaw Uprising

August 1, 1944 - October 2, 1944

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Cowra breakout

August 5, 1944
 140

Battle of Leyte Gulf

October 23, 1944 - October 26, 1944

 141

Battle of the Bulge

December 16, 1944 - January 16, 1945

 142

Yalta Conference

February 4, 1945 - February 11, 1945

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Battle of Corregidor

February 16, 1945 - March 2, 1945

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Battle of Iwo Jima

February 19, 1945 - March 26, 1945

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Bombing of Tokyo

March 9, 1945 - March 10, 1945

Battle for Castle Itter

May 5, 1945

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It was the qualitative superiority of the German infantry divisions and the number of their armoured
divisions that made the difference in 1939. The firepower of a German infantry division far exceeded
that of a French, British, or Polish division; the standard German division included 442 machine
guns, 135 mortars, 72 antitank guns, and 24 howitzers. Allied divisions had a firepower only slightly
greater than that of World War I. Germany had six armoured divisions in September 1939; the Allies,
though they had a large number of tanks, had no armoured divisions at that time.

BRITANNICA EXCLUSIVE ARCHIVE

WWII: D-DAY IN PICTURES

After a prolonged naval and aerial bombardment of German defenses on the Channel coast of France

and the Low Countries, the Allied invasion of Normandy began in the early morning hours of June 6,

1944. This collection of pictures documents the historic event that created a turning point in World

War II.
 147

The six armoured, or panzer, divisions of the Wehrmacht comprised some 2,400 tanks. And though
Germany would subsequently expand its tank forces during the first years of the war, it was not the
number of tanks that Germany had (the Allies had almost as many in September 1939) but the fact of
their being organized into divisions and operated as such that was to prove decisive. In accordance
with the doctrines of General Heinz Guderian, the German tanks were used in massed formations in
conjunction with motorized artillery to punch holes in the enemy line and to isolate segments of the
enemy, which were then surrounded and captured by motorized German infantry divisions while the
tanks ranged forward to repeat the process: deep drives into enemy territory by panzer divisions were
thus followed by mechanized infantry and foot soldiers. These tactics were supported by dive
bombers that attacked and disrupted the enemy’s supply and communications lines and spread panic
and confusion in its rear, thus further paralyzing its defensive capabilities. Mechanization was the
key to the German blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” so named because of the unprecedented speed and
mobility that were its salient characteristics. Tested and well-trained in maneuvers, the German
panzer divisions constituted a force with no equal in Europe.
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German Pz. IV (foreground) and Pz. III (background) tanks, 1942.U.S. Army photograph

German Junkers Ju 87 “Stuka” dive-bomber.UPI/Bettmann Archive

The German Air Force, or Luftwaffe, was also the best force of its kind in 1939. It was a ground-
cooperation force designed to support the Army, but its planes were superior to nearly all Allied
types. In the rearmament period from 1935 to 1939 the production of German combat aircraft
steadily mounted. The table shows the production of German aircraft by years.
year combat types other types

1933 0 368

1934 840 1,128

1935 1,823 1,360

1936 2,530 2,582

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year combat types other types

1937 2,651 2,955

1938 3,350 1,885

1939 4,733 3,562

German aircraft production by year

The standardization of engines and airframes gave the Luftwaffe an advantage over its opponents.

Germany had an operational force of 1,000 fighters and 1,050 bombers in September 1939. The
Allies actually had more planes in 1939 than Germany did, but their strength was made up of many
different types, some of them obsolescent. The corresponding table shows the number of first-line
military aircraft available to the Allies at the outbreak of war.
Frenc
aircraft British Polish
h

bombers 536 463 200

fighters 608 634 300

reconnaissance 96 444 —

coastal
216 — —
command

fleet air arm 204 194 —

Allied air strength, September 1939

Great Britain, which was held back by delays in the rearmament program, was producing one modern
fighter in 1939, the Hurricane. A higher-performance fighter, the Spitfire, was just coming into
production and did not enter the air war in numbers until 1940.
The value of the French Air Force in 1939 was reduced by the number of obsolescent planes in its
order of battle: 131 of the 634 fighters and nearly all of the 463 bombers. France was desperately
trying to buy high-performance aircraft in the United States in 1939.
At sea the odds against Germany were much greater in September 1939 than in August 1914, since
the Allies in 1939 had many more large surface warships than Germany had. At sea, however, there
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was to be no clash between the Allied and the German massed fleets but only the individual
operation of German pocket battleships and commerce raiders.

Bismarck battleshipThe Bismarck shortly after commissioning in 1940.Courtesy of the Marineschule Murwik, Flensburg, Ger.

Technology of war, 1918–39

When World War I ended, the experience of it seemed to vindicate the power of the defensive over
the offensive. It was widely believed that a superiority in numbers of at least three to one was
required for a successful offensive. Defensive concepts underlay the construction of the Maginot
Line between France and Germany and of its lesser counterpart, the Siegfried Line, in the interwar
years. Yet by 1918 both of the requirements for the supremacy of the offensive were at
hand: tanks and planes. The battles of Cambrai (1917) and Amiens (1918) had proved that when
tanks were used in masses, with surprise, and on firm and open terrain, it was possible to break
through any trench system.
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Maginot LineMain entrance to the Schoenenbourg Fort on the Maginot Line, Bas-Rhin department, Alsace region, France. John C. Watkins V

The Germans learned this crucial, though subtle, lesson from World War I. The Allies on the other
hand felt that their victory confirmed their methods, weapons, and leadership, and in the interwar
period the French and British armies were slow to introduce new weapons, methods, and doctrines.
Consequently, in 1939 the British Army did not have a single armoured division, and the French
tanks were distributed in small packets throughout the infantry divisions. The Germans, by contrast,
began to develop large tank formations on an effective basis after their rearmament program began in
1935.
In the air the technology of war had also changed radically between 1918 and 1939. Military
aircraft had increased in size, speed, and range, and for operations at sea, aircraft carriers were
developed that were capable of accompanying the fastest surface ships. Among the new types of
planes developed was the dive bomber, a plane designed for accurate low-altitude bombing of enemy
strong points as part of the tank-plane-infantry combination. Fast low-wing monoplane fighters were
developed in all countries; these aircraft were essentially flying platforms for eight to 12 machine
guns installed in the wings. Light and medium bombers were also developed that could be used for
the strategic bombardment of cities and military strongpoints. The threat of bomber attacks on both
military and civilian targets led directly to the development of radar in England. Radar made it
possible to determine the location, the distance, and the height and speed of a distant aircraft no
matter what the weather was. By December 1938 there were five radar stations established on the
coast of England, and 15 additional stations were begun. So, when war came in September 1939,
 152

Great Britain had a warning chain of radar stations that could tell when hostile planes were
approaching.

MORE ABOUT THIS TOPIC

 History of Europe: The blast of World War II

 India: The impact of World War II
 United States: World War II
 United Kingdom: World War II
 20th-century international relations: World War II, 1939–45
 Germany: World War II
 Germany: War reparations
 Italy: World War II
 Japan: The road to World War II
 Japan: World War II and defeat
The war in Europe, 1939–41

The campaign in Poland, 1939

The German conquest of Poland in September 1939 was the first demonstration in war of the new
theory of high-speed armoured warfare that had been adopted by the Germans when their
rearmament began. Poland was a country all too well suited for such a demonstration. Its frontiers
were immensely long—about 3,500 miles in all; and the stretch of 1,250 miles adjoining German
territory had recently been extended to 1,750 miles in all by the German occupation of Bohemia-
Moravia and of Slovakia, so that Poland’s southern flank became exposed to invasion—as the
northern flank, facing East Prussia, already was. Western Poland had become a huge salient that lay
between Germany’s jaws.
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READ MORE ON THIS TOPIC

20th-century international relations: World War II, 1939–45

War once again broke out over nationality conflicts in east-central Europe, provoked in part by a German

drive for continental hegemony,…

It would have been wiser for the Polish Army to assemble farther back, behind the natural defense
line formed by the Vistula and San rivers, but that would have entailed the abandonment of some of
the most valuable western parts of the country, including the Silesian coalfields and most of the main
industrial zone, which lay west of the river barrier. The economic argument for delaying the German
approach to the main industrial zone was heavily reinforced by Polish national pride and military
overconfidence.
When war broke out the Polish Army was able to mobilize about 1,000,000 men, a fairly large
number. The Polish Army was woefully outmoded, however, and was almost completely lacking
in tanks, armoured personnel carriers, and antitank and antiaircraft guns. Yet many of the Polish
military leaders clung to the double belief that their preponderance of horsed cavalry was an
important asset and that they could take the offensive against the German mechanized forces. They
also tended to discount the effect of Germany’s vastly superior air force, which was nearly 10 times
as powerful as their own.
The unrealism of such an attitude was repeated in the Polish Army’s dispositions. Approximately
one-third of Poland’s forces were concentrated in or near the Polish Corridor (in northeastern
Poland), where they were perilously exposed to a double envelopment—from East Prussia and the
west combined. In the south, facing the main avenues of a German advance, the Polish forces were
thinly spread. At the same time, nearly another one-third of Poland’s forces were massed in reserve
in the north-central part of the country, between Łódź and Warsaw, under the commander in chief,
 154

Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły. The Poles’ forward concentration in general forfeited their chance of
fighting a series of delaying actions, since their foot-marching army was unable to retreat to their
defensive positions in the rear or to man them before being overrun by the invader’s mechanized
columns.
The 40-odd infantry divisions employed by the Germans in the invasion counted for much less than
their 14 mechanized or partially mechanized divisions: these consisted of six armoured divisions;
four light divisions, consisting of motorized infantry (infantry wholly transported by trucks and
personnel carriers) with two armoured units; and four motorized divisions. The Germans attacked
with about 1,500,000 troops in all. It was the deep and rapid thrusts of these mechanized forces that
decided the issue, in conjunction with the overhead pressure of the Luftwaffe, which wrecked the
Polish railway system and destroyed most of the Polish Air Force before it could come into action.
The Luftwaffe’s terror-bombing of Polish cities, bridges, roads, rail lines, and power stations
completed the disorganization of the Polish defenses.
On September 1, 1939, the German attack began. Against northern Poland, General Fedor von
Bock commanded an army group comprising General Georg von Küchler’s 3rd Army, which struck
southward from East Prussia, and General Günther von Kluge’s 4th Army, which struck eastward
across the base of the Corridor. Much stronger in troops and in tanks, however, was the army group
in the south under General Gerd von Rundstedt, attacking from Silesia and from the Moravian and
Slovakian border: General Johannes Blaskowitz’s 8th Army, on the left, was to drive eastward
against Łódź; General Wilhelm List’s 14th Army, on the right, was to push on toward Kraków and to
turn the Poles’ Carpathian flank; and General Walther von Reichenau’s 10th Army, in the centre,
with the bulk of the group’s armour, was to deliver the decisive blow with a northwestward thrust
into the heart of Poland. By September 3, when Kluge in the north had reached the Vistula and
Küchler was approaching the Narew River, Reichenau’s armour was already beyond the Warta; two
days later his left wing was well to the rear of Łódź and his right wing at Kielce; and by September 8
one of his armoured corps was in the outskirts of Warsaw, having advanced 140 miles in the first
week of war. Light divisions on Reichenau’s right were on the Vistula between Warsaw
and Sandomierz by September 9, while List, in the south, was on the San above and below Przemyśl.
At the same time, the 3rd Army tanks, led by Guderian, were across the Narew attacking the line of
the Bug River, behind Warsaw. All the German armies had made progress in fulfilling their parts in
the great enveloping maneuver planned by General Franz Halder, chief of the general staff, and
directed by General Walther von Brauchitsch, the commander in chief. The Polish armies were
splitting up into uncoordinated fragments, some of which were retreating while others were
delivering disjointed attacks on the nearest German columns.
 155

German soldiers breaking down a barricade at the Polish border at the outbreak of World War II, 1939. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

On September 10 the Polish commander in chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, ordered a general
retreat to the southeast. The Germans, however, were by that time not only tightening their net
around the Polish forces west of the Vistula (in the Łódź area and, still farther west, around Poznań)
but also penetrating deeply into eastern Poland. The Polish defense was already reduced to random
efforts by isolated bodies of troops when another blow fell: on September 17, 1939, Soviet forces
entered Poland from the east. The next day, the Polish government and high command crossed the
Romanian frontier on their way into exile. The Warsaw garrison held out against the Germans until
September 28, undergoing terror-bombings and artillery barrages that reduced parts of the city to
rubble, with no regard for the civilian population. The last considerable fragment of the Polish Army
resisted until October 5; and some guerrilla fighting went on into the winter. The Germans took a
total of 700,000 prisoners, and about 80,000 Polish soldiers escaped over neutral frontiers.
Approximately 70,000 Polish soldiers were killed and more than 130,000 wounded during the battle,
whereas the Germans sustained about 45,000 total casualties. Poland was conquered for partition
between Germany and the U.S.S.R., the forces of which met and greeted each other on Polish soil.
On September 28 another secret German–Soviet protocol modified the arrangements of August:
all Lithuania was to be a Soviet sphere of influence, not a German one; but the dividing line in
Poland was changed in Germany’s favour, being moved eastward to the Bug River.
 156

The Baltic states and the Russo-Finnish War, 1939–40

Profiting quickly from its understanding with Germany, the U.S.S.R. on October 10, 1939,
constrained Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to admit Soviet garrisons onto their territories.
Approached with similar demands, Finland refused to comply, even though the U.S.S.R. offered
territorial compensation elsewhere for the cessions that it was requiring for its own strategic reasons.
Finland’s armed forces amounted to about 200,000 troops in 10 divisions. The Soviets eventually
brought about 70 divisions (about 1,000,000 men) to bear in their attack on Finland, along with about
1,000 tanks. Soviet troops attacked Finland on November 30, 1939.
The invaders succeeded in isolating the little Arctic port of Petsamo in the far north but were
ignominiously repulsed on all of the fronts chosen for their advance. On the Karelian Isthmus, the
massive reinforced-concrete fortifications of Finland’s Mannerheim Line blocked the Soviet forces’
direct land route from Leningrad into Finland. The Soviet planners had grossly underestimated the
Finns’ national will to resist and the natural obstacles constituted by the terrain’s numerous lakes and
forests.
The western powers exulted overtly over the humiliation of the Soviet Union. One important effect
of Finland’s early successes was to reinforce the tendency of both Hitler and the
western democracies to underestimate the Soviet military capabilities. But in the meantime, the
Soviet strategists digested their hard-learned military lessons.
On February 1, 1940, the Red Army launched 14 divisions into a major assault on the Mannerheim
Line. The offensive’s weight was concentrated along a 10-mile sector of the line near Summa, which
was pounded by a tremendous artillery bombardment. As the fortifications were
pulverized, tanks and sledge-carried infantry advanced to occupy the ground while the Soviet Air
Force broke up attempted Finnish counterattacks. After little more than a fortnight of this methodical
process, a breach was made through the whole depth of the Mannerheim Line. Once the Soviets had
forced a passage on the Karelian Isthmus, Finland’s eventual collapse was certain. On March 6
Finland sued for peace, and a week later the Soviet terms were accepted: the Finns had to cede the
entire Karelian Isthmus, Viipuri, and their part of the Rybachy Peninsula to the Soviets. The Finns
had suffered about 70,000 casualties in the campaign, the Soviets more than 200,000.
The war in the west, September 1939–June 1940
During their campaign in Poland, the Germans kept only 23 divisions in the west to guard their
frontier against the French, who had nearly five times as many divisions mobilized. The French
commander in chief, General Maurice-Gustave Gamelin, proposed an advance
against Germany through neutral Belgium and the Netherlands in order to have room to exercise his
ponderous military machine. He was overruled, however, and French assaults on the 100-mile stretch
of available front along the Franco-German frontier had barely dented the German defenses when the
collapse of Poland prompted the recall of Gamelin’s advanced divisions to defensive positions in
the Maginot Line. From October 1939 to March 1940, successive plans were developed for
counteraction in the event of a German offensive through Belgium—all of them based on the
assumption that the Germans would come across the plain north of Namur, not across the hilly and
wooded Ardennes. The Germans would indeed have taken the route foreseen by the French if
Hitler’s desire for an offensive in November 1939 had not been frustrated, on the one hand, by bad
weather and, on the other, by the hesitations of his generals; but in March 1940 the bold suggestion
 157

of General Erich von Manstein that an offensive through the Ardennes should, in fact, be practicable
for tank forces was adopted by Hitler, despite orthodox military opinion.
Meanwhile, Hitler’s immediate outlook had been changed by considerations about Scandinavia.
Originally he had intended to respect Norway’s neutrality. Then rumours leaked out, prematurely, of
British designs on Norway—as, in fact, Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, was arguing
that mines should be laid in Norwegian waters to stop the export of Swedish iron ore from Gällivare
to Germany through Norway’s rail terminus and port of Narvik. The British Cabinet, in response to
Churchill, authorized at least the preparation of a plan for a landing at Narvik; and in mid-December
1939 a Norwegian politician, Vidkun Quisling, leader of a pro-Nazi party, was introduced to Hitler.
On January 27, 1940, Hitler ordered plans for an invasion of Norway, for use if he could no longer
respect Norway’s neutrality.
After France’s failure to interrupt the German conquest of Poland, the western powers and the
Germans were so inactive with regard to land operations that journalists began to speak derisively,
over the next six months, of the “phony war.” At sea, however, the period was somewhat more
eventful. German U-boats sank the British aircraft carrier Courageous (September 17) and the
battleship Royal Oak (October 14). The U-boats’ main warfare, however, was against merchant
shipping: they sank more than 110 vessels in the first four months of the war. Both the Germans and
the British, meanwhile, were engaged in extensive mine laying.
In surface warfare at sea, the British were on the whole more fortunate than the Germans. A German
pocket battleship in the Atlantic, the Admiral Graf Spee sank nine ships before coming to a tragic
end: having sustained and inflicted damage in an engagement with three British cruisers off the Río
de la Plata on Dec. 13, 1939, she made off to Montevideo and obtained leave to spend four days there
for repairs; the British mustered reinforcements for the two cruisers still capable of action after the
engagement, namely the Ajax and the Achilles, and brought the Cumberland to the scene in time; but,
on December 17, when the Graf Spee put to sea again, her crew scuttled her a little way out of the
harbour before the fight could be resumed.

The invasion of Norway

British plans for landings on the Norwegian coast in the third week of March 1940 were temporarily
postponed. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, however, was by that time convinced that some
aggressive action ought to be taken; and Paul Reynaud, who succeeded Édouard Daladier as France’s
premier on March 21, was of the same opinion. (Reynaud had come into office on the surge of the
French public’s demand for a more aggressive military policy and quicker offensive action against
Germany.) It was agreed that mines should be laid in Norwegian waters and that the mining should
be followed by the landing of troops at four Norwegian ports, Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen,
and Stavanger.
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BRITANNICA QUIZ

World Wars

When was the United Nations Declaration signed?

Because of Anglo-French arguments, the date of the mining was postponed from April 5 to April 8.
The postponement was catastrophic. Hitler had on April 1 ordered the German invasion of Norway to
begin on April 9; so, when on April 8 the Norwegian government was preoccupied with earnest
protest about the British mine laying, the German expeditions were well on their way.

On April 9, 1940, the major Norwegian ports from Oslo northward to Narvik (1,200 miles away from
Germany’s naval bases) were occupied by advance detachments of German troops. At the same time,
a single parachute battalion (the first ever employed in warfare) took the Oslo and Stavanger
airfields, and 800 operational aircraft overawed the Norwegian population. Norwegian resistance at
Narvik, at Trondheim (the strategic key to Norway), at Bergen, at Stavanger, and at Kristiansand had
been overcome very quickly; and Oslo’s effective resistance to the seaborne forces was nullified
when German troops from the airfield entered the city.
Simultaneously, along with their Norwegian enterprise, the Germans on April 9 occupied Denmark,
sending troopships, covered by aircraft, into Copenhagen harbour and marching over the land frontier
into Jutland. This occupation was obviously necessary for the safety of their communications with
Norway.
Allied troops began to land at Narvik on April 14. Shortly afterward, British troops were landed also
at Namsos and at Åndalsnes, to attack Trondheim from the north and from the south, respectively.
The Germans, however, landed fresh troops in the rear of the British at Namsos and advanced up the
Gudbrandsdal from Oslo against the force at Åndalsnes. By this time the Germans had about 25,000
troops in Norway. By May 2, both Namsos and Åndalsnes were evacuated by the British. The
Germans at Narvik held out against five times as many British and French troops until May 27. By
that time the German offensive in France had progressed to such an extent that the British could no
longer afford any commitment in Norway, and the 25,000 Allied troops were evacuated from Narvik
10 days after their victory. The Norwegian king Haakon VII and his government left Norway
for Britain at the same time. Hitler garrisoned Norway with about 300,000 troops for the rest of
 159

the war. By occupying Norway, Hitler had ensured the protection of Germany’s supply of iron ore
from Sweden and had obtained naval and air bases with which to strike at Britain if necessary.
What was to happen in Norway became a less important question for the western powers when, on
May 10, 1940, they were surprised by Hitler’s long-debated stroke against them through the Low
Countries.

The invasion of the Low Countries and France

France’s 800,000-man standing army was thought at the time to be the most powerful in Europe. But
the French had not progressed beyond the defensive mentality inherited from World War I, and they
relied primarily on their Maginot Line for protection against a German offensive. The Maginot Line
was an extremely well-developed chain of fortifications running from the Swiss frontier
opposite Basel northward along the left bank of the Rhine and then northwestward no farther than
Montmédy, near the Belgian frontier south of the Ardennes Forest. The line consisted of a series of
giant pillboxes and other defensive installations constructed in depth, equipped with underground
supply and communications facilities, and connected by rail lines, with all its heavy guns pointed east
at the German frontier. Depending heavily on the line as a defense against German attack, the French
had 41 divisions manning it or backing it, whereas only 39 divisions were watching the long stretch
of frontier north of it, from Montmédy through the Ardennes and across Flanders to the English
Channel.



 160

The German invasion of France, May 1940; from The Second World War: Triumph of the Axis (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica
Educational Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

World War II: German invasion of France and the Low CountriesOverview of the German invasion of France and the Low Countries,
1940.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

In their plan for the invasion of France and the Low Countries, the Germans kept General Wilhelm
von Leeb’s Army Group C facing the Maginot Line so as to deter the French from diverting forces
from it, while launching Bock’s Army Group B into the basin of the Lower Maas River north of
Liège and Rundstedt’s Army Group A into the Ardennes. Army Group B comprised Küchler’s 18th
Army, with one armoured division and airborne support, to attack the Netherlands, and Reichenau’s
6th, with two armoured divisions, to advance over the Belgian plain. These two armies would have to
deal not only with the Dutch and Belgian armies but also with the forces that the Allies, according to
their plan, would send into the Low Countries, namely two French armies and nine British divisions.
Rundstedt’s Army Group A, however, was much stronger, comprising as it did Kluge’s 4th Army,
List’s 12th, and General Ernst Busch’s 16th, with General Maximilian von Weichs’s 2nd in reserve,
besides a large armoured group under Paul Ludwig von Kleist and a smaller one under
General Hermann Hoth, and amounting in all to 44 divisions, seven of them armoured, with 27
divisions in reserve. Army Group A thus amounted to more than 1,500,000 men and more than 1,500
tanks, and it would strike at the weak hinge of the Allies’ wheel into Belgium—that is to say, at two
French armies, General Charles Huntziger’s 2nd and General André Corap’s 9th, which together
mustered only 12 infantry and four horsed cavalry divisions and stood, respectively, east and west
of Sedan on the least-fortified stretch of the French frontier. Against this weak centre of the Allied
 161

line were thus massed nearly two-thirds of Germany’s forces in the west and nearly three-quarters of
its tank forces.
The Dutch Army comprised 10 divisions and the equivalent of 10 more in smaller formations, and
thus totaled more than 400,000 men. It apparently had a good chance of withstanding the German
invasion, since the attacking German army comprised only seven divisions, apart from the airborne
forces it would use. The Dutch, however, had a wide front, a very sensitive and loosely settled rear,
very few tanks, and no experience of modern warfare. On May 10, the German attack on the
Netherlands began with the capture by parachutists of the bridges at Moerdijk, at Dordrecht, and
at Rotterdam and with landings on the airfields around The Hague. On the same day, the weakly
held Peel Line, south of the westward-turning arc of the Maas, was penetrated by the German land
forces; and on May 11 the Dutch defenders fell back westward past Tilburg to Breda, with the
consequence that the French 7th Army, under General Henri Giraud, whose leading forces had sped
forward across Belgium over the 140 miles to Tilburg, fell back to Breda likewise. The German tanks
thus had a clear road to Moerdijk, and by noon on May 12 they were in the outskirts of Rotterdam.
North of the Maas, meanwhile, where the bulk of the Dutch defense was concentrated, the Germans
achieved a narrow breach of the Geld Valley line on May 12, whereupon the Dutch, unable to
counterattack, retreated to the “Fortress of Holland” Line protecting Utrecht and Amsterdam.
Queen Wilhelmina and her government left the country for England on May 13; and the next day the
Dutch commander in chief, General Henri Gerard Winkelman, surrendered to the Germans, who had
threatened to bomb Rotterdam and Utrecht, as places in the front line of the fighting, if resistance
continued. In fact, Rotterdam was bombed, after the capitulation, by 30 planes through a mistake in
the Germans’ signal communications.
The news of the German onslaught in the Low Countries, dismaying as it was to the Allies, had one
effect that was to be of momentous importance to their fortunes: Chamberlain, whose halfhearted
conduct of the war had been bitterly criticized in the House of Commons during the debate of May
7–8 on the campaign in Norway, resigned office in the evening of May 10 and was succeeded
as prime minister by Churchill, who formed a coalition government.
For the first phase of the invasion of the Belgian plain north of Liège, Reichenau had four army
corps, one armoured corps, and only 500 airborne troops; but he also had massive cooperation from
the German Luftwaffe, whose dive bombers and fighters played a major role in breaking down the
Belgian defenses. West of the Maastricht “appendix” of indefensible Dutch territory separating
Belgium from Germany, the fortress of Eben Emael, immediately opposite Maastricht, and the line of
the Albert Canal constituted the Belgians’ foremost defensive position. On May 10 German airborne
troops landed in gliders on the top of the fortress and on bridges over the canal. On May 11 the
Belgian front was broken, the German tanks running on westward and some of the infantry turning
southward to take Liège from the rear, while the Belgians made a general retreat to the Antwerp–
Namur, or Dyle, Line. French and British divisions had just arrived on this Dyle Line, and
General René Prioux’s two tank divisions went out from it to challenge the German advance. After a
big battle on May 14, however, Prioux’s tanks had to retire to the consolidated Dyle Line; and on
May 15, notwithstanding a successful defense against a German attack, Gamelin ordered the
abandonment of the position, because events farther to the south had made it strategically untenable.
The chances for success of the German offensive against France hinged on a German advance
through the hilly and dense Ardennes Forest, which the French considered to be impassable to tanks.
But the Germans did succeed in moving their tank columns through that difficult belt of country by
means of an amazing feat of staff work. While the armoured divisions used such roads through the
forest as were available, infantry divisions started alongside them by using field and woodland paths
and marched so fast across country that the leading ones reached the Meuse River only a day after
the armoured divisions had.
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The decisive operations in France were those of Rundstedt’s Army Group A. Kleist’s tanks on May
10 took only three hours to cover the 30 miles from the eastern border of independent Luxembourg to
the southeastern border of Belgium; and on May 11 the French cavalry divisions that had ridden
forward into the Ardennes to oppose them were thrown back over the Semois River. By the evening
of May 12 the Germans were across the Franco-Belgian frontier and overlooking the Meuse River.
The defenses of this sector were rudimentary, and it was the least-fortified stretch of the whole
French front. Worse still, the defending French 2nd and 9th armies had hardly any antitank guns or
antiaircraft artillery with which to slow down the German armoured columns and shoot down their
dive bombers. Such was the folly of the French belief that a German armoured thrust through the
Ardennes was unlikely.
On May 13 Kleist’s forces achieved a threefold crossing of the Meuse River. At Sedan wave after
wave of German dive bombers swooped on the French defenders of the south bank. The latter could
not stand the nerve-racking strain, and the German troops were able to push across the river in rubber
boats and on rafts. The tremendous air bombardment was the decisive factor in the crossings. A
thousand aircraft supported Kleist’s forces, while only a few French aircraft intervened in a gallant
but hopeless effort to aid their troops on the ground. Next day, after the tanks had been brought
across, Guderian widened the Sedan bridgehead and beat off French counterattacks. On May 15 he
broke through the French defenses into open country, turning westward in the direction of
the English Channel. On May 16 his forces swept on west for nearly 50 miles. His superiors tried to
put on the brake, feeling that such rapid progress was hazardous, but the pace of the German drive
upset the French far more, and their collapse spread as Reinhardt’s corps joined in the pressure.
When more German tanks crossed the Meuse between Givet and Namur, the breach of the French
front was 60 miles wide.
Driving westward down the empty corridor between the Sambre and the Aisne rivers, Guderian’s
tanks crossed the Oise River on May 17 and reached Amiens two days later. Giraud, who on May 15
had superseded Corap in command of the French 9th Army, was thus frustrated in his desperate plan
of checking the Germans on the Oise; and Kleist, meanwhile, by lining the Aisne progressively with
tanks until the infantry came up to relieve them, was protecting the southwestern flank of the advance
against the danger of a counteroffensive from the south. Indeed, when the Germans, on May 15, were
reported to be crossing the Aisne River between Rethel and Laon, Gamelin told Reynaud that he had
no reserves in that sector and that Paris might fall within two days’ time. Thereupon Reynaud,
though he postponed his immediate decision to move the government to Tours, summoned
General Maxime Weygand from Syria to take Gamelin’s place as commander in chief; but Weygand
did not arrive until May 19.
Guderian’s tanks were at Abbeville on May 20, and on May 22 he turned northward to
threaten Calais and Dunkirk, while Reinhardt, swinging south of the British rear at Arras, headed for
the same objectives, the remaining ports by which the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) could be
evacuated.

The evacuation from Dunkirk

For the Allies, all communication between their northern and southern forces was severed by the arc
of the westward German advance from the Ardennes to the Somme. The Allied armies in the north,
having fallen back from the Dyle Line to the Escaut (Schelde), were being encircled, and already on
 163

May 19 the British commander, Viscount Gort, was considering the withdrawal of the BEF by sea.
On May 21, however, to satisfy orders from London for more positive action, he launched an attack
from Arras southward against the right flank of the Germans’ corridor; but, though it momentarily
alarmed the German high command, this small counterstroke lacked the armoured strength necessary
for success. Meanwhile, Guderian’s tanks had swept up past Boulogne and Calais and were crossing
the canal defense line close to Dunkirk when, on May 24, an inexplicable order from Hitler not only
stopped their advance but actually called them back to the canal line just as Guderian was expecting
to drive into Dunkirk.

The British Expeditionary Force being surrounded by invading Germans at Dunkirk and evacuated from France by a motley rescue fleet of
military ships and private boats; from The Second World War: Triumph of the Axis (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica
Educational Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Dunkirk was now the only port left available for the withdrawal of the mass of the BEF from Europe,
and the British Cabinet at last decided to save what could be saved. The British Admiralty had been
collecting every kind of small craft it could find to help in removing the troops, and the British retreat
to the coast now became a race to evacuate the troops before the Germans could occupy Dunkirk.
Evacuation began on May 26 and became still more urgent the next day, when the Belgians, their
right wing and their centre broken by Reichenau’s advance, sued for an armistice. On May 27,
likewise, bombing by the Luftwaffe put the harbour of Dunkirk out of use, so that many of the
thousands of men thronging the 10-mile stretch of beaches had to be ferried out to sea by petty craft
pressed into service by the Royal Navy and manned largely by amateur seamen, though the harbour’s
damaged breakwater still offered a practicable exit for the majority. By June 4, when the operation
came to an end, 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian troops had been saved; but virtually
all of their heavy equipment had to be abandoned, and, of the 41 destroyers participating, six were
sunk and 19 others damaged. The men who were saved represented a considerable part of the
experienced troops possessed by Great Britain and were an inestimable gain to the Allies. The
success of the near-miraculous evacuation from Dunkirk was due, on the one hand, to fighter cover
by the Royal Air Force from the English coast and on the other to Hitler’s fatal order of May 24
halting Guderian. That order had been made for several reasons, chiefly: Hermann Göring, head of
the Luftwaffe, had mistakenly assured Hitler that his aircraft alone could destroy the Allied troops
trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk; and Hitler himself seems to have believed that
Great Britain might accept peace terms more readily if its armies were not constrained into
humiliating surrender. Three days passed before Walther von Brauchitsch, the German Army
 164

commander in chief, was able to persuade Hitler to withdraw his orders and allow the German
armoured forces to advance on Dunkirk. But they met stronger opposition from the British, who had
had time to solidify their defenses, and almost immediately Hitler stopped the German armoured
forces again, ordering them instead to move south and prepare for the attack on the Somme–Aisne
line.
The campaign in northern France was wound up by Küchler’s forces, after both Guderian and
Reichenau had been ordered southward. Altogether, the Germans had taken more than 1,000,000
prisoners in three weeks, at a cost of 60,000 casualties. Some 220,000 Allied troops, however, were
rescued by British ships from France’s northwestern ports (Cherbourg, Saint-Malo, Brest, and Saint-
Nazaire), thus bringing the total of Allied troops evacuated to about 558,000.
There remained the French armies south of the Germans’ Somme–Aisne front. The French had lost
30 divisions in the campaign so far. Weygand still managed to muster 49 divisions, apart from the 17
left to hold the Maginot Line, but against him the Germans had 130 infantry divisions as well as their
10 divisions of tanks. The Germans, after redisposing their units, began a new offensive on June 5
from their positions on the Somme. The French resisted stiffly for two days, but on June 7 the
German tanks in the westernmost sector, led by Major General Erwin Rommel, broke through
toward Rouen, and on June 9 they were over the Seine. On June 9 the Germans attacked on the
Aisne: the infantry forced the crossings, and then Guderian’s armour drove through
the breach toward Châlons-sur-Marne before turning eastward for the Swiss frontier, thus isolating
all the French forces still holding the Maginot Line.

Italy’s entry into the war and the French Armistice

Italy had been unprepared for war when Hitler attacked Poland, but if the Italian leader, Benito
Mussolini, was to reap any positive advantages from partnership with Hitler it seemed that Italy
would have to abandon its nonbelligerent stance before the western democracies had been defeated
by Germany singlehanded. The obvious collapse of France convinced Mussolini that the time
to implement his Pact of Steel with Hitler had come, and on June 10, 1940, Italy declared war against
France and Great Britain. With about 30 divisions available on their Alpine frontier, the Italians
delayed their actual attack on southeastern France until June 20, but it achieved little against the local
defense. In any case, the issue in France had already been virtually settled by the victory of Italy’s
German ally.
Meanwhile, Reynaud had left Paris for Cangé, near Tours; and Weygand, after speaking frankly and
despondently to Churchill at the Allied military headquarters at Briare on June 11, told Reynaud and
the other ministers at Cangé on June 12 that the battle for France was lost and that a cessation of
hostilities was compulsory. There was little doubt that he was correct in this estimate of the military
situation: the French armies were now splitting up into fragments. Reynaud’s government was
divided between the advocates of capitulation and those who, with Reynaud, wanted to continue the
war from French North Africa. The only decision that it could make was to move itself from Tours
to Bordeaux.
The Germans entered Paris on June 14, 1940, and were driving still deeper southward along both the
western and eastern edges of France. Two days later they were in the Rhône valley. Meanwhile,
Weygand was still pressing for an armistice, backed by all the principal commanders. Reynaud
resigned office on June 16, whereupon a new government was formed by Marshal Philippe Pétain,
 165

the revered and aged hero of the Battle of Verdun in World War I. In the night of June 16 the French
request for an armistice was transmitted to Hitler. While discussion of the terms went on, the German
advance went on too. Finally, on June 22, 1940, at Rethondes, the scene of the signing of the
Armistice of 1918, the new Franco-German Armistice was signed. The Franco-Italian Armistice was
signed on June 24. Both armistices came into effect early on June 25.
The Armistice of June 22 divided France into two zones: one to be under German military
occupation and one to be left to the French in full sovereignty. The occupied zone comprised all
northern France from the northwestern frontier of Switzerland to the Channel and from the Belgian
and German frontiers to the Atlantic, together with a strip extending from the lower Loire southward
along the Atlantic coast to the western end of the Pyrenees; the unoccupied zone comprised only
two-fifths of France’s territory, the southeast. The French Navy and Air Force were to be neutralized,
but it was not required that they be handed over to the Germans. The Italians granted very generous
terms to the French: the only French territory that they claimed to occupy was the small frontier tract
that their forces had succeeded in overrunning since June 20. Meanwhile, from June 18,
General Charles de Gaulle, whom Reynaud had sent on a military mission to London on June 5, was
broadcasting appeals for the continuance of France’s war.
The collapse of France in June 1940 posed a severe naval problem to the British, because the
powerful French Navy still existed: strategically, it was of immense importance to the British that
these French ships not fall into German hands, since they would have tilted the balance of sea
power decidedly in favour of the Axis—the Italian Navy being now also at war with Britain.
Mistrustful of promises that the French ships would be used only for “supervision and
minesweeping,” the British decided to immobilize them. Thus, on July 3, 1940, the British seized all
French ships in British-controlled ports, encountering only nominal resistance. But when British
ships appeared off Mers el-Kébir, near Oran on the Algerian coast, and demanded that the ships of
the important French naval force there either join the Allies or sail out to sea, the French refused to
submit, and the British eventually opened fire, damaging the battleship Dunkerque, destroying
the Bretagne, and disabling several other vessels. Thereupon, Pétain’s government, which on July 1
had installed itself at Vichy, on July 4 severed diplomatic relations with the British. In the eight
following days, the constitution of France’s Third Republic was abolished and a new French state
created, under the supreme authority of Pétain himself. The few French colonies that rallied to
General de Gaulle’s Free French movement were strategically unimportant.

The Battle of Britain

With France conquered, Hitler could now turn his forces on Germany’s sole remaining enemy: Great
Britain, which was protected from the formidable German Army by the waters of the English
Channel. On July 16, 1940, Hitler issued a directive ordering the preparation and, if necessary, the
execution of a plan for the invasion of Great Britain. But an amphibious invasion of Britain would
only be possible, given Britain’s large navy, if Germany could establish control of the air in the battle
zone. To this end, the Luftwaffe chief, Göring, on August 2 issued the “Eagle Day” directive, laying
down a plan of attack in which a few massive blows from the air were to destroy British air power
and so open the way for the amphibious invasion, termed Operation “Sea Lion.” Victory in the air
battle for the Luftwaffe would indeed have exposed Great Britain to invasion and occupation. The
victory by the Royal Air Force (RAF) Fighter Command blocked this possibility and, in fact, created
 166

the conditions for Great Britain’s survival, for the extension of the war, and for the eventual defeat of
Nazi Germany.


Beginning in June 1940 and continuing into the next year, the Battle of Britain was fought in the air and endured on the ground. From The
Second World War: Triumph of the Axis (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
 167

World War II: aerial bombardmentOverview of aerial bombardment in Europe during World War II, with a detailed discussion of the Battle of
Britain.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

The forces engaged in the battle were relatively small. The British disposed some 600
frontline fighters to defend the country. The Germans made available about 1,300 bombers and dive
bombers, and about 900 single-engined and 300 twin-engined fighters. These were based in an arc
around England from Norway to the Cherbourg Peninsula in northern coastal France. The
preliminaries of the Battle of Britain occupied June and July 1940, the climax August and September,
and the aftermath—the so-called Blitz—the winter of 1940–41. In the campaign, the Luftwaffe had
no systematic or consistent plan of action: sometimes it tried to establish a blockade by the
destruction of British shipping and ports; sometimes, to destroy Britain’s Fighter Command by
combat and by the bombing of ground installations; and sometimes, to seek direct strategic results by
attacks on London and other populous centres of industrial or political significance. The British, on
the other hand, had prepared themselves for the kind of battle that in fact took place.
Their radar early warning, the most advanced and the most operationally adapted system in the
world, gave Fighter Command adequate notice of where and when to direct their fighter forces to
repel German bombing raids. The Spitfire, moreover, though still in short supply, was unsurpassed as
an interceptor by any fighter in any other air force.

Supermarine Spitfire, Britain's premier fighter plane from 1938 through World War II. Quadrant/Flight
 168

The British fought not only with the advantage—unusual for them—of superior equipment and
undivided aim but also against an enemy divided in object and condemned by circumstance and by
lack of forethought to fight at a tactical disadvantage. The German bombers lacked the bomb-load
capacity to strike permanently devastating blows and also proved, in daylight, to be
easily vulnerable to the Spitfires and Hurricanes. Britain’s radar, moreover, largely prevented them
from exploiting the element of surprise. The German dive bombers were even more vulnerable to
being shot down by British fighters, and long-range fighter cover was only partially available from
German fighter aircraft, since the latter were operating at the limit of their flying range.
The German air attacks began on ports and airfields along the English Channel, where convoys were
bombed and the air battle was joined. In June and July 1940, as the Germans gradually redeployed
their forces, the air battle moved inland over the interior of Britain. On August 8 the intensive phase
began, when the Germans launched bombing raids involving up to nearly 1,500 aircraft a day and
directed them against the British fighter airfields and radar stations. In four actions, on August 8, 11,
12, and 13, the Germans lost 145 aircraft as against the British loss of 88. By late August the
Germans had lost more than 600 aircraft, the RAF only 260, but the RAF was losing badly needed
fighters and experienced pilots at too great a rate, and its effectiveness was further hampered by
bombing damage done to the radar stations. At the beginning of September the British retaliated by
unexpectedly launching a bombing raid on Berlin, which so infuriated Hitler that he ordered the
Luftwaffe to shift its attacks from Fighter Command installations to London and other cities. These
assaults on London, Coventry, Liverpool, and other cities went on unabated for several months. But
already, by September 15, on which day the British believed, albeit incorrectly, that they had scored
their greatest success by destroying 185 German aircraft, Fighter Command had demonstrated to the
Luftwaffe that it could not gain air ascendancy over Britain. This was because British fighters were
simply shooting down German bombers faster than German industry could produce them. The Battle
of Britain was thus won, and the invasion of England was postponed indefinitely by Hitler. The
British had lost more than 900 fighters but had shot down about 1,700 German aircraft.
During the following winter, the Luftwaffe maintained a bombing offensive, carrying out night-
bombing attacks on Britain’s larger cities. By February 1941 the offensive had declined, but in
March and April there was a revival, and nearly 10,000 sorties were flown, with heavy attacks made
on London. Thereafter German strategic air operations over England withered.

Central Europe and the Balkans, 1940–41

The continued resistance of the British caused Hitler once more to change his timetable. His great
design for a campaign against the U.S.S.R. had originally been scheduled to begin about 1943—by
which time he should have secured the German position on the rest of the European continent by a
series of “localized” campaigns and have reached some sort of compromise with Great Britain. But
in July 1940, seeing Great Britain still undefeated and the United
States increasingly inimical to Germany, he decided that the conquest of the European part of the
Soviet Union must be undertaken in May 1941 in order both to demonstrate Germany’s invincibility
to Great Britain and to deter the United States from intervention in Europe (because the elimination
 169

of the U.S.S.R. would strengthen the Japanese position in the Far East and in the Pacific). Events in
the interval, however, were to make him change his plan once again.
While the invasion of the U.S.S.R. was being prepared, Hitler was much concerned to extend
German influence across Slovakia and Hungary into Romania, the oil fields of which he was anxious
to secure against Soviet attack and the military manpower of which might be joined to the forces of
the German coalition. In May 1940 he obtained an oil and arms pact from Romania; but, when
Romania, after being constrained by a Soviet ultimatum in June to cede Bessarabia and
northern Bukovina to the U.S.S.R., requested a German military mission and a German guarantee of
its remaining frontiers, Hitler refused to comply until the claims of other states against Romania had
been met. Romania was compelled to cede southern Dobruja to Bulgaria on August 21 (an act that
was formalized in the Treaty of Craiova on September 7); but its negotiations with Hungary
about Transylvania were broken off on August 23. Since, if war had broken out between Romania
and Hungary, the U.S.S.R. might have intervened and won control over the oil wells, Hitler decided
to arbitrate immediately: by the Vienna Award of August 30, Germany and Italy assigned northern
Transylvania, including the Szekler district, to Hungary, and Germany then guaranteed what was left
of Romania. In the face of the Romanian nationalists’ outcry against these proceedings, the
king, Carol II, transferred his dictatorial powers to General Ion Antonescu on Sept. 4, 1940,
and abdicated his crown in favour of his young son Michael two days later. Antonescu had already
repeated the request for a German military mission, which arrived in Bucharest on October 12.
Though Hitler had apprised the Italian foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, of his intention to send a
military mission to Romania, Ciano had not apprised Mussolini. So, since the latter’s Balkan
ambitions had been continually restrained by Hitler, particularly with regard to Yugoslavia, the
sudden news of the mission annoyed him. On Oct. 28, 1940, therefore, having given Hitler only the
barest hints of his project, Mussolini launched seven Italian divisions (155,000 men)
from Albania into a separate war of his own against Greece.
The result was exasperating for Hitler. His ally’s forces were not only halted by the Greeks, a few
miles over the border, on Nov. 8, 1940, but were also driven back by General Alexandros Papagos’
counteroffensive of November 14, which was to put the Greeks in possession of one-third of Albania
by mid-December. Moreover, British troops landed in Crete, and some British aircraft were sent to
bases near Athens, whence they might have attacked the Romanian oil fields. Lastly, the success of
the Greeks caused Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, who had hitherto been attentive to overtures from the
Axis powers, to revert to a strictly neutral policy.
Anticipating Mussolini’s appeal for German help in his “separate” or “parallel” war, Hitler in
November 1940 drew Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia successively into the Axis, or Tripartite, Pact
that Germany, Italy, and Japan had concluded on September 27 (see below Japanese policy, 1939–
41); and he also obtained Romania’s assent to the assembling of German troops in the south of
Romania for an attack on Greece through Bulgaria. Hungary consented to the transit of these troops
through its territory lest Romania take Hungary’s place in Germany’s favour and so be secured in
possession of the Transylvanian lands left to it by the Vienna Award. Bulgaria, however, for fear of
Soviet reaction, on the one hand, and of Turkish, on the other (Turkey had massed 28 divisions
in Thrace when Italy attacked Greece), delayed its adhesion to the Axis until March 1, 1941. Only
thereafter, on March 18, did the Yugoslav regent, Prince Paul, and his ministers Dragiša Cvetković
and Aleksandar Cincar-Marković agree to Yugoslavia’s adhesion to the Axis.
Meanwhile, the German 12th Army had crossed the Danube from Romania into Bulgaria on March
2, 1941. Consequently, in accordance with a Greco-British agreement of February 21, a British
expeditionary force of 58,000 men from Egypt landed in Greece on March 7, to occupy the
Olympus–Vermion line. Then, on March 27, 1941, two days after the Yugoslav government’s
signature, in Vienna, of its adhesion to the Axis Pact, a group of Yugoslav Army officers, led by
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General Dušan Simović, executed a coup d’état in Belgrade, overthrowing the regency in favour of

the 17-year-old king Peter II and reversing the former government’s policy.
Almost simultaneously with the Belgrade coup d’état, the decisive Battle of Cape Matapan took
place between the British and Italian fleets in the Mediterranean, off the Peloponnesian mainland
northwest of Crete. Hitherto, Italo-British naval hostilities in the Mediterranean area since June 1940
had comprised only one noteworthy action: the sinking in November at the Italian naval base
of Taranto of three battleships by aircraft from the British carrier Illustrious. In March 1941,
however, some Italian naval forces, including the battleship Vittorio Veneto, with
several cruisers and destroyers, set out to threaten British convoys to Greece; and British forces,
including the battleships Warspite, Valiant, and Barham and the aircraft carrier Formidable, likewise
with cruisers and destroyers, were sent to intercept them. When the forces met in the morning of
March 28, off Cape Matapan, the Vittorio Veneto opened fire on the lighter British ships but was
soon trying to escape from the engagement, for fear of the torpedo aircraft from the Formidable. The
battle then became a pursuit, which lasted long into the night. Finally, though the severely
damaged Vittorio Veneto made good her escape, the British sank three Italian cruisers and two
destroyers. The Italian Navy made no more surface ventures into the eastern Mediterranean.
The German attack on Greece, scheduled for April 1, 1941, was postponed for a few days
when Hitler, because of the Belgrade coup d’état, decided that Yugoslavia was to be destroyed at the
same time. While Great Britain’s efforts to draw Yugoslavia into the Greco-British defensive system
were fruitless, Germany began canvasing allies for its planned invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece.
Italy agreed to collaborate in the attack, and Hungary and Bulgaria agreed to send troops to occupy
the territories that they coveted as soon as the Germans should have destroyed the Yugoslav state.
On April 6, 1941, the Germans, with 24 divisions and 1,200 tanks, invaded both Yugoslavia (which
had 32 divisions) and Greece (which had 15 divisions). The operations were conducted in the same
way as Germany’s previous blitzkrieg campaigns. While massive air raids struck Belgrade, List’s
12th Army drove westward and southward from the Bulgarian frontiers, Kleist’s armoured group
northwestward from Sofia, and Weichs’s 2nd Army southward from Austria and from western
Hungary. The 12th Army’s advance through Skopje to the Albanian border cut communications
between Yugoslavia and Greece in two days; Niš fell to Kleist on April 9, Zagreb to Weichs on April
10; and on April 11 the Italian 2nd Army (comprising 15 divisions) advanced
from Istria into Dalmatia. After the fall of Belgrade to the German forces from bases in Romania
(April 12), the remnant of the Yugoslav Army—whose only offensive, in northern Albania, had
collapsed—was encircled in Bosnia. Its capitulation was signed, in Belgrade, on April17.
In Greece, meanwhile, the Germans took Salonika (Thessaloníki) on April 9, 1941, and then initiated
a drive toward Ioánnina (Yannina), thus severing communication between the bulk of the Greek
Army (which was on the Albanian frontier) and its rear. The isolated main body capitulated on April
20, the Greek Army as a whole on April 22. Two days later the pass of Thermopylae, defended by a
British rear guard, was taken by the Germans, who entered Athens on April 27. All mainland Greece
and all the Greek Aegean islands except Crete were under German occupation by May 11, the Ionian
islands under Italian. The remainder of Britain’s 50,000-man force in Greece was hastily evacuated
with great difficulty after leaving all of their tanks and other heavy equipment behind.
The campaign against Yugoslavia brought 340,000 soldiers of the Yugoslav Army into captivity as
German prisoners of war. In the campaign against Greece the Germans took 220,000 Greek and
20,000 British or Commonwealth prisoners of war. The combined German losses in the Balkan
campaigns were about 2,500 dead, 6,000 wounded, and 3,000 missing.
German airborne troops began to land in Crete on May 20, 1941, at Máleme, in the Canea-Suda area,
at Réthimnon, and at Iráklion. Fighting, on land and on the sea, with heavy losses on both sides, went
on for a week before the Allied commander in chief, General Bernard Cyril Freyberg of the New
 171

Zealand Expeditionary Force, was authorized to evacuate the island. The last defenders were
overwhelmed at Réthimnon on May 31. The prisoners of war taken by the Germans in Crete
numbered more than 15,000 British or Commonwealth troops, besides the Greeks taken. In battles
around the island, German air attacks sank three light cruisers and six destroyers of the British
Mediterranean fleet and damaged three battleships, one aircraft carrier, six light cruisers, and five
destroyers.
Both the Yugoslav and the Greek royal governments went into exile on their armies’ collapse. The
Axis powers were left to dispose as they would of their conquests. Yugoslavia was completely
dissolved: Croatia, the independence of which had been proclaimed on April 10, 1941, was expanded
to form Great Croatia, which included Srem (Syrmia, the zone between the Sava and
the Danube south of the Drava confluence) and Bosnia and Hercegovina; most of Dalmatia was
annexed to Italy; Montenegro was restored to independence; Yugoslav Macedonia was partitioned
between Bulgaria and Albania; Slovenia was partitioned between Italy and Germany; the Baranya
triangle and the Bačka went to Hungary; the Banat and Serbia were put under German military
administration. Of the independent states, Great Croatia, ruled by Ante Pavelić’s
nationalist Ustaše (“Insurgents”), and Montenegro were Italian spheres of influence, although
German troops still occupied the eastern part of Great Croatia. A puppet government of Serbia was
set up by the Germans in August 1941.
While Bulgarian troops occupied eastern Macedonia and most of western Thrace, the rest of
mainland Greece, theoretically subject to a puppet government in Athens, was militarily occupied by
the Italians except for three zones, namely the Athens district, the Salonika district, and the Dimotika
strip of Thrace, which the German conquerors reserved for themselves. The Germans also remained
in occupation of Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Melos, and Crete.

Other fronts, 1940–41

Egypt and Cyrenaica, 1940–summer 1941

The contemporary course of events in the Balkans, described above, nullified the first great victory
won by British land forces in World War II, which took place in North Africa.
When Italy declared war against Great Britain in June 1940, it had nearly 300,000 men under
Marshal Rodolfo Graziani in Cyrenaica (present-day Libya), to confront the 36,000 troops whom the
British commander in chief in the Middle East, General Sir Archibald Wavell, had in Egypt to
protect the North African approaches to the Suez Canal. Between these forces lay the Western
Desert, in which the westernmost position actually held by the British was Mersa Matruh (Marsā
Maṭİūḥ), 120 miles east of the Cyrenaican frontier. The Italians in September 1940 occupied Sīdī
Barrānī, 170 miles west of Mersa Matruh; but, after settling six divisions into a chain of widely
separated camps, they did nothing more for weeks, and during that time Wavell received some
reinforcements.
Wavell, whose command included not only Egypt but also the East African fronts against the
Italians, decided to strike first in North Africa. On December 7, 1940, some 30,000 men, under
Major General Richard Nugent O’Connor, advanced westward, from Mersa Matruh, against 80,000
Italians; but, whereas the Italians at Sīdī Barrānī had only 120 tanks, O’Connor had 275. Having
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passed by night through a gap in the chain of forts, O’Connor’s forces stormed three of the Italian
camps, while the 7th Armoured Division was already cutting the Italians’ road of retreat along the
coast to the west. On December 10 most of the positions closer to Sīdī Barrānī were overrun; and on
December 11 the reserve tanks made a further enveloping bound to the coast beyond Buqbuq,
intercepting a large column of retreating Italians. In three days the British had taken nearly 40,000
prisoners.
Falling back across the frontier into Cyrenaica, the remnant of the Italian forces from Sīdī Barrānī
shut itself up in the fortress of Bardia (Bardīyah), which O’Connor’s tanks speedily isolated. On
January 3, 1941, the British assault on Bardia began, and three days later the whole garrison of
Bardia surrendered—45,000 men. The next fortress to the west, Tobruk (Ṭubruq), was assaulted on
January 23 and captured the next day (30,000 more prisoners).
To complete their conquest of Cyrenaica, it remained for the British to take the port of Benghazi. On
February 3, 1941, however, O’Connor learned that the Italians were about to abandon Benghazi and
to retreat westward down the coast road to Agheila (al-ʿUqaylah). Thereupon he boldly ordered the
7th Armoured Division to cross the desert hinterland and intercept the Italian retreat by cutting the
coast road well to the east of Agheila. On February 5, after an advance of 170 miles in 33 hours, the
British were blocking the Italians’ line of retreat south of Beda Fomm (Bayḍāʾ Fumm); and in the
morning of February 6, as the main Italian columns appeared, a day of battle began. Though the
Italians had, altogether, nearly four times as many cruiser tanks as the British, by the following
morning 60 Italian tanks had been crippled, 40 more abandoned, and the rest of Graziani’s army was
surrendering in crowds. The British, only 3,000 strong and having lost only three of their 29 tanks,
took 20,000 prisoners, 120 tanks, and 216 guns.
The British, having occupied Benghazi on February 6 and Agheila on February 8, could now have
pushed on without hindrance to Tripoli, but the chance was foregone: the Greek government had
accepted Churchill’s reiterated offer of British troops to be sent to Greece from Egypt, which meant a
serious reduction of British strength in North Africa.
The reduction was to have serious consequences, because on February 6, the very day of Beda
Fomm, a young general, Erwin Rommel, had been appointed by Hitler to command two German
mechanized divisions that were to be sent as soon as possible to help the Italians. Arriving
in Tripolitania, Rommel decided to try an offensive with what forces he had. Against the depleted
British strength, he was rapidly and brilliantly successful. After occupying Agheila with ease on
March 24 and Mersa Bréga (Qasr al-Burayqah) on March 31, he resumed his advance on April 2—
despite orders to stand still for two months—with 50 tanks backed by two new Italian divisions. The
British evacuated Benghazi the next day and began a precipitate retreat into Egypt, losing great
numbers of their tanks on the way (a large force of armour, surrounded at Mechili, had to surrender
on April 7). By April 11 all Cyrenaica except Tobruk had been reconquered by
Rommel’s audacious initiative.
Tobruk, garrisoned mainly by the 9th Australian Division, held out against siege; and Rommel,
though he defeated two British attempts to relieve the place (May and June 1941), was obliged to
suspend his offensive on the Egyptian frontier, since he had overstretched his supply lines.
 173

East Africa
Wavell, the success of whose North African strategy had been sacrificed to Churchill’s recurrent
fantasy of creating a Balkan front against Germany (Greece in 1941 was scarcely less disastrous for
the British than the Dardanelles in 1915), nevertheless enjoyed one definitive triumph before
Churchill, doubly chagrined at having lost Cyrenaica for Greece’s sake and Greece for no advantage
at all, removed him, in the summer of 1941, from his command in the Middle East. That triumph was
the destruction of Italian East Africa and the elimination, thereby, of any threat to the Suez
Canal from the south or to Kenya from the north.
In August 1940 Italian forces mounted a full-scale offensive and overran British Somaliland. Wavell,
however, was already assured of the collaboration of the former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in
raising the Ethiopians in patriotic revolt against the Italians; and, whereas in June he had disposed
only of meagre resources against the 200,000 men and 325 aircraft under the Duca d’Aosta, Amedeo
di Savoia, his troops in the Sudan were reinforced by two Indian divisions before the end of the year.
After Haile Selassie and a British major, Orde Wingate, with two battalions of Ethiopian exiles, had
crossed the Sudanese frontier directly into Ethiopia, General William Platt and the Indian divisions
invaded Eritrea on January 19, 1941 (the Italians had already abandoned Kassala); and, almost
simultaneously, British troops from Kenya, under General Alan Cunningham, advanced into Italian
Somaliland.
Platt’s drive eastward into Eritrea was checked on February 5, at Keren, where the best Italian troops,
under General Nicolangelo Carnimeo, put up a stiff defense facilitated by a barrier of cliffs. But
when Keren fell on March 26, Platt’s way to Asmara (Asmera), to Massawa (Mitsiwa), and then
from Eritrea southward into Ethiopia was comparatively easy. Meanwhile, Cunningham’s troops
were advancing northward into Ethiopia; and on April 6 they entered the Ethiopian capital, Addis
Ababa. Finally, the Duca d’Aosta was caught between Platt’s column and Cunningham’s; and at
Amba Alaji, on May 20, he and the main body of his forces surrendered.
Iraq and Syria, 1940–41
In 1940 Prince ʿAbd al-Ilāh, regent of Iraq for King Fayṣal, had a government divided within itself
about the war; he himself and his foreign minister, Nuri as-Said, were pro-British, but his prime
minister, Rashid Ali al-Gailani, had pro-German leanings. Having resigned office in January 1941,
Rashid Ali on April 3 seized power in Baghdad with help from some army officers and announced
that the temporarily absent regent was deposed. The British, ostensibly exercising their right under
the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930 to move troops across Iraqi territory, landed troops at Basra on April
19 and rejected Iraqi demands that these troops be sent on into Palestine before any further landings.
Iraqi troops were then concentrated around the British air base at Ḥabbānīyah, west of Baghdad; and
on May 2 the British commander there opened hostilities, lest the Iraqis should attack first. Having
won the upper hand at Ḥabbānīyah and been reinforced from Palestine, the British troops from the air
base marched on Baghdad; and on May 30 Rashid Ali and his friends took refuge in Iran. ʿAbd al-
Ilāh was reinstated as regent; Nuri became prime minister; and the British military presence remained
to uphold them.
German military supplies for Rashid Ali were dispatched too late to be useful to him; but they
reached Iraq via Syria, whose high commissioner, General H.-F. Dentz, was a nominee of
the Vichy government of France. Lest Syria and Lebanon should fall altogether under Axis control,
the British decided to intervene there. Consequently, Free French forces, under General Georges
Catroux, with British, Australian, and Indian support, were sent into both countries from Palestine on
June 8, 1941; and a week later British forces invaded Syria from Iraq. Dentz’s forces put up an
unexpectedly stiff resistance, particularly against the Free French, but were finally obliged to
capitulate: an armistice was signed at Acre on July 14. By an arrangement of July 25 the Free French
retained territorial command in Syria and Lebanon subject to strategic control by the British.
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The beginning of lend-lease

On June 10, 1940, when Italy entered the war on the German side and when the fall of France
was imminent, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that the United States would “extend to
the opponents of force the material resources of this nation.” After France fell, he pursued this policy
by aiding the British in their struggle against Germany. Roosevelt arranged for the transfer of surplus
American war matériel to the British under various arrangements, including the exchange of 50 old
American destroyers for certain British-held Atlantic bases, and he facilitated the placing of British
orders for munitions in the United States. The British decided to rely on the United States
unreservedly and without regard to their ability to pay. By December 1940 they had already placed
orders for war materials that were far more than they could possibly muster the dollar exchange to
finance.

World War II: America Prepares for WarStill with the hope of not directly engaging in the war, the United States provided defense materials
and other support systems for the Allied forces at the dawn of the 1940s.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Churchill suggested the concept of lend-lease to Roosevelt in December 1940, proposing that the
United States provide war materials, foodstuffs, and clothing to the democracies (and particularly
to Great Britain). Roosevelt assented, and a bill to achieve this purpose was passed by
the Congress in early 1941. The Lend-Lease Act not only empowered the president to transfer
defense materials, services, and information to any foreign government whose defense he deemed
vital to that of the United States, but also left to his discretion what he should ask in return. An
enormous grant of power, it gave Roosevelt virtually a free hand to pursue his policy of material aid
to the “opponents of force.” Congress appropriated funds generously, amounting to almost
$13,000,000,000 by November 1941. Other countries besides Britain began receiving lend-lease aid
by this time, including China and the Soviet Union. From the time of the German invasion of the
U.S.S.R., Roosevelt had been clearly determined to aid the Soviet Union, but the American public’s
suspicions of Communism delayed his declaring that country eligible for lend-lease until November
 175

1941. American deliveries of aircraft, tanks, and other supplies to the U.S.S.R. began shortly
thereafter.

The Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1940–41

At the outbreak of World War II, the primary concerns of the British Navy were to defend Great
Britain from invasion and to retain command of the ocean trading routes, both in order to protect the
passage of essential supplies of food and raw materials for Britain and to deny the trading routes to
the Axis powers, thus drawing tight once again the blockade that had proved so successful
during World War I. Britain had adequate forces of battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, and other
ships to fulfill these tasks.
The German Navy’s role was to protect Germany’s coasts, to defend its sea communications and to
attack those of the Allies’, and to support land and air operations. These modest goals were in
keeping with Germany’s position as the dominant land-based power in continental Europe.
Germany’s main naval weapon during the war was to be the submarine, or U-boat, with which it
attacked Allied shipping much as it had in World War I.
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U-218Launching of U-218 at Kiel, Germany, in 1941.From J.P. Mallmann Showell, U-Boats under the Swastika (1987)

German control of the Biscay ports after the fall of France in June 1940 provided the U-boats with
bases from which they could infest the Atlantic without having to pass either through the Channel or
around the north of the British Isles at the end of every sortie. Thenceforward, so long as naval
escorts for outgoing convoys from the British Isles could go only 200 or 300 miles out to sea before
having to turn back to escort incoming convoys, the U-boats had a very wide field for free-ranging
activity: sinkings rose sharply from 55,580 tons in May 1940 to 352,407 tons in October, achieved
mainly by solitary attacks by single U-boats at night. But the beginning of lend-lease and the freeing
of British warships after the German invasion threat waned enabled the British to escort their
convoys for 400 miles by October 1940 and halfway across the Atlantic by April 1941. Since air
cover for shipping could also be provided from the British Isles, from Canada, and from Iceland, the
Atlantic space left open to the U-boats was reduced by May 1941 to a width of only 300 miles.
Moreover, British surface vessels had the ASDIC (Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation
Committee) device to detect submerged U-boats. By the spring of 1941, under the guidance of
Admiral Karl Dönitz, the U-boat commanders were changing their tactic of individual operation to
one of wolf-pack attacks: groups of U-boats, disposed in long lines, would rally when one of them by
radio signaled a sighting and overwhelm the convoy by weight of numbers. Between July and
December 1941 the German U-boat strength was raised from 65 to more than 230.
 177

In 1941 convoys bound for Britain from the United States face a perilous crossing, with many ships sunk by German submarines and surface
raiders. From “The Second World War: Triumph of the Axis” (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational
Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Furthermore, the German surface fleet became more active against Allied seaborne trade. Six armed
German raiders disguised as merchantmen, with orders to leave convoys alone and to confine their
attacks to unescorted ships, roamed the oceans with practical impunity from the spring of 1940 and
had sunk 366,644 tons of shipping by the end of the year. German battleships—the Admiral Scheer,
the Admiral Hipper, the Scharnhorst, and the Gneisenau—one after another began similar raiding
operations, with considerable success, from October 1940; and in May 1941 a really modern
battleship, the Bismarck, and a new cruiser, the Prinz Eugen, put out to sea from Germany.
The Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen, however, were located by British reconnaissance in the North
Sea near Bergen, and an intensive hunt for them was immediately set in motion. Tracked from a
point northwest of Iceland by two British cruisers, the two German ships were engaged on May 24
by the battle cruiser Hood and by the new battleship Prince of Wales; and, though the Hood was
sunk, the Bismarck ’s fuel supply was put out of action, so that its commander, Admiral Günther
Lütjens, decided to make for the French coast. Separating from the Prinz Eugen (which escaped),
the Bismarck threw off her pursuers early on May 25 but was sighted again the next day some 660
miles west of Brest. Paralyzed by torpedo aircraft from the Ark Royal, it was bombarded by the King
George V, the Rodney, and the Dorsetshire on May 27 and sank.
In the Mediterranean the year 1941 ended with some naval triumphs for the Axis: U-boats torpedoed
the Ark Royal on November 13 and the Barham 12 days later; Italian frogmen, entering the harbour
of Alexandria, on December 19 crippled the battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant; and two British
cruisers and a destroyer were also sunk in Mediterranean waters in December.
German strategy, 1939–42

German strategy in World War II is wholly intelligible only if Hitler’s far-reaching system of power
politics and his racist ideology are borne in mind. Since the 1920s his program had been first to win
power in Germany proper, next to consolidate Germany’s domination over Central Europe, and then
to raise Germany to the status of a world power by two stages: (1) the building up of a continental
empire embracing all Europe, including the European portion of the Soviet Union, and (2) the
attainment for Germany of equal rank with the British Empire, Japan, and the United States—the
only world powers to be left after the elimination of France and the U.S.S.R.—through the
acquisition of colonies in Africa and the construction of a strong fleet with bases on the Atlantic. In
 178

the succeeding generation Hitler foresaw a decisive conflict between Germany and the United States,
during which he hoped that Great Britain would be Germany’s ally.
The conquest of the European part of the Soviet Union, which in Hitler’s calendar was dated
approximately for 1943–45, was to be preceded, he thought, by short localized campaigns elsewhere
in Europe to provide a strategic shield and to secure Germany’s rear for the great expedition of
conquest in the East, which was also bound up with the extermination of the Jews. The most
important of the localized campaigns would be that against France. While this European program
remained unfulfilled, it was imperative to avoid any world war, since only after the German Reich
had come to dominate the whole European continent would it have the economic base and the
territorial extent that were prerequisite for success in a great war, especially against maritime world
powers.
Hitler had always contemplated the overthrow of the Soviet regime, and though he had congratulated
himself on the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 as a matter of expediency, anti-
Bolshevism had remained his most profound emotional conviction. His feelings had been stirred up
afresh by the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states and of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in June
1940 and by the consequent proximity of Soviet forces to the Romanian oil fields on which Germany
depended. Hitler became acutely suspicious of the intentions of the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, and
he began to feel that he could not afford to wait to complete the subjugation of western Europe
before dealing with the Soviet Union. Hitler and his generals had originally scheduled the invasion of
the U.S.S.R. for mid-May 1941, but the unforeseen necessity of invading Yugoslavia and Greece in
April of that year had forced them to postpone the Soviet campaign to late June. The swiftness of
Hitler’s Balkan victories enabled him to keep to this revised timetable, but the five weeks’ delay
shortened the time for carrying out the invasion of the U.S.S.R. and was to prove the more serious
because in 1941 the Russian winter would arrive earlier than usual. Nevertheless, Hitler and the
heads of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, or German Army High Command), namely the army
commander in chief Walther von Brauchitsch and the army general staff chief Franz Halder, were
convinced that the Red Army could be defeated in two or three months, and that, by the end of
October, the Germans would have conquered the whole European part of Russia and
the Ukraine west of a line stretching from Archangel to Astrakhan. The invasion of the Soviet Union
was given the code name “Operation Barbarossa.”

Invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941

For the campaign against the Soviet Union, the Germans allotted almost 150 divisions containing a
total of about 3,000,000 men. Among these were 19 panzer divisions, and in total the “Barbarossa”
force had about 3,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,500 aircraft. It was in effect the largest and
most powerful invasion force in human history. The Germans’ strength was further increased by
more than 30 divisions of Finnish and Romanian troops.
 179

World War II: Operation Barbarossa Germany invading the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, June 22, 1941.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises
GmbH, Mainz

The Soviet Union had twice or perhaps three times the number of both tanks and aircraft as the
Germans had, but their aircraft were mostly obsolete. The Soviet tanks were about equal to those of
the Germans, however. A greater hindrance to Hitler’s chances of victory was that the German
intelligence service underestimated the troop reserves that Stalin could bring up from the depths of
the U.S.S.R. The Germans correctly estimated that there were about 150 divisions in the western
parts of the U.S.S.R. and reckoned that 50 more might be produced. But the Soviets actually brought
up more than 200 fresh divisions by the middle of August, making a total of 360. The consequence
was that, though the Germans succeeded in shattering the original Soviet armies by superior
technique, they then found their path blocked by fresh ones. The effects of the miscalculations were
increased because much of August was wasted while Hitler and his advisers were having long
arguments as to what course they should follow after their initial victories. Another factor in the
Germans’ calculations was purely political, though no less mistaken; they believed that within three
to six months of their invasion, the Soviet regime would collapse from lack of domestic support.
The German attack on the Soviet Union was to have an immediate and highly salutary effect
on Great Britain’s situation. Until then Britain’s prospects had appeared hopeless in the eyes of most
people except the British themselves; and the government’s decision to continue the struggle after the
fall of France and to reject Hitler’s peace offers could spell only slow suicide unless relief came from
either the United States or the U.S.S.R. Hitler brought Great Britain relief by turning eastward and
invading the Soviet Union just as the strain on Britain was becoming severe.
On June 22, 1941, the German offensive was launched by three army groups under the same
commanders as in the invasion of France in 1940: on the left (north), an army group under Leeb
struck from East Prussia into the Baltic states toward Leningrad; on the right (south), another army
group, under Rundstedt, with an armoured group under Kleist, advanced from southern Poland into
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the Ukraine against Kiev, whence it was to wheel southeastward to the coasts of the Black Sea and

the Sea of Azov; and in the centre, north of the Pripet Marshes, the main blow was delivered
by Bock’s army group, with one armoured group under Guderian and another under Hoth, thrusting
northeastward at Smolensk and Moscow.

In June 1941, German armoured divisions roll deep into the Soviet Union, but by winter they find their supply lines stretched thin and the
Soviets determined to fight. From The Second World War: Triumph of the Axis (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational
Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The invasion along a 1,800-mile front took the Soviet leadership completely by surprise and caught
the Red Army in an unprepared and partially demobilized state. Piercing the northern border,
Guderian’s tanks raced 50 miles beyond the frontier on the first day of the invasion and were
at Minsk, 200 miles beyond it, on June 27. At Minsk they converged with Hoth’s tanks, which had
pierced the opposite flank, but Bock’s infantry could not follow up quickly enough to complete the
encirclement of the Soviet troops in the area; though 300,000 prisoners were taken in the salient, a
large part of the Soviet forces was able to escape to the east. The Soviet armies were clumsily
handled and frittered their tank strength away in piecemeal action like that of the French in 1940. But
the isolated Soviet troops fought with a stubbornness that the French had not shown, and their
resistance imposed a brake by continuing to block road centres long after the German tide had swept
past them. The result was similar when Guderian’s tanks, having crossed the Dnieper River on July
10, entered Smolensk six days later and converged with Hoth’s thrust through Vitebsk: 200,000
Soviet prisoners were taken; but some Soviet forces were withdrawn from the trap to the line of
the Desna, and a large pocket of resistance lay behind the German armour. By mid-July, moreover, a
series of rainstorms were turning the sandy Russian roads into clogging mud, over which the wheeled
vehicles of the German transport behind the tanks could make only very slow progress. The Germans
also began to be hampered by the scorched earth policy adopted by the retreating Soviets. The Soviet
troops burned crops, destroyed bridges, and evacuated factories in the face of the German advance.
Entire steel and munitions plants in the westernmost portions of the U.S.S.R. were dismantled and
shipped by rail to the east, where they were put back into production. The Soviets also destroyed or
evacuated most of their rolling stock (railroad cars), thus depriving the Germans of the use of the
Soviet rail system, since Soviet railroad track was of a different gauge than German track and
German rolling stock was consequently useless on it.
Nevertheless, by mid-July the Germans had advanced more than 400 miles and were only 200 miles
from Moscow. They still had ample time to make decisive gains before the onset of winter, but they
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lost the opportunity, primarily because of arguments throughout August between Hitler and the OKH
about the destination of the next thrusts thence: whereas the OKH proposed Moscow as the main
objective, Hitler wanted the major effort to be directed southeastward, through the Ukraine and
the Donets Basin into the Caucasus, with a minor swing northwestward against Leningrad (to
converge with Leeb’s army group).
In the Ukraine, meanwhile, Rundstedt and Kleist had made short work of the foremost Soviet
defenses, stronger though the latter had been. A new Soviet front south of Kiev was broken by the
end of July; and in the next fortnight the Germans swept down to the Black Sea mouths of
the Bug and Dnieper rivers—to converge with Romania’s simultaneous offensive. Kleist was then
ordered to wheel northward from the Ukraine, Guderian southward from Smolensk, for a pincer
movement around the Soviet forces behind Kiev; and by the end of September the claws of the
encircling movement had caught 520,000 men. These gigantic encirclements were partly the fault of
inept Soviet high commanders and partly the fault of Stalin, who as commander in chief stubbornly
overrode the advice of his generals and ordered his armies to stand and fight instead of allowing them
to retreat eastward and regroup in preparation for a counteroffensive.
Winter was approaching, and Hitler stopped Leeb’s northward drive on the outskirts of Leningrad.
He ordered Rundstedt and Kleist, however, to press on from the Dnieper toward the Don and the
Caucasus; and Bock was to resume the advance on Moscow.
Bock’s renewed advance on Moscow began on October 2, 1941. Its prospects looked bright when
Bock’s armies brought off a great encirclement around Vyazma, where 600,000 more Soviet troops
were captured. That left the Germans momentarily with an almost clear path to Moscow. But the
Vyazma battle had not been completed until late October; the German troops were tired, the country
became a morass as the weather got worse, and fresh Soviet forces appeared in the path as they
plodded slowly forward. Some of the German generals wanted to break off the offensive and to take
up a suitable winter line. But Bock wanted to press on, believing that the Soviets were on the verge
of collapse, while Brauchitsch and Halder tended to agree with his view. As that also accorded with
Hitler’s desire, he made no objection. The temptation of Moscow, now so close in front of their eyes,
was too great for any of the topmost leaders to resist. On December 2 a further effort was launched,
and some German detachments penetrated into the suburbs of Moscow; but the advance as a whole
was held up in the forests covering the capital. The stemming of this last phase of the great German
offensive was partly due to the effects of the Russian winter, whose subzero temperatures were the
most severe in several decades. In October and November a wave of frostbite cases had decimated
the ill-clad German troops, for whom provisions of winter clothing had not been made, while the icy
cold paralyzed the Germans’ mechanized transport, tanks, artillery, and aircraft. The Soviets, by
contrast, were well clad and tended to fight more effectively in winter than did the Germans. By this
time German casualties had mounted to levels that were unheard of in the campaigns against France
and the Balkans; by November the Germans had suffered about 730,000 casualties.
In the south, Kleist had already reached Rostov-on-Don, gateway to the Caucasus, on November 22,
but had exhausted his tanks’ fuel in doing so. Rundstedt, seeing the place to be untenable, wanted to
evacuate it but was overruled by Hitler. A Soviet counteroffensive recaptured Rostov on November
28, and Rundstedt was relieved of his command four days later. The Germans, however, managed to
establish a front on the Mius River—as Rundstedt had recommended.
As the German drive against Moscow slackened, the Soviet commander on the Moscow front,
General Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, on December 6 inaugurated the first great
counteroffensive with strokes against Bock’s right in the Elets (Yelets) and Tula sectors south of
Moscow and against his centre in the Klin and Kalinin sectors to the northwest. Levies of Siberian
troops, who were extremely effective fighters in cold weather, were used for these offensives. There
followed a blow at the German left, in the Velikie Luki sector; and the counteroffensive, which was
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sustained throughout the winter of 1941–42, soon took the form of a triple convergence toward
Smolensk.
These Soviet counteroffensives tumbled back the exhausted Germans, lapped around their flanks,
and produced a critical situation. From generals downward, the invaders were filled with ghastly
thoughts of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. In that emergency Hitler forbade any retreat beyond
the shortest possible local withdrawals. His decision exposed his troops to awful sufferings in their
advanced positions facing Moscow, for they had neither the clothing nor the equipment for a Russian
winter campaign; but if they had once started a general retreat it might easily have degenerated into a
panic-stricken rout.
The Red Army’s winter counteroffensive continued for more than three months after its December
launching, though with diminishing progress. By March 1942 it had advanced more than 150 miles in
some sectors. But the Germans maintained their hold on the main bastions of their winter front—
such towns as Schlüsselburg, Novgorod, Rzhev, Vyazma, Bryansk, Orël (Oryol), Kursk, Kharkov,
and Taganrog—despite the fact that the Soviets had often advanced many miles beyond these
bastions, which were in effect cut off. In retrospect, it became clear that Hitler’s veto on any
extensive withdrawal worked out in such a way as to restore the confidence of the German troops and
probably saved them from a widespread collapse. Nevertheless, they paid a heavy price indirectly for
that rigid defense. One immediate handicap was that the strength of the Luftwaffe was drained in the
prolonged effort to maintain supplies by air, under winter conditions, to the garrisons of these more
or less isolated bastion towns. The tremendous strain of that winter campaign, on armies which had
not been prepared for it, had other serious effects. Before the winter ended, many German divisions
were reduced to barely a third of their original strength, and they were never fully built up again.
The German plan of campaign had begun to miscarry in August 1941, and its failure was patent
when the Soviet counteroffensive started. Nevertheless, having dismissed Brauchitsch and appointed
himself army commander in chief in December, Hitler persisted in overruling the tentative opposition
of the general staff to his strategy.
The first three months of the German–Soviet conflict produced cautious rapprochements between the
U.S.S.R. and Great Britain and between the U.S.S.R. and the United States. The Anglo-Soviet
agreement of July 12, 1941, pledged the signatory powers to assist one another and to abstain from
making any separate peace with Germany. On August 25, 1941, British and Soviet forces jointly
invaded Iran, to forestall the establishment of a German base there and to divide the country into
spheres of occupation for the duration of the war; and late in September—at a conference in Moscow
—Soviet, British, and U.S. representatives formulated the monthly quantities of supplies, including
aircraft, tanks, and raw materials, that Great Britain and the United States should try to furnish to the
Soviet Union.
The critical situation on the Eastern Front did not deter Hitler from declaring Germany to be
at war with the United States on December 11, 1941, after the Japanese attack on the U.S., British,
and Dutch positions in the Pacific and in the Far East (see below Japanese policy, 1939–41), since
this extension of hostilities did not immediately commit the German land forces to any new theatre
but at the same time had the merit of entitling the German Navy to intensify the war at sea.

The war in the Pacific, 1938–41

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The war in China, 1937–41

In 1931–32 the Japanese had invaded Manchuria (Northeast China) and, after overcoming ineffective
Chinese resistance there, had created the Japanese-controlled puppet state of Manchukuo. In the
following years the Nationalist government of China, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, temporized in the
face of Japanese military and diplomatic pressures and instead waged an internal war against
the Chinese Communists, led by Mao Zedong, who were based in Shensi Province in north-central
China. Meanwhile, the Japanese began a military buildup in North China proper, which in turn
stimulated the formation of a unified resistance by the Nationalists and the Communists.


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In September 1931 the Japanese Imperial Army invades Manchuria, and refugees flee their burning cities. From “The Second World War:
Prelude to Conflict” (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Japanese expansion in the late 19th and 20th centuries.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Overt hostilities between Japan and China began after the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 7,
1937, when shots were exchanged between Chinese and Japanese troops on the outskirts of Peking.
Open fighting broke out in that area, and in late July the Japanese captured the Peking-Tientsin area.
Thereupon full-scale hostilities began between the two nations. The Japanese landed near Shanghai,
at the mouth of the Yangtze River, and took Shanghai in November and the Chinese
capital, Nanking, in December 1937. Chiang Kai-shek moved his government to Han-k’ou (one of
the Wu-han cities), which lay 435 miles west of Shanghai along the Yangtze. The Japanese also
pushed southward and westward from the Peking area into Hopeh and Shansi provinces. In 1938 the
Japanese launched several ambitious military campaigns that brought them deep into the heart of
central China. They advanced to the northeast and west from Nanking, taking Suchow and occupying
the Wu-han cities. The Nationalists were forced to move their government
to Chungking in Szechwan Province, about 500 miles west of the Wu-han cities. The Japanese also
occupied Canton and several other coastal cities in South China in 1938.
Nationalist Chinese resistance to these Japanese advances was ineffective, primarily because the
Nationalist leadership was still more interested in holding their forces in reserve for a future struggle
with the Communists than in repelling the Japanese. By contrast, the Communists, from their base in
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north-central China, began an increasingly effective guerrilla war against the Japanese troops in
Manchuria and North China. The Japanese needed large numbers of troops to maintain their hold on
the immense Chinese territories and populations they controlled. Of the 51 infantry divisions making
up the Japanese Army in 1941, 38 of them, comprising about 750,000 men, were stationed in China
(including Manchuria).

Japanese policy, 1939–41
When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, the Japanese, despite a series of victorious battles,
had still not brought their war in China to an end: on the one hand, the Japanese strategists had made
no plans to cope with the guerrilla warfare pursued by the Chinese; on the other, the Japanese
commanders in the field often disregarded the orders of the supreme command at the Imperial
headquarters and occupied more Chinese territory than they had been ordered to take. Half of the
Japanese Army was thus still tied down in China when the commitment of Great
Britain and France to war against Germany opened up the prospect of wider conquests
for Japan in Southeast Asia and in the Pacific. Japan’s military ventures in China proper were
consequently restricted rather more severely henceforth.

In September 1940 Imperial Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. This alliance gave Japanese leaders the
security they needed to expand their designs for an East Asian empire into Indochina and beyond. Their ambitions brought them into conflict
with the United States, a conflict that erupted into war with the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The German victories over the Netherlands and France in the summer of 1940 further encouraged the
Japanese premier, Prince Konoe, to look southward at those defeated powers’ colonies and also, of
course, at the British and U.S. positions in the Far East. The island archipelago of the Dutch East
Indies (now Indonesia) along with French Indochina and British-held Malaya contained raw
materials (tin, rubber, petroleum) that were essential to Japan’s industrial economy, and if Japan
could seize these regions and incorporate them into the empire, it could make itself virtually self-
sufficient economically and thus become the dominant power in the Pacific Ocean. Since Great
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Britain, single-handedly, was confronting the might of the Axis in Europe, the Japanese strategists
had to reckon, primarily, with the opposition of the United States to their plans for territorial
aggrandizement. When Japanese troops entered northern Indochina in September 1940 (in pursuance
of an agreement extorted in August from the Vichy government of France), the United States uttered
a protest. Germany and Italy, by contrast, recognized Japan as the leading power in the Far East by
concluding with it the Tripartite, or Axis, Pact of September 27, 1940: negotiated by Japanese
foreign minister Matsuoka Yosuke, the pact pledged its signatories to come to one another’s help in
the event of an attack “by a power not already engaged in war.” Japan also concluded a neutrality
pact with the U.S.S.R. on April 13, 1941.
On July 2, 1941, the Imperial Conference decided to press the Japanese advance southward even at
the risk of war with Great Britain and the United States; and this policy was pursued even when
Matsuoka was relieved of office a fortnight later. On July 26, in pursuance of a new agreement
with Vichy France, Japanese forces began to occupy bases in southern Indochina.
This time the United States reacted vigorously, not only freezing Japanese assets under U.S. control
but also imposing an embargo on supplies of oil to Japan. Dismay at the embargo drove the Japanese
naval command, which had hitherto been more moderate than the army, into collusion with the
army’s extremism. When negotiations with the Dutch of Indonesia for an alternative supply of oil
produced no satisfaction, the Imperial Conference on September 6, at the high command’s insistence,
decided that war must be undertaken against the United States and Great Britain unless an
understanding with the United States could be reached in a few weeks’ time.
General Tōjō Hideki, who succeeded Konoe as premier in mid-October 1941, continued the already
desperate talks. The United States, however, persisted in making demands that Japan could not
concede: renunciation of the Tripartite Pact (which would have left Japan diplomatically isolated);
the withdrawal of Japanese troops from China and from Southeast Asia (a humiliating retreat from an
overt commitment of four years’ standing); and an open-door regime for trade in China.
When Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state, on November 26, 1941, sent an abrupt note to the
Japanese bluntly requiring them to evacuate China and Indochina and to recognize no Chinese
regime other than that of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese could see no point in continuing the talks.
(See Sidebar: Pearl Harbor and the “Back Door to War” Theory.)
Since peace with the United States seemed impossible, Japan set in motion its plans for war, which
would now necessarily be waged not only against the United States but also against Great Britain
(the existing war effort of which depended on U.S. support and the Far Eastern colonies of which lay
within the orbit of the projected Japanese expansion) and against the Dutch East Indies (the oil of
which was essential to Japanese enterprises, even apart from geopolitical considerations).

The evolving Japanese military strategy was based on the peculiar geography of the Pacific Ocean
and on the relative weakness and unpreparedness of the Allied military presence in that ocean. The
western half of the Pacific is dotted with many islands, large and small, while the eastern half of the
ocean is, with the exception of the Hawaiian Islands, almost devoid of landmasses (and hence of
usable bases). The British, French, American, and Dutch military forces in the entire Pacific region
west of Hawaii amounted to only about 350,000 troops, most of them lacking combat experience and
being of disparate nationalities. Allied air power in the Pacific was weak and consisted mostly of
obsolete planes. If the Japanese, with their large, well-equipped armies that had been battle-hardened
in China, could quickly launch coordinated attacks from their existing bases on certain Japanese-
mandated Pacific islands, on Formosa (Taiwan), and from Japan itself, they could overwhelm the
Allied forces, overrun the entire western Pacific Ocean as well as Southeast Asia, and then develop
those areas’ resources to their own military-industrial advantage. If successful in their campaigns, the
Japanese planned to establish a strongly fortified defensive perimeter extending from Burma in the
 187

west to the southern rim of the Dutch East Indies and northern New Guinea in the south and
sweeping around to the Gilbert and Marshall islands in the southeast and east. The Japanese believed
that any American and British counteroffensives against this perimeter could be repelled, after which
those nations would eventually seek a negotiated peace that would allow Japan to keep her newly
won empire.
Until the end of 1940 the Japanese strategists had assumed that any new war to be waged would be
against a single enemy. When it became clear, in 1941, that the British and the Dutch as well as the
Americans must be attacked, a new and daring war plan was successfully sponsored by the
commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku.
Yamamoto’s plan prescribed two operations, together involving the whole strength of his navy,
which was composed of the following ships: 10 battleships, six regular aircraft carriers,
four auxiliary carriers, 18 heavy cruisers, 20 light cruisers, 112 destroyers, 65 submarines, and 2,274
combat planes. The first operation, to which all six regular aircraft carriers, two battleships, three
cruisers, and 11 destroyers were allocated, was to be a surprise attack, scheduled for December 7
(December 8 by Japanese time), on the main U.S. Pacific Fleet in its base at Pearl Harbor in the
Hawaiian Islands. The rest of the Japanese Navy was to support the army in the “Southern
Operation”: 11 infantry divisions and seven tank regiments, assisted by 795 combat planes, were to
undertake two drives, one from Formosa through the Philippines, the other from French Indochina
and Hainan Island through Malaya, so as to converge on the Dutch East Indies, with a view to the
capture of Java as the culmination of a campaign of 150 days—during which, moreover, Wake
Island, Guam, the Gilbert Islands, and Burma should also have been secured as outer bastions,
besides Hong Kong.

Pearl Harbor and the Japanese expansion, to July 1942

In accordance with Yamamoto’s plan, the aircraft carrier strike force commanded by
Admiral Nagumo Chuichi sailed eastward undetected by any U.S. reconnaissance until it had reached
a point 275 miles north of Hawaii. From there, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a total of about 360
aircraft, composed of dive-bombers, torpedo bombers, and a few fighters, was launched in two waves
in the early morning at the giant U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The base at that time was
accommodating 70 U.S. fighting ships, 24 auxiliaries, and some 300 planes. The Americans were
taken completely by surprise, and all eight battleships in the harbour were hit (though six were
eventually repaired and returned to service); three cruisers, three destroyers, a minelayer, and other
vessels were damaged; more than 180 aircraft were destroyed and others damaged (most while
parked at airfields); and more than 2,330 troops were killed and over 1,140 wounded. Japanese losses
were comparatively small. The Japanese attack failed in one crucial respect, however; the Pacific
Fleet’s three aircraft carriers were at sea at the time of the attack and escaped harm, and these were to
become the nucleus of the United States’ incipient naval defense in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor’s shore
installations and oil-storage facilities also escaped damage. The Pearl Harbor attack, unannounced
beforehand by the Japanese as it was, unified the American public and swept away any remaining
support for American neutrality in the war. On December 8 the U.S. Congress declared war on
Japan with only one dissenting vote.

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Pearl Harbor, HawaiiFord Island in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, as seen from a Japanese aircraft during the attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet, December
7, 1941.National Archives, Washington, D.C.

On December 7, 1941, Japanese airplanes strike the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II. From “The
Second World War: Triumph of the Axis” (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
 189

On the day of the attack, December 8 by local time, Formosa-based Japanese bombers struck Clark
and Iba airfields in the Philippines, destroying more than 50 percent of the U.S. Army’s Far East
aircraft; and, two days later, further raids destroyed not only more U.S. fighters but also Cavite Naval
Yard, likewise in the Philippines. Part of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, however, had already gone south in
November; and the surviving major ships and bomber aircraft, which were vulnerable for lack of
fighter protection, were withdrawn in the next fortnight to safety in bases in Java and Australia.
Japanese forces began to land on the island of Luzon in the Philippines on December 10. The main
assault, consisting of the bulk of one division, was made at Lingayen Gulf, 100 miles north-
northwest of Manila, on December 22, and a second large landing took place south of Manila two
days later. Manila itself fell unopposed to the Japanese on January 2, 1942, but by that time the U.S.
and Filipino forces under General Douglas MacArthur were ready to hold Bataan Peninsula (across
the bay from Manila) and Corregidor Island (in the bay). The Japanese attack on Bataan was halted
initially, but it was reinforced in the following eight weeks. MacArthur was ordered to Australia on
March 11, leaving Bataan’s defense to Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright. The latter and
his men surrendered on April 9; Corregidor fell in the night of May 5–6; and the southern
Philippines capitulated three days later.
Japanese bombers had already destroyed British air power at Hong Kong on December 8, 1941, and
the British and Canadian defenders surrendered to the ground attack from the Kowloon
Peninsula (the nearest mainland) on December 25. To secure their flank while pushing southward
into Malaya, the Japanese also occupied Bangkok on December 9 and Victoria Point in southernmost
Burma on December 16. The Japanese landings in Malaya, from December 8 onward, accompanied
as they were by air strikes, overwhelmed the small Australian and Indian forces; and the British
battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse, sailing from Singapore to cut Japanese
communications, were sunk by Japanese aircraft on December 10. By the end of January 1942, two
Japanese divisions, with air and armoured support, had occupied all Malaya except Singapore Island.
In Burma, meanwhile, other Japanese troops had taken Moulmein and were
approaching Rangoon and Mandalay.
On the eastern perimeter of the war zone, the Japanese had bombed Wake Island on December 8,
attempted to capture it on December 11, and achieved a landing on December 23, quickly subduing
the garrison. Guam had already fallen on December 10. Having also occupied Makin and Tarawa in
the Gilbert Islands in the first days of the war, the Japanese successfully attacked Rabaul, the
strategic base on New Britain (now part of Papua New Guinea), on January 23, 1942.
A unified American–British–Dutch–Australian Command, ABDACOM, under Wavell, responsible
for holding Malaya, Sumatra, Java, and the approaches to Australia, became operative on January 15,
1942; but the Japanese had already begun their advance on the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. They
occupied Kuching (December 17), Brunei Bay (January 6), and Jesselton (January 11), on the
northern coast of Borneo, as well as Tarakan Island (off northeastern Borneo) and points
on Celebes. Balikpapan (on Borneo’s east coast) and Kendari (in southeastern Celebes) fell to the
Japanese on January 24, 1942, Amboina on February 4, Makasar City (in southwestern Celebes) on
February 8, and Bandjarmasin (in southern Borneo) on February 16. Bali was invaded on February
18, and by February 24 the Japanese were also in possession of Timor.

The fall of Singapore

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Meanwhile, on February 8 and 9, three Japanese divisions had landed on Singapore Island; and on
February 15 they forced the 90,000-strong British, Australian, and Indian garrison there, under
Lieutenant General A.E. Percival, to surrender. Singapore was the major British base in the Pacific
and had been regarded as unassailable due to its strong seaward defenses. The Japanese took it with
comparative ease by advancing down the Malay Peninsula and then assaulting the base’s landward
side, which the British had left inadequately defended. On February 13, moreover, Japanese
paratroopers had landed at Palembang in Sumatra, which fell to an amphibious assault three days
later.
When ABDACOM was dissolved on February 25, 1942, only Java remained to complete the
Japanese program of conquest. The Allies’ desperate attempt to intercept the Japanese invasion fleet
was defeated in the seven-hour Battle of the Java Sea on February 27, in which five Allied warships
were lost and only one Japanese destroyer damaged. The Japanese landed at three points on Java on
February 28 and rapidly expanded their beachheads. On March 9 the 20,000 Allied troops in Java
surrendered. In the Indian Ocean, the Japanese captured the Andaman Islands on March 23, and
began a series of attacks on British shipping. After the failure of ABDACOM, the U.S.–British
Combined Chiefs of Staff placed the Pacific under the U.S. Joint Chiefs’ strategic direction.
MacArthur became supreme commander of the Southwest Pacific Area, which comprised the Dutch
East Indies (less Sumatra), the Philippines, Australia, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomons;
and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz became commander in chief of the Pacific Ocean Areas, which
comprised virtually every area not under MacArthur. Their missions were to hold the U.S.–Australia
line of communications, to contain the Japanese within the Pacific, to support the defense of North
America, and to prepare for major amphibious counteroffensives.
Japan’s initial war plans were realized with the capture of Java. But despite their military triumphs,
the Japanese saw no indication that the Allies were ready for a negotiated peace. On the contrary, it
seemed evident that an Allied counterstroke was in the making. The U.S. Pacific Fleet bombed
the Marshall Islands on February 1, 1942, Wake Island on February 23, and Marcus Island (between
Wake and Japan) on March 1. These moves, together with the bombing of Rabaul on February 23
and the establishment of bases in Australia and a line of communications across the South Pacific,
made the Japanese decide to expand so as to cut the Allied line of communications to Australia. They
planned to occupy New Caledonia, the Fiji Islands, and Samoa and also to seize eastern New Guinea,
whence they would threaten Australia from an air base to be established at Port Moresby. They
planned also to capture Midway Island in the North Pacific and to establish air bases in the Aleutians.
In pursuance of this new program, Japanese troops occupied Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea
and Buka in the Solomon Islands in March 1942 and Bougainville in the Solomons and
the Admiralty Islands (north of New Guinea) early in April.
Something to raise the Allies’ morale was achieved on April 18, 1942, when 16 U.S. bombers
raided Tokyo—though they did little real damage except to the Japanese government’s prestige. Far
more important were the consequences of the U.S. intelligence services’ detection of Japanese plans
to seize Port Moresby and Tulagi (in the southern Solomons). Had these two places fallen, Japanese
aircraft could have dominated the Coral Sea. In the event, after U.S. aircraft on May 3, 1942, had
interfered with the Japanese landing on Tulagi, U.S. naval units, with aircraft, challenged the
Japanese ships on their circuitous detour from Rabaul to Port Moresby. On May 5 and 6 the opposing
carrier groups sought each other out, and the four-day Battle of the Coral Sea ensued. On May 7
planes from the Japanese carriers sank a U.S. destroyer and an oil tanker, but U.S. planes sank the
Japanese light carrier Shoho and a cruiser; and the next day, though Japanese aircraft sank the U.S.
carrier Lexington and damaged the carrier Yorktown, the large Japanese carrier Shokaku had to retire
crippled. Finally, the Japanese lost so many planes in the battle that their enterprise against Port
Moresby had to be abandoned.
 191

In the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 1942), U.S. naval airplanes thwart Japanese plans to occupy Port Moresby, New Guinea. From “The Second
World War: Allied Victory” (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Despite the mixed results of the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese continued with their plan to
seize Midway Island. Seeking a naval showdown with the remaining ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet
and counting on their own numerical superiority to secure a victory, the Japanese mustered four
heavy and three light aircraft carriers, two seaplane carriers, 11 battleships, 15 cruisers, 44
destroyers, 15 submarines, and miscellaneous small vessels. The U.S. Pacific Fleet had only three
heavy carriers, eight cruisers, 18 destroyers, and 19 submarines, though there were some 115 aircraft
in support of it. The Americans, however, had the incomparable advantage of knowing the intentions
of the Japanese in advance, thanks to the U.S. intelligence services’ having broken the Japanese
Navy’s code and deciphered key radio transmissions. In the ensuing Battle of Midway, the Japanese
ships destined to take Midway Island were attacked while still 500 miles from their target by U.S.
bombers on June 3. The Japanese carriers were still able to launch their aircraft against Midway early
on June 4, but in the ensuing battle, waves of carrier- and Midway-based U.S. bombers sank all four
of the Japanese heavy carriers and one heavy cruiser. Appalled by this disaster, the Japanese began to
retreat in the night of June 4–5. Though the U.S. carrier Yorktown was sunk by torpedo on June 6,
Midway was saved from invasion. In the Aleutians, the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor effectively
and on June 7 occupied Attu and Kiska.
 192

Midway, Battle ofIn June 1942, one month after the Battle of the Coral Sea, U.S. naval airplanes stopped the advance of the Japanese Imperial
Navy near Midway Island. From “The Second World War: Allied Victory” (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational
Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The Battle of Midway was probably the turning point of the war in the Pacific, for Japan lost its first-
line carrier strength and most of its navy’s best trained pilots. Henceforth, the naval strengths of the
Japanese and of the Allies were virtually equal. Having lost the strategic initiative, Japan canceled its
plans to invade New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa.
The Chinese front and Burma, 1941–42

Japan’s entry into war against the western Allies had its repercussions in China. Chiang Kai-shek’s
government on December 9, 1941, formally declared war not only against Japan (a formality long
overdue) but also, with political rather than military intent, against Germany and Italy. Three Chinese
armies were rushed to the Burmese frontier, since the Burma Road was the only land route whereby
the western Allies could send supplies to the Nationalist Chinese government. On January 3, 1942,
Chiang was recognized as supreme Allied commander for the China theatre of war; and a U.S.
general, Joseph W. Stilwell, was sent to him to be his chief of staff. In the first eight weeks
after Pearl Harbor, however, the major achievement of the Chinese was the definitive repulse, on
January 15, 1942, of a long-sustained Japanese drive against Ch’ang-sha, on the Canton–Han-k’ou
railway.
 193

Chinese line the streets of K'un-ming as the first supply convoy reaches the city over the Allied-controlled Burma-Ledo road during World War
II.U.S. Army photograph

Thereafter, Chiang and Stilwell were largely preoccupied by efforts to check the Japanese advance
into Burma. By mid-March 1942 two Chinese armies, under Stilwell’s command, had crossed the
Burmese frontier; but before the end of the month the Chinese force defending Toungoo, in central
Burma between Rangoon and Mandalay, was nearly annihilated by the more soldierly Japanese.
British and Indian units in Burma fared scarcely better, being driven into retreat by the enemy’s
numerical superiority both in the air and on the ground. On April 29 the Japanese took Lashio, the
Burma Road’s southern terminus, thus cutting the supply line to China and turning the Allies’
northern flank. Under continued pressure, the British and Indian forces in the following month fell
back through Kalewa to Imphāl (across the Indian border), while most of the Chinese retreated across
the Salween River into China. By the end of 1942 all of Burma was in Japanese hands, China was
effectively isolated (except by air), and India was exposed to the danger of a Japanese invasion
through Burma.
Since the U.S. bombers that raided Tokyo on April 18 flew on to Chinese airfields, particularly to
those in Chekiang (the coastal province south of Shanghai), the Japanese reacted by launching a
powerful offensive to seize those airfields. By the end of July they had generally achieved their
objectives.
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Developments from autumn 1941 to spring 1942

Allied strategy and controversies, 1940–42

In the year following the collapse of France in June 1940, British strategists, relying as they could on
supplies from the nonbelligerent United States, were concerned first with home defense, second with
the security of the British positions in the Middle East, and third with the development of
a war of attrition against the Axis powers, pending the buildup of adequate forces for an invasion of
the European continent. For the United States, President Roosevelt’s advisers, from November 1940,
based their strategic plans on the “Europe first” principle; that is to say, if the United States became
engaged in war simultaneously against Germany, Italy, and Japan, merely defensive operations
should be conducted in the Pacific (to protect at least the Alaska–Hawaii–Panama triangle) while an
offensive was being mounted in Europe.
Japan’s entry into the war terminated the nonbelligerency of the United States. The three weeks’
conference, named Arcadia, that Roosevelt, Churchill, and their advisers opened in Washington,
D.C., on December 22, 1941, reassured the British about U.S. maintenance of the “Europe first”
principle and also produced two plans: a tentative one, code-named “Sledgehammer,” for the buildup
of an offensive force in Great Britain, in case it should be decided to invade France; and another,
code-named “Super-Gymnast,” for combining a British landing behind the German forces
in Libya (already planned under the code name “Gymnast”) with a U.S. landing near Casablanca on
the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The same conference furthermore created the machinery of
the Combined Chiefs of Staff, where the British Chiefs of Staff Committee was to be linked
continuously, through delegates in Washington, D.C., with the newly established U.S. Joint Chiefs of
Staff Organization, so that all aspects of the war could be studied in concert. It was on January 1,
1942, during the Arcadia Conference, that the Declaration of the United Nations was signed in
Washington, D.C., as a collective statement of the Allies’ war aims in sequel to the Atlantic Charter.
 195

Atlantic CharterAtlantic Charter Conference, August 1941.U.S. Naval Historical Center

Meanwhile, Churchill became anxious to do something to help the embattled Soviets—who were
clamouring for the United States and Britain to invade continental Europe so as to take some of the
German pressure off the Eastern Front. Roosevelt was no less conscious than Churchill of the fact
that the Soviet Union was bearing by far the greatest burden of the war against Germany; and this
consideration inclined him to listen to the arguments of his Joint Chiefs of Staff Organization for a
change of plan. After some hesitation, he sent his confidant Harry Hopkins and his army chief of
staff General George C. Marshall to London in April 1942 to suggest the scrapping of “Super-
Gymnast” in favour of “Bolero,” namely the concentration of forces in Great Britain for a landing in
Europe (perhaps at Brest or at Cherbourg) in the autumn; then “Roundup,” an invasion of France by
30 U.S. and 18 British divisions, could follow in April 1943. The British agreed but soon began to
doubt the practicability of mounting an amphibious invasion of France at such an early date.
Attempts to conclude an Anglo-Soviet political agreement were renewed without result, but a 20-
year Anglo-Soviet alliance was signed on May 26, 1942; and, though Churchill warned the Soviet
foreign minister, Vyacheslav Mikhaylovich Molotov, not to expect an early second front in Europe,
Molotov seemed gratified by what he was told about Anglo-U.S. plans.
Visiting Roosevelt again in the latter part of June 1942, Churchill at Hyde Park, New York, and in
Washington, D.C., pressed for a revised and enlarged joint operation in North Africa before the end
of the year, instead of a buildup for the invasion of France; but the U.S. Joint Chiefs resolutely
upheld the latter plan. After further debate and disagreement, in July the U.S. Joint Chiefs yielded at
last to British obstinacy in favour of a North African enterprise: it was decided that “Torch,” as this
combined Anglo-U.S. operation came to be called, should begin the following autumn.
 196

Already, on July 17, 1942, Churchill had had to notify Stalin that convoys of Allied supplies to
northern Russia must be suspended because of German submarine activity on the Arctic sea route (on
June 2 a convoy from Iceland had lost 23 out of 34 vessels). Consequently, it was the more awkward
to inform Stalin that there would be no second front in Europe before 1943. In mid-August 1942,
when Churchill went to Moscow to break the news, Stalin raged against the retreat from the plan for
a second front in Europe but had to admit the military logic of “Torch.”

Libya and Egypt, autumn 1941–summer 1942

In the Western Desert, a major offensive against Rommel’s front was undertaken on November 18,
1941, by the British 8th Army, commanded by Cunningham under the command in chief of Wavell’s
successor in the Middle East, General Sir Claude Auchinleck. The offensive was routed.
General Neil Methuen Ritchie took Cunningham’s place on November 25, still more tanks were
brought up, and a fortnight’s resumed pressure constrained Rommel to evacuate Cyrenaica and to
retreat to Agedabia. There, however, Rommel was at last, albeit meagrely, reinforced; and, after
repulsing a British attack on December 26, he prepared a counteroffensive. When the British still
imagined his forces to be hopelessly crippled, he attacked on January 21, 1942, and, by a series of
strokes, drove the 8th Army back to the Gazala–Bir Hakeim line, just west of Tobruk.
Both sides were subsequently further reinforced. Then, on the night of May 26–27, Rommel passed
around Ritchie’s southern flank with his three German divisions and two Italian ones, leaving only
four Italian divisions to face the Gazala line. Though at first Rommel did some damage to the British
tanks as they came into action piecemeal from a weak position, he failed to break through to the coast
behind Gazala. In a single day one-third of Rommel’s tank force was lost; and, after another
unsuccessful effort to reach the coast, he decided, on May 29, to take up a defensive position.
The new German position, aptly known as the Cauldron, seemed indeed to be perilously exposed;
and throughout the first days of June the British attacked it continually from the air and from the
ground, imagining that Rommel’s armour was caught at last. The British tanks, however, persisted in
making direct assaults in small groups against the Cauldron and were beaten off with very heavy
losses; and Rommel, meanwhile, secured his rear and his line of supply by overwhelming several
isolated British positions to the south.

Whereas in May 1942 the British had had 700 tanks, with 200 more in reserve, against Rommel’s
525, by June 10 their present armoured strength was reduced, through their wasteful tactics against
the Cauldron, to 170, and most of the reserve was exhausted. Suddenly then, on June 11, Rommel
struck eastward, to catch most of the remaining British armour in the converging fire of two panzer
divisions. By nightfall on June 13 the British had barely 70 tanks left, and Rommel, with some 150
still fit for action, was master of the battlefield.
The British on June 14 began a precipitate retreat from the Gazala line toward the Egyptian frontier.
A garrison of 33,000 men, however, with an immense quantity of material, was left behind in Tobruk
—on the retention of which Churchill characteristically and most unfortunately insisted in successive
telegrams from London. Rommel’s prompt reduction of Tobruk, achieved on June 21, 1942, was felt
by Great Britain as a national disaster second only to the loss of Singapore; and 80 percent of the
transport with which Rommel chased the remnant of the 8th Army eastward consisted of captured
British vehicles.
 197

At this point Auchinleck relieved Ritchie of his command and in a realistic and soldierly way ordered
a general British retreat back to the Alamein area. By June 30 the German tanks were pressing
against the British positions between el-Alamein (al-ʿAlamayn) and the Qattara Depression, some 60
miles west of Alexandria, after an advance of more than 350 miles from
Gazala. Hitler and Mussolini could expect that within a matter of days Rommel would be the master
of Egypt.
The ensuing First Battle of el-Alamein, which lasted throughout July 1942, marked the end of the
German hopes of a rapid victory. Rommel’s troops, having come so far and so fast, were exhausted;
their first assaults failed to break the defense rallied by Auchinleck; and they were also subjected to
disconcerting counterstrokes. At this point, the respite that Rommel had to grant to his men gave
Auchinleck time to bring up reinforcements. By the end of July Rommel knew that it was he rather
than Auchinleck who was now on the defensive.
Auchinleck had saved Egypt by halting Rommel’s invasion, but his counterattacks had not driven it
back. Early in August, when Churchill arrived in Cairo to review the situation, Auchinleck insisted
on postponing the resumption of the offensive until September, so that his new forces could be
properly acclimatized and trained for desert warfare. Impatient of this delay, Churchill removed
Auchinleck from the command in chief in the Middle East and gave the post to General Sir Harold
Alexander, while the command of the 8th Army was transferred eventually (after the sudden death of
Churchill’s first nominee) to General Bernard Law Montgomery. Paradoxically, Montgomery
postponed the resumption of the offensive even longer than Auchinleck had desired.
While the British in the course of August raised their strength in armour at the front to some 700
tanks, Rommel received only meagre reinforcement in the shape of infantry. He had, however, about
200 gun-armed German tanks and also 240 Italian tanks (of an obsolete model). With this armament,
in the night of August 30–31, 1942, he launched a fresh attack, intending to capture by surprise the
minefields on the southern sector of the British front and then to drive eastward with his armour for
some 30 miles before wheeling north into the 8th Army’s supply area on the coast. In the event, the
minefields proved unexpectedly deep, and by daybreak Rommel’s spearhead was only eight miles
beyond them. Delayed on their eastward drive and already under attack from the air, the two German
panzer divisions of the Afrika Korps had to make their wheel to the north at a much shorter distance
from the breach than Rommel had planned. Their assault thus ran mainly into the position held by the
British 22nd Armoured Brigade, to the southwest of the ridge ʿAlam al-Halfaʾ. Shortage of fuel on
the German side and reinforced defense on the British, together with intensification of the British
bombing, spelled the defeat of the offensive, and Rommel on September 2 decided to make a gradual
withdrawal.

The Germans’ summer offensive in southern Russia, 1942

The German plan to launch another great summer offensive crystallized in the early months of 1942.
Hitler’s decision was influenced by his economists, who mistakenly told him that Germany could not
continue the war unless it obtained petroleum supplies from the Caucasus. Hitler was the more
responsive to such arguments because they coincided with his belief that another German offensive
would so drain the Soviet Union’s manpower that the U.S.S.R. would be unable to continue the war.
His thinking was shared by his generals, who had been awed by the prodigality with which the
 198

Soviets squandered their troops in the fighting of 1941 and the spring of 1942. By this time at least
4,000,000 Soviet troops had been killed, wounded, or captured, while German casualties totaled only
1,150,000.
In the early summer of 1942 the German southern line ran from Orël southward east of Kursk,
through Belgorod, and east of Kharkov down to the loop of the Soviet salient opposite Izyum,
beyond which it veered southeastward to Taganrog, on the northern coast of the Sea of Azov. Before
the Germans were ready for their principal offensive, the Red Army in May started a drive against
Kharkov; but this premature effort actually served the Germans’ purposes, since it not only
preempted the Soviet reserves but also provoked an immediate counterstroke against its southern
flank, where the Germans broke into the salient and reached the Donets River near Izyum. The
Germans captured 240,000 Soviet prisoners in the encirclement that followed. In May also the
Germans drove the Soviet defenders of the Kerch Peninsula out of Crimea; and on June 3 the
Germans began an assault against Sevastopol, which, however, held out for a month.
The Germans’ crossing of the Donets near Izyum on June 10, 1942, was the prelude to their summer
offensive, which was launched at last on June 28: Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs’s Army
Group B, from the Kursk–Belgorod sector of the front, struck toward the middle Don
River opposite Voronezh, whence General Friedrich Paulus’ 6th Army was to wheel southeastward
against Stalingrad (Volgograd); and List’s Army Group A, from the front south of Kharkov, with
Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army, struck toward the lower Don to take Rostov and to thrust thence
northeastward against Stalingrad as well as southward into the vast oil fields of Caucasia. Army
Group B swept rapidly across a 100-mile stretch of plain to the Don and captured Voronezh on July
6. The 1st Panzer Army drove 250 miles from its starting line and captured Rostov on July 23. Once
his forces had reached Rostov, Hitler decided to split his troops so that they could both invade the
rest of the Caucasus and take the important industrial city of Stalingrad on the Volga River, 220
miles northeast of Rostov. This decision was to have fatal consequences for the Germans, since they
lacked the resources to successfully take and hold both of these objectives.
Maikop (Maykup), the great oil centre 200 miles south of Rostov, fell to Kleist’s right-hand column
on August 9, and Pyatigorsk, 150 miles east of Maikop, fell to his centre on the same day, while the
projected thrust against Stalingrad, in the opposite direction from Rostov, was being developed.
Shortage of fuel, however, slowed the pace of Kleist’s subsequent southeastward progress through
the Caucasian mountains; and, after forcing a passage over the Terek River near Mozdok early in
September, he was halted definitively just south of that river. From the end of October 1942 the
Caucasian front was stabilized; but the titanic struggle for Stalingrad, draining manpower that might
have won victory for the Germans in Caucasia, was to rage on, fatefully, for three more months (see
below Stalingrad and the German retreat, summer 1942–February 1943). Already, however, it was
evident that Hitler’s new offensive had fallen short of its objectives, and the scapegoat this time was
Halder, who was superseded by Kurt Zeitzler as chief of the army general staff.

The Allies’ First Decisive Successes

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The Solomons, Papua, Madagascar, the Aleutians, and Burma,

July 1942–May 1943

On July 2, 1942, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered limited offensives in three stages to recapture
the New Britain–New Ireland–Solomons–eastern New Guinea area: first, the seizure of Tulagi and of
the Santa Cruz Islands, with adjacent positions; second, the occupation of the central and northern
Solomons and of the northeast coast of New Guinea; third, the seizure of Rabaul and of other points
in the Bismarck Archipelago.
On July 6 the Japanese landed troops on Guadalcanal, one of the southern Solomons, and began to
construct an air base. The Allied high command, fearing further Japanese advances southeastward,
sped into the area to dislodge the enemy and to obtain a base for later advances toward Japan’s main
base in the theatre, Rabaul. The U.S. 1st Marine Division poured ashore on August 7 and secured
Guadalcanal’s airfield, Tulagi’s harbour, and neighbouring islands by dusk on August 8—the Pacific
war’s first major Allied offensive. During the night of August 8–9, Japanese cruisers and destroyers,
attempting to hold Guadalcanal, sank four U.S. cruisers, themselves sustaining one cruiser sunk and
one damaged and later sunk. On August 23–25, in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the Japanese
lost a light carrier, a destroyer, and a submarine and sustained damage to a cruiser and to a seaplane
carrier but sank an Allied destroyer and crippled a cruiser. On August 31 another U.S. carrier was
disabled, and on September 15 Japanese submarines sank the carrier Wasp and damaged a battleship.
Meanwhile, more than 6,000 Japanese reinforced their Guadalcanal garrison, attacking
the Marines’ beachhead on August 20–21 and on September 12–14. On September 18 some U.S.
reinforcements arrived, and mid-October saw about 22,000 Japanese ranged against 23,000 U.S.
troops. The sea battles of Cape Esperance and of the Santa Cruz Islands—in which two Japanese
cruisers and two destroyers were sunk and three carriers and two destroyers damaged in return for the
loss of one U.S. carrier and two destroyers, besides damage to six other Allied ships—thwarted an
attempt to reinforce further the Japanese ground troops, whose attack proved a failure (October 20–
29).
 200

U.S. Marines landing on Guadalcanal, August 1942.UPI/Bettmann Archive

After October, Allied strength was built up. Another Japanese attempt at counter-reinforcement led to
the naval Battle of Guadalcanal, fought on November 13–15: it cost Japan two battleships, three
destroyers, one cruiser, two submarines, and 11 transports and the Allies (now under
Admiral William F. Halsey) two cruisers and seven destroyers sunk and one battleship and one
cruiser damaged. Only 4,000 Japanese troops out of 12,500 managed to reach land, without
equipment; and on November 30 eight Japanese destroyers, attempting to land more troops, were
beaten off in the Battle of Tassafaronga, losing one destroyer sunk and one crippled, at an Allied cost
of one cruiser sunk and three damaged.
By Jan. 5, 1943, Guadalcanal’s Allied garrison totaled 44,000, against 22,500 Japanese. The
Japanese decided to evacuate the position, carrying away 12,000 men in early February in daring
destroyer runs. In ground warfare Japanese losses were more than 24,000 for the Guadalcanal
campaign, Allied losses about 1,600 killed and 4,250 wounded (figures that ignore the higher number
of casualties from disease). On February 21, U.S. infantry began occupying the Russell Islands, to
support advances on Rabaul.
Earlier, before Allied plans to secure eastern New Guinea had been implemented, the Japanese had
landed near Gona on the north coast of Papua (the southeastern extremity of the great island) on July
24, 1942, in an attempt to reach Port Moresby overland, via the Kokoda Trail. Advanced Japanese
units from the north, despite Australian opposition, had reached a ridge 32 miles from Port Moresby
by mid-September. Then, however, they had to withdraw exhausted to Gona and to nearby Buna,
where there were some 7,500 Japanese assembled by November 18. The next day U.S. infantry
 201

attacked them there. Each side was subsequently reinforced; but the Australians took Gona on
December 9 and the Americans Buna village on December 14. Buna government station fell to the
Allies on Jan. 2, 1943, Sanananda on January 18, and all Japanese resistance in Papua ceased on
January 22.
The retaking of Guadalcanal and Papua ended the Japanese drive south, and communications
with Australia and New Zealand were now secure. Altogether, Papua cost Japan nearly 12,000 killed
and 350 captured. Allied losses were 3,300 killed and 5,500 wounded. Allied air forces had played a
particularly important role, interdicting Japanese supply lines and transporting Allied supplies and
reinforcements.
Japan, having lost Guadalcanal, fought henceforth defensively, with worsening prospects. Its final
effort to reinforce the Lae–Salamaua position in New Guinea from the stronghold of Rabaul was a
disaster: in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, on March 2–4, 1943, the Japanese lost four destroyers and
eight transports, and only 1,000 of the 7,000 troops reached their destination. On March 25 the
Japanese Army and Navy high commands agreed on a policy of strengthening the defense of
strategic points and of counterattacking wherever possible, priority being given to the defense of the
remaining Japanese positions in New Guinea, with secondary emphasis on the Solomon Islands. In
the following three weeks, however, the Allies improved their own position in New Guinea, and
Japanese intervention was confined to air attacks. Before the end of April, moreover, the Japanese
Navy sustained a disaster: the guiding genius of the Japanese war effort, Yamamoto, was sent late in
March to command the forces based on Rabaul but was killed in an American air ambush on a flight
to Bougainville.
Developments of the Allies’ war against Japan also took place outside the southwest Pacific area.
British forces in the summer of 1942 invaded Vichy French-held Madagascar. A renewed British
offensive in September 1942 overran the island; hostilities ceased on November 5, and a Free
French administration of Madagascar took office on Jan. 8, 1943. In the North Pacific, meanwhile,
the United States had decided to expel the Japanese from the Aleutians. Having landed forces on
Adak in August 1942, they began air attacks against Kiska and Attu from Adak the next month and
from Amchitka also in the following January, while a naval blockade prevented the Japanese from
reinforcing their garrisons. Finally, U.S. troops, bypassing Kiska, invaded Attu on May 11, 1943—to
kill most of the island’s 2,300 defenders in three weeks of fighting. The Japanese then evacuated
Kiska. Bases in the Aleutians thenceforth facilitated the Allies’ bombing of the Kuril Islands.
Burma, autumn 1942–summer 1943

On the Burmese front the Allies found they could do little to dislodge the Japanese from their
occupation of that country, and what little the Allies did attempt proved abortive. Brigadier
General Orde Wingate’s “Chindits,” which were long-range penetration groups depending on
supplies from the air, crossed the Chindwin River in February 1943 and were initially successful in
severing Japanese communications on the railroad between Mandalay and Myitkyina. But the
Chindits soon found themselves in unfavourable terrain and in grave danger of encirclement, and so
they made their way back to India.
In May 1943, however, the Allies reorganized their system of command for Southeast Asia. Vice
Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten was appointed supreme commander of the South East Asia
Command (SEAC), and Stilwell was appointed deputy to Mountbatten. Stilwell at the same time was
chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek. The British–Indian forces destined for Burma
meanwhile constituted the 14th Army, under Lieutenant General William Slim, whose operational
control Stilwell agreed to accept. Shortly afterward, Auchinleck succeeded Wavell as commander in
chief in India.
 202

Montgomery’s Battle of el-Alamein and Rommel’s retreat, 1942–

43
While Churchill was still chafing in London about his generals’ delay in resuming the offensive
in Egypt, Montgomery waited for seven weeks after ʿAlam al-Halfaʾ in order to be sure of success.
He finally chose to begin his attack in the night of Oct. 23–24, 1942, when there would be moonlight
for the clearing of gaps in the German minefields.
By mid-October the British 8th Army had 230,000 men and 1,230 gun-armed tanks ready for action,
while the German–Italian forces numbered only 80,000 men, with only 210 tanks of comparable
quality ready; and in air support the British enjoyed a superiority of 1,500 to 350. Allied air
and submarine attacks on the Axis supply lines across the Mediterranean, moreover, had prevented
Rommel’s army from receiving adequate replenishments of fuel, ammunition, and food; and Rommel
himself, who had been ill before ʿAlam al-Halfaʾ, was convalescing in Austria.
The British launched their infantry attack at el-Alamein at 10:00 PM on Oct. 23, 1942, but found the
German minefields harder to clear than they had foreseen. Two days later, however, some of those
tanks were deploying six miles beyond the original front. When Rommel, ordered back
to Africa by Hitler, reached the front in the evening of October 25, half of the Germans’ available
armour was already destroyed. Nevertheless, the impetus of the British onslaught was stopped the
next day, when German antitank guns took a heavy toll of armour trying to deepen the westward
penetration. In the night of October 28 Montgomery turned the offensive northward from the wedge,
but this drive likewise miscarried. In the first week of their offensive the British lost four times as
many tanks as the Germans but still had 800 available against the latter’s remaining 90.
When Montgomery switched the British line of attack back to its original direction, early on Nov. 2,
1942, Rommel was no longer strong enough to withstand him. After expensive resistance throughout
the daytime, he ordered a retreat to Fūka (Fūkah); but in the afternoon of November 3 the retreat was
fatally countermanded by Hitler, who insisted that the Alamein position be held. The 36 hours wasted
in obeying this long-distance instruction cost Rommel his chance of making a stand at Fūka: when he
resumed his retreat, he had to race much farther back to escape successive British attempts to
intercept him on the coast road by scythelike sweeps from the south. A fortnight after resuming his
withdrawal from el-Alamein, Rommel was 700 miles to the west, at the traditional backstop of
Agheila. As the British took their time to mount their attacks, he fell back farther by stages: after
three weeks, 200 miles to Buerat (al-Buʾayrāt); after three more weeks, in mid-January 1943, the
whole distance of 350 miles past Tripoli to the Mareth Line within the frontiers of Tunisia. By that
time the Axis position in Tunisia was being battered from the west, through the execution of
“Torch.”

Stalingrad and the German retreat, summer 1942–February 1943

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The German 4th Panzer Army, after being diverted to the south to help Kleist’s attack on Rostov late
in July 1942 (see above The Germans’ summer offensive in southern Russia, 1942), was redirected
toward Stalingrad a fortnight later. Stalingrad was a large industrial city producing armaments
and tractors; it stretched for 30 miles along the banks of the Volga River. By the end of August the
4th Army’s northeastward advance against the city was converging with the eastward advance of the
6th Army, under General Friedrich Paulus, with 330,000 of the German Army’s finest troops. The
Red Army, however, put up the most determined resistance, yielding ground only very slowly and at
a high cost as the 6th Army approached Stalingrad. On August 23 a German spearhead penetrated the
city’s northern suburbs, and the Luftwaffe rained incendiary bombs that destroyed most of the city’s
wooden housing. The Soviet 62nd Army was pushed back into Stalingrad proper, where, under the
command of General Vasily I. Chuikov, it made a determined stand. Meanwhile, the Germans’
concentration on Stalingrad was increasingly draining reserves from their flank cover, which was
already strained by having to stretch so far—400 miles on the left (north), as far as Voronezh, 400
again on the right (south), as far as the Terek River. By mid-September the Germans had pushed the
Soviet forces in Stalingrad back until the latter occupied only a nine-mile-long strip of the city along
the Volga, and this strip was only two or three miles wide. The Soviets had to supply their troops by
barge and boat across the Volga from the other bank. At this point Stalingrad became the scene of
some of the fiercest and most concentrated fighting of the war; streets, blocks, and individual
buildings were fought over by many small units of troops and often changed hands again and again.
The city’s remaining buildings were pounded into rubble by the unrelenting close combat. The most
critical moment came on October 14, when the Soviet defenders had their backs so close to the Volga
that the few remaining supply crossings of the river came under German machine-gun fire. The
Germans, however, were growing dispirited by heavy losses, by fatigue, and by the approach of
winter.
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World War II: Battle of StalingradOverview of the Battle of Stalingrad (1942–43).Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

A huge Soviet counteroffensive, planned by generals G.K. Zhukov, A.M. Vasilevsky, and Nikolay

Nikolayevich Voronov, was launched on Nov. 19–20, 1942, in two spearheads, north and south of
the German salient whose tip was at Stalingrad. The twin pincers of this counteroffensive struck the
flanks of the German salient at points about 50 miles north and 50 miles south of Stalingrad and were
designed to isolate the 250,000 remaining men of the German 6th and 4th armies in the city. The
attacks quickly penetrated deep into the flanks, and by November 23 the two prongs of the attack had
linked up about 60 miles west of Stalingrad; the encirclement of the two German armies in Stalingrad
was complete. The German high command urged Hitler to allow Paulus and his forces to break out of
the encirclement and rejoin the main German forces west of the city, but Hitler would not
contemplate a retreat from the Volga River and ordered Paulus to “stand and fight.” With winter
setting in and food and medical supplies dwindling, Paulus’ forces grew weaker. In mid-December
Hitler allowed one of the most talented German commanders, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, to
form a special army corps to rescue Paulus’ forces by fighting its way eastward, but Hitler refused to
let Paulus fight his way westward at the same time in order to link up with Manstein. This fatal
decision doomed Paulus’ forces, since the main German forces now simply lacked the reserves
needed to break through the Soviet encirclement singlehandedly. Hitler exhorted the trapped German
forces to fight to the death, but on Jan. 31, 1943, Paulus surrendered; 91,000 frozen, starving men (all
that was left of the 6th and 4th armies) and 24 generals surrendered with him.
Besides being the greatest battle of the war, Stalingrad proved to be the turning point of the military
struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union. The battle used up precious German reserves,
destroyed two entire armies, and humiliated the prestigious German war machine. It also marked the
increasing skill and professionalism of a group of younger Soviet generals who had emerged as
capable commanders, chief among whom was Zhukov.
Meanwhile, early in January 1943, only just in time, Hitler acknowledged that the encirclement of
the Germans in Stalingrad would lead to an even worse disaster unless he extricated his forces from
the Caucasus. Kleist was therefore ordered to retreat, while his northern flank of 600 miles was still
protected by the desperate resistance of the encircled Paulus. Kleist’s forces were making their way
back across the Don at Rostov when Paulus at last surrendered. Had Paulus surrendered three weeks
earlier (after seven weeks of isolation), Kleist’s escape would have been impossible.
Even west of Rostov there were threats to Kleist’s line of retreat. In January, two Soviet armies, the
one under General Nikolay Fyodorovich Vatutin, the other under General Filipp Ivanovich Golikov,
had crossed the Don upstream from Serafimovich and were thrusting southwestward to
the Donets between Kamensk and Kharkov: Vatutin’s forces, having crossed the Donets at Izyum,
took Lozovaya Junction on February 11, Golikov’s took Kharkov five days later. Farther to the north,
a third Soviet army, under General Ivan Danilovich Chernyakhovsky, had initiated a drive westward
from Voronezh on February 2 and had retaken Kursk on February 8. Thus, the Germans had to
retreat from all the territory they had taken in their great summer offensive in 1942. The Caucasus
returned to Soviet hands.
A sudden thaw supervened to hamper the Red Army’s transport of supplies and reinforcements
across the swollen courses of the great rivers. With the momentum of the Soviet counteroffensive
thus slowed, the Germans made good their retreat to the Dnepr along the easier routes of the Black
Sea littoral and were able, before the end of February 1943, to mount a counteroffensive of their
own.
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The invasion of northwest Africa, November–December 1942

When the U.S. and British strategists had decided on “Torch” (Allied landings on the western coast
of North Africa) late in July 1942, it remained to settle the practical details of the operation. The
purpose of “Torch” was to hem Rommel’s forces in between U.S. troops on the west and British
troops to the east. After considerable discussion, it was finally agreed that landings, under the
supreme command of Major General Dwight D. Eisenhower, should be made on November 8 at three
places in the vicinity of Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco and on beaches near Oran and
near Algiers itself on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria. The amphibious landings would involve a
total of about 110,000 troops, most of them Americans.
The conciliation of the French on whose colonial territory the landings would be made was a more
delicate matter. All of French North Africa was still loyal to the Vichy government of Marshal
Pétain, with which the United States, unlike Great Britain, was still formally maintaining diplomatic
relations. Thus, the French commander in chief in Algeria, General Alphonse Juin, and his
counterpart in Morocco, General Charles-Auguste Noguès, were subordinate to the supreme
commander of all Vichy’s forces, namely Admiral Jean-François Darlan. American diplomats and
generals tried to gain these officers’ collaboration with the Allies in the landings, for it was vital to
try to avoid a situation in which Vichy French troops put up armed resistance to the landings at the
beaches.
The U.S.-British landings at Algiers began on November 8 and were met by little French resistance.
The simultaneous landings near Oran met stiffer resistance, and on November 9 the whole U.S. plan
of operations was dislocated by a French counterattack on the Arzew beachhead. Around Casablanca
the U.S. landings were accomplished without difficulty, but resistance developed when the invaders
tried to expand their beachheads. On November 10, however, the fighting was called off; and next
day the French authorities in Morocco concluded an armistice with the Americans.
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An Anglo-American force lands in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942, and by the following June it has linked up with British forces in
Tunisia and driven the Germans from North Africa. From The Second World War: Allied Victory (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia
Britannica Educational Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The landing in Algiers, meanwhile, was complicated by the fact that Darlan himself was in the city at
the time. The situation was muddled, with some French troops loyal to Pétain while others backed de
Gaulle and the anti-Vichy French general whom the Allies were sponsoring in North Africa, Henri
Giraud.
On Nov. 11, 1942, in reaction to the Allied landings, German and Italian forces overran
southern France, the metropolitan territory hitherto under Pétain’s immediate authority. This event
helped induce Noguès and the other French commanders in Algeria to assent to Darlan’s proposals
for a working agreement with the Allies, including recognition of Giraud as military commander in
chief of the French forces. Concluded on November 13, the agreement was promptly endorsed by
Eisenhower. French West Africa, including Senegal, with the port of Dakar, likewise followed
Darlan’s lead. The Germans, however, by mining the exit from the harbour of Toulon, forestalled
plans for the escape of the main French fleet from metropolitan France to North Africa: on
November 27, the French crews scuttled their ships to avoid capture. On Dec. 24, 1942, Darlan was
assassinated; both Royalist and Gaullist circles in North Africa had steadfastly objected to him on
political grounds. Giraud thereupon took his place, for a time, as French high commissioner in North
Africa.

Tunisia, November 1942–May 1943

Axis troops had begun to arrive in Tunisia as early as Nov. 9, 1942, and were reinforced in the
following fortnight until they numbered about 20,000 combat troops (which were subsequently
heavily reinforced by air). Thus, when the British general Kenneth Anderson, designated to
command the invasion of Tunisia from the west with the Allied 1st Army, started his offensive on
November 25, the defense was unexpectedly strong. By December 5 the 1st Army’s advance was
checked a dozen miles from Tunis and from Bizerte. Further reinforcements enabled Colonel
General Jürgen von Arnim, who assumed the command in chief of the Axis defense in Tunisia on
December 9, to expand his two bridgeheads in Tunisia until they were merged into one. Germany
and Italy had won the race for Tunis but were henceforth to succumb to the lure of retaining their
prize regardless of the greater need of conserving their strength for the defense of Europe.
After Rommel had fallen back from Libya to the Mareth Line in mid-January 1943 (see
above Montgomery’s Battle of el-Alamein and Rommel’s retreat, 1942–43), two German armies,
Arnim’s and Rommel’s, were holding the north and the south of the eastern littoral both against
Anderson’s 1st Army attacking from the west and against Montgomery’s 8th from the southeast.
Rommel judged that a counterstroke should be delivered first against the Allies in the west.
Accordingly, on February 14 the Axis forces delivered a major attack against U.S. forces between
the Fāʾiḍ Pass in the north and Gafsa in the south. West of Fāʾiḍ, the 21st Panzer Division, under
General Heinz Ziegler, destroyed 100 U.S. tanks and drove the Americans back 50 miles. In
the Kasserine Pass, however, the Allies put up some stiffer opposition.
When on February 19 Rommel received authority to continue his attack, he was ordered to advance
not against Tébessa but northward from Kasserine against Thala—where, in fact, Alexander was
expecting him. Having overcome the stubborn U.S. resistance in the Kasserine Pass on February 20,
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the Germans entered Thala the next day, only to be expelled a few hours later by Alexander’s reserve
troops. His chance having been forfeited, Rommel began a gradual withdrawal on February 22.
The delays ensuing from the frustration of Rommel’s stroke against the 1st Army reduced the
effectiveness of his stroke against the 8th. Whereas on Feb. 26, 1943, Montgomery had had only one
division facing the Mareth Line, he quadrupled his strength in the following week, massing 400 tanks
and 500 antitank guns. Rommel’s attack, on March 6, was brought to an early halt, and 50 German
tanks were lost. A sick man and a disappointed soldier, Rommel relinquished his command.
The Allied 1st Army resumed the offensive on March 17, with attacks by the U.S. II Corps, under
General George Patton, on the roads through the mountains, with the aim of cutting the Afrika
Korps’ line of retreat up the coast to Tunis; but these attacks were checked by the Germans in the
passes. In the night of March 20–21, however, the British 8th Army launched a frontal assault on the
Mareth Line, combined with an outflanking movement by the New Zealand Corps toward el-Hamma
(al-Ḥāmmah) in the Germans’ rear; and a few days later, seeing the frontal assault to have failed,
Montgomery switched the main weight of his attack to the flank. Threatened with encirclement, the
Germans decided to abandon the Mareth Line, which the 8th Army occupied on March 28; but the
German defenses at el-Hamma held out long enough to enable the rest of the Afrika Korps to retreat
without much loss to a new line on the Wādī al-ʿAkārīt, north of Gabès. The new line, however,
was breached by the 8th Army on April 6; and, meanwhile, the Americans were also advancing on
the Axis troops’ rear from Gafsa. By the following morning the Afrika Korps was retreating rapidly
northward along the littoral toward Tunis, and by April 11 it had joined hands with Arnim’s forces
for the defense of a 100-mile perimeter stretching around Tunis and Bizerte (Banzart).
Thanks to the rapidity of the Afrika Korps’ retreat from Wādī al-ʿAkārīt, the German high command
had an opportunity to withdraw its forces from the rump of Tunisia to Sicily, but it chose instead to
defend the indefensible rump. The defenders indeed withstood the converging assaults that the 8th
and 1st armies delivered against the perimeter from April 20 to April 23; but on May 6 a
concentrated attack by Allied artillery, aircraft, infantry, and tanks was launched on the two-mile
front of the Medjerda (Majardah) Valley leading to Tunis; and on May 7 the city fell to the leading
British armoured forces, while the Americans and the French almost simultaneously captured
Bizerte. At the same time, the Germans’ line of retreat into the Cap Bon Peninsula was severed by an
armoured division’s swift turn southeastward from Tunis. A general collapse of the German
resistance followed, the Allies taking more than 250,000 prisoners, including 125,000 German troops
and Arnim himself. North Africa had been cleared of Axis forces and was now completely in Allied
hands. Its capture insured the safety of Allied shipping and naval movements throughout the
Mediterranean, and North Africa would serve as a base for future Allied operations against Italy
itself.
The Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea, 1942–45

The year 1942 was, on the whole, a favourable one for the German U-boats. First, the U.S. entry into
the war entitled them to infest the U.S. coast of the North Atlantic; and it was not until the middle of
the year that the Allies’ introduction of the convoy system from the Caribbean northward constrained
the raiders to go so far afield as the waters between Brazil and West Africa. Second, U-tankers were
developed; i.e., large converted U-boats equipped to provide fuel, torpedoes, and other supplies to U-
boats operating in remote waters. In the course of 1942, the U-boats sank more than 6,266,000 tons
of shipping; and, since in the same period their operational strength rose from 91 to 212, it seemed
conceivable that they might soon score their desired target of 800,000 tons of sinkings per month.
March 1943 saw the climax of the U-boats’ good fortune: their strength rose to 240; they sank in that
single month 627,377 tons of shipping; and, in the greatest convoy battle of the war, when 20 of them
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attacked two convoys merged into one, they sank 21 ships (141,000 tons) out of 77 with the loss of
only one of their own number. The anticlimax followed, thanks to five developments of the Allies’
counteraction: “support groups” were reintroduced; aircraft carriers became progressively available
for escorts; more and more long-range Liberator aircraft began to cover the convoys offshore; ships
were equipped with a radar set of very short wavelength, the probing of which was undetectable to
the U-boats; and a regular offensive against U-boats on their transit routes was launched from the air
(56 were destroyed in April–May 1943). The U-boats sank 327,943 tons in April, 264,852 in May,
only 95,753 in June 1943; and for the rest of the war monthly totals were less than 100,000 tons
except in July and September 1943 and in March 1944.
Late in 1944 the U-boats were equipped with the snorkel breathing tube, which provided them with
the necessary oxygen to recharge their batteries under water and so converted them from submersible
torpedo boats into almost complete submarines virtually undetectable to radar. About the same time a
new model of U-boat, with greater underwater speed and endurance, came into operation. These
improvements came too late, however, because the Allies’ surface and air resources for the
protection of the convoys were already overwhelming.

Air warfare, 1942–43

Early in 1942 the RAF bomber command, headed by Sir Arthur Harris, began an intensification of

the Allies’ growing strategic air offensive against Germany. These attacks, which were aimed against
factories, rail depots, dockyards, bridges, and dams and against cities and towns themselves, were
intended to both destroy Germany’s war industries and to deprive its civilian population of their
housing, thus sapping their will to continue the war. The characteristic feature of the new program
was its emphasis on area bombing, in which the centres of towns would be the points of aim for
nocturnal raids.
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Danzig harbour in flames after an attack by Allied bombers in World War II. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Already in March 1942 an exceptionally destructive bombing raid, using the Germans’
own incendiary method, had been made on Lübeck; and intensive attacks were also made
on Essen (site of the Krupp munitions works) and other Ruhr towns. In the night of May 30–31 more
than 1,000 bombers were dispatched against Cologne, where they did heavy damage to one-third of
that city’s built-up area. Such operations, however, became highly expensive to the bomber
command, particularly because of the defense put up by the German night fighter force. Interrupted
for two months during which the bombers concentrated their attention on U-boat bases on the Bay of
Biscay, the air offensive against Germany was resumed in March 1943. In the following 12 months,
moreover, its resources were to be increased formidably, so that by March 1944 the bomber
command’s average daily operational strength had risen to 974 from about 500 in 1942. These
numbers helped the RAF to concentrate effectively against major industrial targets, such as those in
the Ruhr. The phases of the resumed offensive were: (1) the Battle of the Ruhr, from March to July
1943, comprising 18,506 sorties and costing 872 aircraft shot down and 2,126 damaged, its most
memorable operation being that of the night of May 16–17, when the Möhne Dam in the Ruhr Basin
and the Eder Dam in the Weser Basin were breached, (2) the Battle of Hamburg, from July to
November 1943, comprising 17,021 sorties and costing 695 bombers lost and 1,123 damaged but,
nevertheless, thanks in part to the new Window antiradar and “H2S” radar devices, achieving an
unprecedented measure of devastation, since four out of its 33 major actions, with a little help from
minor attacks, killed about 40,000 people and drove nearly 1,000,000 from their homes, and (3)
the Battle of Berlin, from November 1943 to March 1944, comprising 20,224 sorties but costing
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1,047 bombers lost and 1,682 returned damaged and achieving, on the whole, less devastation than
the Battle of Hamburg.
The U.S. 8th Air Force, based in Great Britain, also took part in the strategic offensive against
Germany from January 1943. Its bombers, Flying Fortresses (B-17s) and Liberators (B-24s), attacked
industrial targets in daylight. They proved, however, to be very vulnerable to German fighter attack
whenever they went beyond the range of their own escort of fighters—that is to say, farther than the
distance from Norfolk to Aachen: the raid against the important ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt,
for instance, on Oct. 14, 1943, lost 60 out of the 291 bombers participating, and 138 of those that
returned were damaged. Not until December 1943 was the P-51B (Mustang III) brought into
operation with the 8th Air Force—a long-range fighter that portended a change in the balance of air
power. The Germans, meanwhile, continued to increase their production of aircraft and, in particular,
of their highly successful fighters.

German-occupied Europe

Hitler’s racist ideology and his brutal conception of power politics caused him to pursue certain aims

in those European countries conquered by the Germans in the period 1939–42. Hitler intended that
those western and northern European areas in which civil administrations were installed—
the Netherlands and Norway—would at some later date become part of the German Reich, or nation.
Those countries left by Germany under military administration (which originally had been imposed
everywhere), such as France and Serbia, would eventually be included more loosely in a German-
dominated European bloc. Poland and the Soviet Union, on the other hand, were to be a colonial area
for German settlement and economic exploitation.
Without regard to these distinctions, the SS, the elite corps of the Nazi Party, possessed exceptional
powers throughout German-dominated Europe and in the course of time came to perform more and
more executive functions, even in those countries under military administration. Similarly, the
powers that Hitler gave to his chief labour commissioner, Fritz Sauckel, for the compulsory
enrollment of foreign workers into the German armaments industry were soon applied to the whole
of German-dominated Europe and ultimately turned 7,500,000 people into forced or slave labourers.
Above all, however, there was the Final Solution of the “Jewish question” as ordered by Hitler,
which meant the physical extermination of the Jewish people throughout Europe wherever German
rule was in force or where German influence was decisive.
The Final Solution—that is to say the step beyond half-measures such as the concentration of
Poland’s Jews into overcrowded ghettoes—was introduced concurrently with Germany’s
preparations for the military campaign against the Soviet Union, since Hitler believed that the
annihilation of the Communists entailed not only the extermination of the Soviet ruling class but also
what he believed to be its “biological basis”—the millions of Jews in western Russia and
the Ukraine. Accordingly, with the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, special mobile
killing squads began systematically shooting the Jewish population on conquered Soviet territory in
the rear of the advancing German armies; in a few months, up to the end of 1941, they had killed
about 1,400,000 people. Meanwhile, plans were made in 1941 to similarly exterminate the Jews of
central and western Europe. At the Wannsee Conference of Nazi and SS chiefs in January 1942, it
was agreed that those Jews would be deported and sent to camps in eastern Poland where they would
 211

be killed en masse or made to work as slave labourers until they perished. In the period from May
1942 to September 1944 more than 4,200,000 Jews were killed in such death camps
as Auschwitz (Oświęcim), Treblinka, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, and Sobibor. About 5,700,000
Jews died in the course of the Final Solution.

World War II: Liberation of concentration camps U.S. soldiers, having defeated the German military, come face-to-face with the horrors of Nazi
concentration camps. From “The Second World War: Allied Victory” (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational
Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

While Hitler destined the Jews in his empire to physical extermination, he regarded the Slavs,
principally the Poles and the Russians, as “subhumans” who were to be subjected to continual
decimation and used as a pool of cheap labour, that is to say, reduced to slavery. Poland became the
training ground for this purpose. Upon the German conquest of Poland in 1939, Hitler ordered the SS
to kill a large proportion of the Polish intelligentsia. A reign of terror against the nationalistic-minded
Polish ruling classes began, and by the war’s end a total of 3,000,000 Poles (in addition to 3,000,000
Polish Jews) had been killed. Hitler further willed that the whole mass of Slavs and Balts in the
occupied portions of the Soviet Union should be indiscriminately subjected to German domination
and should be economically exploited without hindrance or compassion. In the event,
the Ukraine was the major area subject to economic exploitation and also became the main source
of slave labour. When the German armies first entered the Ukraine in July 1941, many Ukrainians
had welcomed the Germans as their liberators from Stalinist terror and collectivization. But this
goodwill soon turned to resentment as the Germans requisitioned large quantities of grain from the
farms, forcibly deported several million Ukrainians for work in Germany, and engaged in brutal
reprisals against civilians for acts of resistance or sabotage.
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execution; HolocaustGerman troops executing a group of Poles.Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen Widerstandes, courtesy of USHMM Photo
Archives

These inhumane occupation policies were practiced to a greater or lesser extent in all the countries
occupied by the Germans, and the result was the beginning in 1940–41 of armed,
underground resistance movements in those countries. Underground resistance was especially
effective in the Soviet Union because it functioned behind fronts on which the German armies were
still engaged in battle with the Red Army. The Soviet Partisans, as they were called, could thus
covertly receive arms, equipment, and direction from the Soviet forces at the front itself. Soviet
Partisans, like the members of other nations’ Resistance movements, harassed and disrupted German
military and economic activities by blowing up ammunition dumps and communications and
transport facilities, sabotaging factories, ambushing small German units, and gathering military
intelligence for use by the Allied armies. By 1944 the Resistance organizations in the Soviet Union,
Poland, Yugoslavia, France, and Greece had grown quite large and were holding down many
German divisions that were badly needed at the battlefront. In eastern Europe and Yugoslavia, the
Resistance came to control large tracts of land in more inaccessible areas such as forests, mountain
ranges, and swamplands. Some Resistance organizations, such as the Partisans in Yugoslavia and the
National Liberation Movement in Greece, were Communist ones, while others, such as the Maquis in
France and the Home Army in Poland, comprised people of many different political persuasions,
though they were invariably anti-Fascists.
The German occupation authorities’ attempts to eradicate the Resistance in most cases merely fanned
the flames, due to the Germans’ use of indiscriminate reprisals against civilians. It is generally agreed
that by 1944 the Germans had earned the overwhelming antipathy of most of the people in the
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occupied nations of Europe. It should be noted, however, that the German occupation was in general
far harsher in eastern Europe and the Balkans than in western Europe. In the Soviet Union, Poland,
Yugoslavia, and Greece, a process of Resistance guerrilla warfare and Nazi reprisals began in 1941
and rose to a crescendo in 1943–44 as the fury of Nazi racism resulted in a war of annihilation upon
the Slavic peoples.

Casablanca and Trident, January–May 1943

To decide what should be done after victory in North Africa, Roosevelt and Churchill, with their
advisers, met at Casablanca in mid-January 1943. After long argument, it was eventually agreed
that Sicily should be the next Axis area to be taken, in July. For the war against Japan, it was decided
that two offensive operations should be undertaken: MacArthur should move toward the Japanese
base at Rabaul, on the island of New Britain; and convergent movements on Burma should be made
by the British from the mainland of India and by the Americans from the sea. Politically,
the Casablanca Conference owes its importance to the fact that, at its end, Roosevelt publicly
announced a demand for the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.
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Casablanca Conference; Giraud, Henri; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Gaulle, Charles de; Churchill, Winston Allied leaders (from left) French General
Henri Giraud, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, French General Charles de Gaulle, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the
Casablanca Conference, January 1943.U.S. Army Photo

Only four months after Casablanca it became necessary to hold another Anglo-U.S. conference. In
mid-May 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their advisers met, in Washington, D.C., for the conference
code-named Trident. There the Sicilian project was effectively confirmed, and the date May 1, 1944,
was prescribed—definitively in the U.S view, provisionally in the British—for the landing of 29
divisions in France; but the question whether the conquest of Sicily should be followed, as the British
proposed, by an invasion of Italy was left unsettled.
The Eastern Front, February–September 1943

The German counteroffensive of February 1943 threw back the Soviet forces that had been
advancing toward the Dnepr River on the Izyum sector of the front, and by mid-March the Germans
had retaken Kharkov and Belgorod and reestablished a front on the Donets River. Hitler also
authorized the German forces to fall back, in March, from their advanced positions facing Moscow to
a straighter line in front of Smolensk and Orël. Finally, there was the existence of the large Soviet
bulge, or salient, around Kursk, between Orël and Belgorod, which extended for about 150 miles
from north to south and protruded 100 miles into the German lines. This salient irresistibly tempted
Hitler and Zeitzler into undertaking a new and extremely ambitious offensive instead of remaining
content to hold their newly shortened front.

Soviet forces use signal flares to illuminate a night attack during the battle of Kursk in July–August 1943. Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy
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Hitler concentrated all efforts on this offensive without regard to the risk that an unsuccessful attack
would leave him without reserves to maintain any subsequent defense of his long front. The
Germans’ increasing difficulty in building up their forces with fresh drafts of men and equipment
was reflected in the increased delay that year in opening the summer offensive. Three months’ pause
followed the close of the winter campaign.

By contrast, the Red Army had improved much since 1942, both in quality and in quantity. The flow
of new equipment had greatly increased, as had the number of new divisions, and its numerical
superiority over the Germans was now about 4 to 1. Better still, its leadership had improved with
experience: generals and junior commanders alike had become more skilled tacticians. That could
already be discerned in the summer of 1943, when the Soviets waited to let the Germans lead off and
commit themselves deeply to an offensive, and so stood well-poised to exploit the Germans’ loss of
balance in lunging.
The German offensive against the Kursk salient was launched on July 5, 1943, and into it Hitler
threw 20 infantry divisions and 17 armoured divisions having a total of about 3,000 tanks. But the
German tank columns got entangled in the deep minefields that the Soviets had laid, forewarned by
the long preparation of the offensive. The Germans advanced only 10–30 miles, and no large bag of
Soviet prisoners was taken, since the Red Army had withdrawn their main forces from the salient
before the German attack began. After a week of effort the German armoured divisions were
seriously reduced by the well-prepared Soviet antitank defenses in the salient. On July 12, as the
Germans began to pull out, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive upon the German positions in the
salient and met with great success, taking Orël on August 5. By this time the Germans had lost 2,900
tanks and 70,000 men in the Battle of Kursk, which was the largest tank battle in history. The Soviets
continued to advance steadily, taking Belgorod and then Kharkov. In September the Soviet advance
was accelerated, and by the end of the month the Germans in the Ukraine had been driven back to the
Dnepr.
The Southwest and South Pacific, June–October 1943

A Pacific military conference held in Washington, D.C., in March 1943 produced a new schedule of
operations calling for the development of some counterattacks against the Japanese. The reduction of
the threat from the large Japanese naval base at Rabaul, by encirclement if not by the capture of that
stronghold, was a primary objective for MacArthur.
Between June 22 and June 30, 1943, two U.S. regiments invaded Woodlark and Kiriwina islands
(northeast of the tip of Papua), whence aircraft could range over not only the Coral Sea but also the
approaches to Rabaul and to the Solomons. At the same time, U.S. and Australian units advanced
from Buna along the coast of New Guinea toward Lae and Salamaua, while other Australian forces
simultaneously advanced from Wau in the hinterland; and in the night of June 29–30, U.S. forces
secured Nassau Bay as a base for further advances against the same positions.
U.S. landings on New Georgia and on Rendova in the Solomons, however, also made in the night of
June 29–30, provoked the Japanese into strong counteraction: between July 5 and July 16, in the
battles of Kula Gulf and of Kolombangara, the Allies lost one cruiser and two destroyers and had
three more cruisers crippled; and the Japanese, though they lost a cruiser and two destroyers, were
able to land considerable reinforcements (from New Britain). Only substantial counter-reinforcement
secured the New Georgia group of islands for the Allies, who, moreover, began on August 15 to
extend their operation to the island of Vella Lavella also. In the last two months of the struggle,
which ended with the Japanese evacuation of Vella Lavella on October 7, the Japanese sank an
Allied destroyer and crippled two more but lost a further six of their own; and their attempt to defend
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the Solomon Islands cost them 10,000 lives, as against the Americans’ 1,150 killed and 4,100
wounded.
Meanwhile, U.S. planes on August 17–18 had attacked Japanese bases at Wewak (on the New
Guinea coast far to the west of Lae) and destroyed more than 200 aircraft there. On September 4 an
Australian division landed near Lae, and the next day U.S. paratroops dropped at Nadzab, above Lae
on the Markham River, where they were soon joined by an Australian airborne division. Salamaua
fell to the Allies on September 12, Lae on September 16, and Finschhafen, on the Huon
Peninsula behind Lae, on October 2. On Sept. 30, 1943, the Japanese made a new policy decision: a
last defense line was to be established from western New Guinea and the Carolines to the Marianas
by spring 1944, to be held at all costs, and also to be used as a base for counterattacks.

The Allied Landings In Europe And The Defeat Of

The Axis Powers
Developments from autumn 1943 to summer 1944

Sicily and the fall of Mussolini, July–August 1943

Hitler’s greatest strategic disadvantage in opposing the Allies’ imminent reentry into Europe lay in
the immense stretch of Germany’s conquests, from the west coast of France to the east coast
of Greece. It was difficult for him to gauge where the Allies would strike next. The Allies’ greatest
strategic advantage lay in the wide choice of alternative objectives and in the powers of distraction
they enjoyed through their superior sea power. Hitler, while always having to guard against a cross-
Channel invasion from England’s shores, had cause to fear that the Anglo-American armies in North
Africa might land anywhere on his southern front between Spain and Greece.
Having failed to save its forces in Tunisia, the Axis had only 10 Italian divisions of various sorts and
two German panzer units stationed on the island of Sicily at midsummer 1943. The Allies,
meanwhile, were preparing to throw some 478,000 men into the island—150,000 of them in the first
three days of the invasion. Under the supreme command of Alexander, Montgomery’s British 8th
Army and Patton’s U.S. 7th Army were to be landed on two stretches of beach 40 miles long, 20
miles distant from one another, the British in the southeast of the island, the Americans in the south.
The Allies’ air superiority in the Mediterranean theatre was so great by this time—more than 4,000
aircraft against some 1,500 German and Italian ones—that the Axis bombers had been withdrawn
from Sicily in June to bases in north-central Italy.
On July 10 Allied seaborne troops landed on Sicily. The coastal defenses, manned largely
by Sicilians unwilling to turn their homeland into a battlefield for the Germans’ sake, collapsed
rapidly enough. The British forces had cleared the whole southeastern part of the island in the first
three days of the invasion. The Allies’ drive toward Messina then took the form of
a circuitous movement by the British around Mount Etna in combination with an eastward drive by
the Americans, who took Palermo, on the western half of the northern coast, on July 22. Meanwhile,
the German armoured strength in Sicily had been reinforced.
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After the successive disasters sustained by the Axis in Africa, many of the Italian leaders were
desperately anxious to make peace with the Allies. The invasion of Sicily, representing an immediate
threat to the Italian mainland, prompted them to action. On the night of July 24–25, 1943, when
Mussolini revealed to the Fascist Grand Council that the Germans were thinking of evacuating the
southern half of Italy, the majority of the council voted for a resolution against him, and he resigned
his powers. On July 25 the king, Victor Emmanuel III, ordered the arrest of Mussolini and entrusted
Marshal Pietro Badoglio with the formation of a new government. The new government entered into
secret negotiations with the Allies, despite the presence of sizable German forces in Italy.
A few days after the fall of Mussolini, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander in
chief in Italy, decided that the Axis troops in Sicily must be evacuated; the local Italian commander
thought so too. While rearguard actions held up the Allies at Adrano (on the western face of Mount
Etna) and at Randazzo (to the north), 40,000 Germans and 60,000 Italian troops were safely
withdrawn across the Strait of Messina to the mainland, mostly in the week ending on August 16,
1943—the day before the Allies’ entry into Messina.
The Allies sustained about 22,800 casualties in their conquest of Sicily. The Axis powers suffered
about 165,000 casualties, of whom 30,000 were Germans.

The Quadrant Conference (Quebec I)

The success of the Sicilian operation and the fall of Mussolini converted the American military and
political leadership into supporters of a campaign in Italy. Furthermore, Lieutenant General Sir
Frederick Morgan, who after Casablanca had been designated chief of staff to the Supreme Allied
Commander (COSSAC), produced a detailed and realistic plan for the long-envisaged invasion of
France from Great Britain, thus enabling the U.S. strategists to calculate more precisely how much of
the Allies’ resources were needed for that purpose and how much could be spared for operations in
the Mediterranean and for the Pacific. With regard to the Pacific, plans sponsored by Admiral Nimitz
for operations against the Gilbert and Marshall islands apart from the enterprise against Rabaul were
approved early in August 1943.
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King, W.L. Mackenzie; Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Churchill, Winston (From left, seated) Canadian Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, U.S.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at an Allied conference in Quebec, 1943. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The new turn of strategical thought necessitated a new Anglo-U.S. conference, which took place
in Quebec in mid-August 1943 and was code-named “Quadrant.” After vigorous debate, the question
of the timing of “Overlord” was eventually left open, but it was agreed that the strength of the assault
force should exceed the original estimate by 25 percent, that the cross-Channel landing should be
supported by a landing in southern France, and that a U.S. officer should be in command of
“Overlord.” It was also decided that a new Southeast Asia theatre of war should be organized, under
British command.

The Allies’ invasion of Italy and the Italian volte-face, 1943

From Sicily, the Allies had a wide choice of directions for their next offensive. Calabria, the “toe”
of Italy, was the nearest and most obvious possible destination, and the “shin” was also vulnerable;
and the “heel” was also very attractive. The two army corps of Montgomery’s 8th Army crossed
the Strait of Messina and landed on the “toe” of Italy on September 3, 1943; but, though the initial
resistance was practically negligible, they made only very slow progress, as the terrain, with only two
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good roads running up the coasts of the great Calabrian “toe” prevented the deployment of large
forces. On the day of the landing, however, the Italian government at last agreed to the Allies’ secret
terms for a capitulation. It was understood that Italy would be treated with leniency in direct
proportion to the part that it would take, as soon as possible, in the war against Germany. The
capitulation was announced on September 8.
The landing on the “shin” of Italy, at Salerno, just south of Naples, was begun on September 9, by
the mixed U.S.–British 5th Army, under U.S. General Mark Clark. Transported by 700 ships, 55,000
men made the initial assault, and 115,000 more followed up. At first they were faced only by the
German 16th Panzer Division; but Kesselring, though he had only eight weak divisions to defend all
southern and central Italy, had had time to plan since the fall of Mussolini and had been expecting a
blow at the “shin.” His counterstroke made the success of the Salerno landing precarious for six days,
and it was not until October 1 that the 5th Army entered Naples.
By contrast, the much smaller landing on the “heel” of Italy, which had been made on September 2
(the day preceding the invasion of the “toe”), took the Germans by surprise. Notwithstanding the
paucity of its strength in men and in equipment, the expedition captured two good ports, Taranto and
Brindisi, in a very short time; but it lacked the resources to advance promptly. Nearly a fortnight
passed before another small force was landed at Bari, the next considerable port north of Brindisi, to
push thence unopposed into Foggia.
It was the threat to their rear from the “heel” of Italy and from Foggia that had induced the Germans
to fall back from their positions defending Naples against the 5th Army. When the Italian
government, in pursuance of a Badoglio–Eisenhower agreement of September 29, declared war
against Germany on October 13, 1943, Kesselring was already receiving reinforcements and
consolidating the German hold on central and northern Italy. The 5th Army was checked temporarily
on the Volturno River, only 20 miles north of Naples, then more lastingly on the Garigliano River,
while the 8th Army, having made its way from Calabria up the Adriatic coast, was likewise held on
the Sangro River. Autumn and midwinter passed without the Allies’ making any notable impression
on the Germans’ Gustav Line, which ran for 100 miles from the mouth of the Garigliano through
Cassino and over the Apennines to the mouth of the Sangro.
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Ortona; World War IIThe ruins of Ortona, Italy, after liberation from the German army by Canadian forces, December 1943. Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc.

The western Allies and Stalin: Cairo and Tehrān, 1943

Relations between the western Allies and the U.S.S.R. were still delicate. Besides their inability to
satisfy Soviet demands for convoys of supplies and for an early invasion of France, the Americans
and the British were embarrassed by the discrepancy between their political war aims and Stalin’s.
The longest-standing difference was about Poland. While Poles were still fighting on the Allies’ side
and acknowledging the authority of General Władysław Sikorski’s London-based Polish government
in exile, Stalin was trying to get the Allies to consent to the U.S.S.R.’s retention, after the war, of all
the territory taken from Poland by virtue of the German–Soviet pacts of 1939. On January 16, 1943,
the Soviet government announced that Poles from the border territories in dispute were being treated
as Soviet citizens and drafted into the Red Army. On April 25, the Soviet government severed
relations with the London Poles, and Moscow subsequently began to build up its own puppet
government for postwar Poland.
Besides the quarrel over Poland, the western Allies and the U.S.S.R. were also at variance with
regard to the postwar fate of other European states still under German domination; but the Americans
and the British were really more interested in maintaining the Soviet war effort against Germany than
in insisting, at the risk of offense to Stalin, on the detailed application of their own loudly but
vaguely enunciated war aims.
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Sextant, the conference of November 22–27, 1943, for which Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-
shek met in Cairo, was, on Roosevelt’s insistence, devoted mainly to discussing plans for a British–
U.S.–Chinese operation in northern Burma. Little was produced by Sextant except the Cairo
Declaration, published on December 1, a further statement of war aims. It prescribed inter alia
that Japan was to surrender all Pacific islands acquired since 1914, to retrocede Manchuria, Formosa,
and the Pescadores to China, and to give up all other territory “taken by violence and greed”; and, in
addition, it was stipulated that Korea was in due course to become independent.
From Cairo, Roosevelt and Churchill went to Tehrān, to meet Stalin at the Eureka conference of
November 28–December 1. Stalin renewed the Soviet promise of military intervention against Japan,
but he primarily wanted an assurance that “Overlord” (the invasion of France) would indeed take
place in 1944. Reassured about this by Roosevelt, he declared that the Red Army would attack
simultaneously on the Eastern Front. On the political plane, Stalin now demanded the Baltic coast
of East Prussia for the U.S.S.R. as well as the territories annexed in 1939–40. The main communique
of the conference was accompanied by a joint declaration guaranteeing the postwar restoration of
Iran. Returning to Cairo, Roosevelt and Churchill spent six more days, December 2–7, in staff talks
to compose their differences on strategy. They finally agreed that “Overlord” (with Eisenhower in
command) should have first claim on resources.

(Left to right) Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Tehrān
Conference, December 1943.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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German strategy, from 1943

From late 1942 German strategy, every feature of which was determined by Hitler, was solely aimed
at protecting the still very large area under German control—most of Europe and part of North Africa
—against a future Soviet onslaught on the Eastern Front and against future Anglo-U.S. offensives on
the southern and western fronts. The Germans’ vague hopes that the Allies would shrink from such
costly tasks or that the “unnatural” coalition of Western capitalism and Soviet Communism would
break up before achieving victory were disappointed, so Hitler, in accordance with his dictum that
“Germany shall either be a world power or not be at all,” consciously resolved to preside over the
downfall of the German nation. He gave inflexible orders whereby whole armies were made to stand
their ground in tactically hopeless positions and were forbidden to surrender under any
circumstances. The initial success of this strategy in preventing a German rout during the Soviet
winter counteroffensive of 1941–42 had blinded Hitler to its impracticability in the very different
military circumstances on the Eastern Front by 1943, by which time the Germans simply lacked
sufficient numbers of troops to defend an extremely long front against much more numerous Soviet
forces. (By December 1943 the 3,000,000 German troops there were opposed by about 5,500,000
Soviet troops.)

The strategy of keeping his armies stationary was made easier for Hitler by the complete ascendancy
he had achieved over his generals, who disputed with Hitler only at the risk of losing their commands
or worse. Frequent changes were made in the command of the various army groups and armies, with
the result that during 1943–44 most of the talented commanders who had been associated with
Germany’s past successes were removed, and everyone who was suspected of a critical attitude at
headquarters was silenced.

From late 1943 on, Hitler’s strategy, which from a political standpoint remains inexplicable to most
Western historians, was to strengthen the German forces in western Europe at the expense of those
on the Eastern Front. In view of the danger of the great Anglo-U.S. invasion of western Europe that
seemed imminent by early 1944, the loss of some part of his eastern conquests evidently seemed to
Hitler to be less serious. Hitler continued to insist on the primacy of the war in the west after the start
of the Allied invasion of northern France in June 1944, and while his armies made strenuous efforts
to contain the Allied bridgehead in Normandy for the next two months, Hitler accepted the
annihilation of the German Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front by the Soviet summer offensive
(from June 1944), which brought the Red Army in a few weeks’ time to the Vistula River and the
borders of East Prussia. But the Western Front likewise crumbled in a few weeks, whereupon the
Allies advanced to Germany’s western borders. Then, still adhering to his guiding principle, Hitler
assembled on the Western Front all that was left of his forces there and tried to drive the British and
Americans back in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. This campaign had some
successes but meant that Germany’s last battleworthy units were used on the Western Front while the
Red Army, heavily outnumbering the remaining German troops in the east, resumed its drive on the
eastern frontiers of Germany and reached the Oder River by the end of January 1945.
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The Eastern Front, October 1943–April 1944

By the end of the first week of October 1943, the Red Army had established several bridgeheads on
the right bank of the Dnieper River. Then, while General N.F. Vatutin’s drive against Kiev was
engaging the Germans’ attention, General Ivan Stepanovich Konev suddenly pushed so far forward
from the Kremenchug bridgehead (more than halfway downstream between Kiev and
Dnepropetrovsk) that the German forces within the great bend of the Dnieper to the south would
have been isolated if Manstein had not stemmed the Soviet advance just in time to extricate them. By
early November the Red Army had reached the mouth of the Dnieper also, and the Germans in
Crimea were isolated. Kiev, too, fell to Vatutin on November 6, and Zhitomir, 80 miles to the west,
and Korosten, north of Zhitomir, fell in the next 12 days. Farther north, however, the Germans, who
had already fallen back from Smolensk to a line covering the upper Dnieper, repelled with little
difficulty five rather predictable Soviet thrusts toward Minsk in the last quarter of 1943.
Vatutin’s forces from the Zhitomir–Korosten sector advanced westward across the prewar Polish
frontier on January 4, 1944, and, though another German flank attack, by troops drawn
from adjacent fronts, slowed them down, they had reached Lutsk, 100 miles farther west, a month
later. Vatutin’s left wing, meanwhile, wheeled southward to converge with Konev’s right, so that 10
German divisions were encircled near Korsun, on the Dnieper line south of Kiev. Vainly trying to
save those 10 divisions, the Germans had to abandon Nikopol, in the Dnieper bend far to the south,
with its valuable manganese mines.
March 1944 saw a triple thrust by the Red Army: Zhukov, succeeding to Vatutin’s command, drove
southwest toward Tarnopol, to outflank the Germans on the upper stretches of the southern Bug
River. General Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky, in the south, advanced across the mouth of the
latter river from that of the Dnieper; and between them Konev, striking over the central stretch of the
Bug, reached the Dniester, 70 miles ahead, and succeeded in crossing it. When Zhukov had crossed
the upper Prut River and Konev was threatening Iaşi on the Moldavian stretch of the river,
the Carpathian Mountains were the only natural barrier remaining between the Red Army and the
Hungarian Plain. German troops occupied Hungary on March 20, since Hitler suspected that the
Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, might not resist the Red Army to the utmost.
A German counterstroke from the Lwów area of southern Poland against Zhukov’s extended flank
early in April not only put an end to the latter’s overhasty pressure on the Tatar (Yablonitsky) Pass
through the Carpathians but also made possible the withdrawal of some of the German forces
endangered by the Red Army’s March operation. Konev, too, was halted in front of Iaşi; but his left
swung southward down the Dniester to converge with Malinovsky’s drive on Odessa. That great port
fell to the Red Army on April 10. On May 9 the Germans in Crimea abandoned Sevastopol, caught
as they were between Soviet pincers from the mainland north of the isthmus and from the east across
the Strait of Kerch.
At the northern end of the Eastern Front, a Soviet offensive in January 1944 had been followed by an
orderly German retreat from the fringes of the long-besieged Leningrad area to a shorter line
exploiting the great lakes farther to the south. The retreat was beneficial to the Germans but
sacrificed their land link with the Finns, who now found themselves no better off than they had been
in 1939–40. Finland in February 1944 sought an armistice from the U.S.S.R., but the latter’s terms
proved unacceptable.
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The war in the Pacific, October 1943–August 1944

Considering that it might be necessary for them to invade Japan proper, the Allies drew up new plans
in mid-1943. The main offensive, it was decided, should be from the south and from the southeast,
through the Philippines and through Micronesia (rather than from the Aleutians in the North Pacific
or from the Asian mainland). While occupation of the Philippines would disrupt Japanese
communications with the East Indian isles west of New Guinea and with Malaya, the conquest of
Micronesia, from the Gilberts by way of the Marshalls and Carolines to the Marianas, would not only
offer the possibility of drawing the Japanese into a naval showdown but also win bases for heavy air
raids on the Japanese mainland prior to invasion.
For the approach to the Philippines, it was prerequisite, on the one hand, to complete the
encirclement of Rabaul, thereby nullifying the threat from the Japanese positions in the Solomon
Islands and in the Bismarck Archipelago (New Britain, New Ireland, etc.) and, on the other, to
reduce the Japanese hold on western New Guinea. Great emphasis, however, was put on the advance
across the central Pacific through Micronesia, to be begun via the Gilberts.
The encirclement of Rabaul

Allied moves to isolate the large Japanese garrison on Rabaul proceeded by land and air. The
encirclement of Rabaul by land began during October and November 1943 with the capture by New
Zealand troops of the Treasury Islands in the Solomons and was accompanied on November 1 by a
U.S. landing at Empress Augusta Bay on the west of Bougainville. U.S. reinforcements subsequently
repulsed Japanese counterattacks in December, when they sank two destroyers, and in March 1944,
when they killed almost 6,000 men. What remained of the Japanese garrison on Bougainville was no
longer capable of fighting, though it did not surrender until the end of the war.
Continuing the approach to Rabaul, U.S. troops landed on December 15 at Arawe on the
southwestern coast of New Britain, thereby distracting Japanese attention from Cape Gloucester, on
the northwestern coast, where a major landing was made on December 26. By January 16, 1944, the
airstrip at Cape Gloucester had been captured and defense lines set up. Talasea, halfway to Rabaul,
fell in March 1944. The conquest of western New Britain secured Allied control of the Vitiaz and
Dampier straits between that island and New Guinea.
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U.S. Marines shelling Japanese positions on Cape Gloucester, New Britain Island, New Guinea, during World War II. U.S. Department of Defense

U.S. Marines moving supplies and weapons during the battle for Cape Gloucester, New Britain Island, New Guinea, during World War II. U.S.
Department of Defense

By constructing air bases on each island that they captured, the Allies systematically blocked
any westward movement that the Japanese might have made: New Zealand troops took the Green
Islands southeast of New Guinea on February 15; and U.S. forces invaded Los Negros in
the Admiralty Islands on February 29 and captured Manus on March 9.
With the fall of the Emirau Islands on March 20, the Allies’ stranglehold on Rabaul and Kavieng was
practically complete, so that they could thenceforth disregard the 100,000 Japanese immobilized
there.

Western New Guinea

Before they could push northward to the Philippines, the Allies had to subdue Japanese-held western
New Guinea. U.S. troops took Saidor, on the Huon Peninsula, on January 2, 1944, and established an
air base there; and the Australians took Sio, to the east of Saidor, on January 16. Then reinforcements
were landed at Mindiri, west of Saidor, on March 5, and Australian infantry began to move westward
up the coast, to take Bogadjim, Madang, and Alexishafen.
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Bypassing Hansa Bay (which was eventually captured on June 15) and Wewak, whither the Japanese
had retreated, the Allies, on April 22, 1944, made two simultaneous landings at Hollandia: having in
the past weeks already destroyed 300 Japanese planes, they captured the airfields there in four days’
time. In the following months Hollandia was converted into a major base and command post for the
Southwest Pacific area. The Allies also took Aitape, on the coast east of Hollandia, and held it
against counterattacks by more than 200,000 Wewak-based Japanese during July and August. Biak,
the isle guarding the entrance to Geelvink Bay, west of Hollandia, was invaded by U.S. troops on
May 27, 1944; but the Japanese defense of it was maintained until early August. Though
westernmost New Guinea fell likewise to the Allies in August 1944, the Japanese garrison at Wewak
held out until May 10, 1945.

The central Pacific

Though the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff envisaged no major offensive westward across the Pacific
toward Formosa until mid-1944, they nevertheless decided to launch a limited offensive in the central
Pacific in 1943, hoping thereby both to speed the pace of the war and to draw the Japanese away
from other areas. Accordingly, Nimitz’ central Pacific forces invaded the Gilberts on November 23,
1943. Makin fell easily, but well-fortified Japanese defenses on Tarawa cost the U.S. Marines 1,000
killed and 2,300 wounded. Japanese losses in the Gilberts totaled about 8,500 men.
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U.S. troops advancing on Tarawa, Gilbert Islands, in 1943U.S. troops advancing on Tarawa, Gilbert Islands, in 1943, during World War II.U.S.
Dept. of Defense

Aftermath of the bloody invasion of Tarawa by U.S. Marines, November 1943.U.S. Department of Defense

Having been forced to cede the Gilberts, the Japanese elected next to defend the Marshalls, in order
both to absorb Allied forces and to strain the latters’ extended lines of supply. Nimitz
subjected Kwajalein Atoll, which he chose first to attack, to so heavy a preliminary bombardment
that the U.S. infantry could land on it on January 31, 1944; and U.S. forces moved on to Enewetak on
February 17.
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Marshall Islands; World War IIU.S. Marines on the beach of Namur Islet, Kwajalein Atoll, the first of the Marshall Islands to be taken from Japan
in January–February 1944.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

U.S. Marines taking a Japanese prisoner in the Marshall Islands. U.S. Department of Defense

In support of the landings on the Marshalls, the U.S. fleet on February 17, 1944, started a series of
day and night attacks against the Japanese base at Truk in the Caroline Islands, where they destroyed
some 300 aircraft and 200,000 tons of merchant shipping. Henceforth, the Allies could confidently
ignore Truk and bypass it.
The Allies’ next objective, for which they required more than 500 ships and 125,000 troops, was to
reduce the Mariana Islands, lying 1,000 miles from Enewetak and 3,500 miles from Pearl Harbor.
Against this threat, after the destruction at Truk, the Japanese hastily drew up a new defense plan,
“Operation A,” relying on their remaining 1,055 land-based aircraft in the Marianas, in the Carolines,
and in western New Guinea and on timely and decisive intervention by a sea force, which should
include nine aircraft carriers with 450 aircraft. But in the spring of 1944 the Japanese air strength was
still further depleted, and, moreover, on March 31 the sponsor of the plan, Admiral Koga Mineichi
(Yamamoto’s successor), and his staff were killed in an air disaster. When, on June 15, two U.S.
Marine divisions went ashore on Saipan Island in the Marianas, the 30,000 Japanese defenders put up
so fierce a resistance that an army division was needed to reinforce the Marines. Using the same
defensive tactics as on other small islands, the Japanese had fortified themselves in underground
caves and bunkers that afforded protection from American artillery and naval bombardment.
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Notwithstanding this, the Japanese defenders were gradually compressed into smaller and smaller
pockets, and they themselves ended most organized resistance with a suicidal counterattack on July
7, the largest of its kind during the war.
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U.S. Marines coming ashore under Japanese fire on Saipan, Mariana Islands, 1944.U.S. Department of Defense

U.S. Marines advancing against Japanese positions on Saipan, Mariana Islands, 1944.U.S. Department of Defense

The loss of Saipan was such a disaster for Japan that when the news was announced in Tokyo
the prime minister, Tōjō Hideki, and his entire Cabinet resigned. To realists in the Japanese high
command, the loss of the Marianas spelled the ultimate loss of the war, but no one dared say so.
Tōjō’s Cabinet was succeeded by that of General Koiso Kuniaki, which was pledged to carrying on
the fight with renewed vigour.
Air power enthusiasts have called the conquest of Saipan “the turning point of the war in the
Pacific,” for it enabled the United States to establish air bases there for the big B-29 bombers, which
had been developed for the specific purpose of bombing Japan. The first flight of 100 B-29s took off
from Saipan on November 24, 1944, and bombed Tokyo, the first bombing raid on the Japanese
capital since 1942.
While the Japanese were still resisting on Saipan, the Japanese Combined Fleet, under
Admiral Ozawa Jisaburō, was approaching from Philippine and East Indian anchorages, in
accordance with “Operation A,” to challenge the U.S. 5th Fleet, under Admiral Raymond Spruance.
Ozawa, with only nine aircraft carriers against 15 for the United States, was obviously inferior in
naval power, but he counted heavily on help from land-based aircraft on Guam, Rota, and Yap. The
encounter, which took place west of the Marianas and is known as the Battle of the Philippine Sea,
has been called the greatest carrier battle of the war. It began on June 19 when Ozawa sent 430
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planes in four waves against Spruance’s ships. The result was a disaster for the Japanese. U.S. airmen
shot down more than 300 planes and sank two carriers, and as the Japanese fleet retreated northward
toward Okinawa it lost another carrier and almost 100 more planes. The United States lost about 130
planes. The hasty and incomplete training of the Japanese pilots and the inadequate armour plating of
their planes were decisive factors in the numerous aerial combats of this battle, which was ultimately
of more strategic importance than the fall of Saipan. Nimitz’ forces could thereafter occupy other
major islands in the Marianas: Guam on July 21 and Tinian on July 24. The Marianas cost the
Japanese 46,000 killed or captured, the Americans only 4,750 killed.
The Burmese frontier and China, November 1943–summer 1944

For the dry season of 1943–44 both the Japanese and the Allies were resolved on offensives
in Southeast Asia. On the Japanese side, Lieutenant General Kawabe Masakazu planned a major
Japanese advance across the Chindwin River, on the central front, in order to occupy the plain of
Imphāl and to establish a firm defensive line in eastern Assam. The Allies, for their part, planned a
number of thrusts into Burma: Stilwell’s NCAC forces, including his three Chinese divisions and
“Merrill’s Marauders” (U.S. troops trained by Wingate on Chindit lines), were to advance against
Mogaung and Myitkyina; while Slim’s 14th Army was to launch its XV Corps southeastward into
Arakan and its IV Corps eastward to the Chindwin. Because the Japanese had habitually got the
better of advanced British forces by outflanking them, Slim formulated a new tactic to ensure that his
units would stand against attack in the forthcoming campaign, even if they should be isolated: they
were to know that, when ordered to stand, they could certainly count both on supplies from the air
and on his use of reserve troops to turn the situation against the Japanese attackers.
On the southern wing of the Burmese front, the XV Corps’s Arakan operation, launched in
November 1943, had achieved most of its objectives by the end of January 1944. When the Japanese
counterattack surrounded one Indian division and part of another, Slim’s new tactic was brought into
play, and the Japanese found themselves crushed between the encircled Indians and the relieving
forces.

The Japanese crossing of the Chindwin into Assam, on the central Burmese front, when the fighting
in Arakan was dying down, played into Slim’s hands, since he could now profit from the Allies’
superiority in aircraft and in tanks. The Japanese were able to approach Imphāl and to surround
Kohīma, but the British forces protecting these towns were reinforced with several Indian divisions
that were taken from the now-secure Arakan front. With air support, Slim’s reinforced forces now
defended Imphāl against multiple Japanese thrusts and outflanking movements until, in mid-May
1944, he was able to launch two of his divisions into an offensive eastward, while still containing the
last bold effort of the Japanese to capture Imphāl. By June 22 the 14th Army had averted the
Japanese menace to Assam and won the initiative for its own advance into Burma. The Battle of
Imphāl–Kohīma cost the British and Indian forces 17,587 casualties (12,600 of them sustained at
Imphāl), the Japanese forces 30,500 dead (including 8,400 from disease) and 30,000 wounded.
On the northern Burmese front, Stilwell’s forces were already approaching Mogaung and Myitkyina
before the southern crisis of Imphāl–Kohīma; and the subsidiary Chindit operation against Indaw was
going well ahead when, on March 24, 1944, Wingate himself was killed in an air crash.
Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek was constrained by U.S. threats of a suspension of lend-lease to finally
authorize some action by the 12 divisions of his Yunnan Army, which on May 12, 1944, with air
support, began to cross the Salween River westward in the direction of Myitkyina, Bhamo, and
Lashio. Myitkyina airfield was taken by Stilwell’s forces, with “Merrill’s Marauders,” on May 17,
Mogaung was taken by the Chindits on June 26, and finally Myitkyina itself was taken by Stilwell’s
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Chinese divisions on August 3. All of northwest and much of northern Burma was now in Allied
hands.
In China proper, a Japanese attack toward Ch’ang-sha, begun on May 27, won control not only of a
further stretch of the north–south axis of the Peking–Han-K’ou railroad but also of several of the
airfields from which the Americans had been bombing the Japanese in China and were intending to
bomb them in Japan.

The Italian front, 1944
The Allies’ northward advance up the Italian peninsula to Rome was still blocked
by Kesselring’s Gustav Line, which was hinged on Monte Cassino. To bypass that line, the Allies
landed some 50,000 seaborne troops, with 5,000 vehicles, at Anzio, only 33 miles south of Rome, on
January 22, 1944. The landing surprised the Germans and met, at first, with very little opposition;
but, instead of driving on over the Alban Hills to Rome at once, the force at Anzio spent so much
time consolidating its position there that Kesselring was able, with his reserves, to develop a
powerful counteroffensive against it on February 3. The beachhead was thereby reduced to a very
shallow dimension, while the defenses at Monte Cassino held out unimpaired against a new assault
by Clark’s 5th Army.
For a final effort against the Gustav Line, Alexander decided to shift most of the 8th Army, now
commanded by Major General Sir Oliver Leese, from the Adriatic flank of the peninsula to the west,
where it was to strengthen the 5th Army’s pressure around Monte Cassino and on the approaches to
the valley of the Liri (headstream of the Garigliano). The combined attack, which was started in the
night of May 11–12, 1944, succeeded in breaching the German defenses at a number of points
between Cassino and the coast. Thanks to this victory, the Americans could push forward up the
coast, while the British entered the valley and outflanked Monte Cassino, which fell to a Polish corps
of the 8th Army on May 18. Five days later, the Allies’ force at Anzio struck out against the
investing Germans (whose strength had been diminished in order to reinforce the Gustav Line); and
by May 26 it had achieved a breakthrough. When the 8th Army’s Canadian Corps penetrated the last
German defenses in the Liri Valley, the whole Gustav Line began to collapse.
Concentrating all available strength on his left wing, Alexander pressed up from the south to effect a
junction with the troops thrusting northward from Anzio. The Germans in the Alban Hills could not
withstand the massive attack. On June 5, 1944, the Allies entered Rome. The propaganda value of
their occupying the Eternal City, Mussolini’s former capital, was offset, however, by an unforeseen
strategical reality: Kesselring’s forces retreated not in the expected rout but gradually, to the line of
the Arno River; Florence, 160 miles north of Rome, did not fall to the Allies until August 13; and by
that time the Germans had made ready yet another chain of defenses, the Gothic Line, running from
the Tyrrhenian coast midway between Pisa and La Spezia, over the Apennines in a reversed S curve,
to the Adriatic coast between Pesaro and Rimini.
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Livorno; World War II; NiseiU.S. soldiers, members of a Nisei unit attached to the U.S. Fifth Army, passing through liberated Livorno (Leghorn),
Italy, July 1944.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Alexander might have made more headway against Kesselring’s new front if some of his forces had
not been subtracted, in August 1944, for the American-sponsored but eventually unnecessary
invasion of southern France (“Operation Anvil,” finally renamed “Dragoon” [see below]). As it was,
the 8th Army, switched back from the west to the Adriatic coast, achieved only an indecisive
breakthrough toward Rimini. After this September offensive, the autumn rains set in, to make even
more difficult Alexander’s indirect movements, against Kesselring’s resolute opposition, toward the
mouth of the Po River.

Developments from summer 1944 to autumn 1945

The Allied invasions of western Europe, June–November 1944

The German Army high command had long been expecting an Allied invasion of northern France but
had no means of knowing where precisely the stroke would come: while Rundstedt, commander in
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chief in the west, thought that the landings would be made between Calais and Dieppe (at the
narrowest width of the Channel between England and France), Hitler prophetically indicated the
central and more westerly stretches of the coast of Normandy as the site of the attack; and Rommel,
who was in charge of the forces on France’s Channel coast, finally came around to Hitler’s opinion.
The fortifications of those stretches were consequently improved, but Rundstedt and Rommel still
took different views about the way in which the invasion should be met: while Rundstedt
recommended a massive counterattack on the invaders after their landing, Rommel, fearing that
Allied air supremacy might interfere fatally with the adequate massing of the German forces for such
a counterattack, advocated instead immediate action on the beaches against any attempted landing.
The Germans had 59 divisions spread over western Europe from the Low Countries to the Atlantic
and Mediterranean coasts of France; but approximately half of this number was static, and the
remainder included only 10 armoured or motorized divisions.
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

World War II: Normandy InvasionOverview of the Normandy Invasion. Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

Rommel, ErwinErwin Rommel inspecting western German defenses, early 1944.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Postponed from May, the western Allies’ “Operation Overlord,” their long-debated invasion of
northern France, took place on June 6, 1944—the war’s most celebrated D-Day—when 156,000 men
were landed on the beaches of Normandy between the Orne estuary and the southeastern end of the
Cotentin Peninsula: 83,000 British and Canadian troops on the eastern beaches, 73,000 Americans on
the western. Under Eisenhower’s supreme direction and Montgomery’s immediate command, the
invading forces initially comprised the Canadian 1st Army (Lieutenant General Henry Duncan
Graham Crerar); the British 2nd Army (Lieutenant General Sir Miles Dempsey); and the British 1st
and 6th airborne divisions, the U.S. 1st Army, and the U.S. 82nd and 101st airborne divisions (all
under Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley).
 240

Normandy InvasionOn D-Day, June 6, 1944, an Allied force led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the greatest amphibious invasion of
all time against German defenses on the coast of Normandy, France. From The Second World War: Allied Victory (1963), a documentary by
Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

By 9:00 AM on D-Day the coastal defenses were generally breached, but Caen, which had been
scheduled to fall on D-Day and was the hinge of an Allied advance, held out until July 9, the
one panzer division already available there on June 6 having been joined the next day by a second.
Though the heavy fighting at Caen attracted most of the German reserves, the U.S. forces in the
westernmost sector of the front likewise met a very stubborn resistance. But when they had taken the
port of Cherbourg on June 26 and proceeded to clear the rest of the Cotentin, they could turn
southward to take Saint-Lô on July 18.
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D-Day; Sherman tankSherman tanks coming ashore at Juno Beach in Normandy, France, on D-Day, June 6, 1944.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The Allies could not have made such rapid progress in northern France if their air forces had not
been able to interfere decisively with the movement of the German reserves. Allied aircraft destroyed
most of the bridges over the Seine River to the east and over the Loire to the south. The German
reserves thus had to make long detours in order to reach the Normandy battle zone and were so
constantly harassed on the march by Allied strafing that they suffered endless delays and only arrived
in driblets. And even where reserves could have been brought up, their movement was
sometimes inhibited by hesitation and dissension on the Germans’ own side. Hitler, though he had
rightly predicted the zone of the Allies’ landings, came to mistakenly believe, after D-Day, that a
second and larger invasion was to be attempted east of the Seine and so was reluctant to allow
reserves to be moved westward over that river. He also forbade the German forces already engaged
in Normandy to retreat in time to make an orderly withdrawal to new defenses.
Rundstedt, meanwhile, was slow in obtaining Hitler’s authority for the movement of the general
reserve’s SS panzer corps from its position north of Paris to the front; and Rommel, though he made
prompt use of the forces at hand, had been absent from his headquarters on D-Day itself, when a
forecast of rough weather had seemed to make a cross-Channel invasion unlikely.
Subsequently, Rundstedt’s urgent plea for permission to retreat provoked Hitler, on July 3, to
appoint Günther von Kluge as commander in chief in the west in Rundstedt’s place; and Rommel
was badly hurt on July 17, when his car crashed under attack from Allied planes.
There was something else, besides the progress of the Allies, to demoralize the German commanders
—the failure and the aftermath of a conspiracy against Hitler. Alarmed at the calamitous course of
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events and disgusted by the crimes of the Nazi regime, certain conservative but anti-Nazi civilian
dignitaries and military officers had formed themselves into a secret opposition, with Karl Friedrich
Goerdeler (a former chief mayor of Leipzig) and Colonel General Ludwig Beck (a former chief of
the army general staff) among its leaders. From 1943 this opposition canvased the indispensable
support of the active military authorities with some notable success: General Friedrich Olbricht (chief
of the General Army Office) and several of the serving commanders, including Rommel and Kluge,
became implicated to various extents. Apart from General Henning von Tresckow, however, the
group’s most dynamic member was Colonel Graf Claus von Stauffenberg, who as chief of staff to the
chief of the army reserve from July 1, 1944, had access to Hitler. Finally, it was decided to kill Hitler
and to use the army reserve for a coup d’état in Berlin, where a new regime under Beck and
Goerdeler should be set up. On July 20, therefore, Stauffenberg left a bomb concealed in a briefcase
in the room where Hitler was conferring at his headquarters in East Prussia. The bomb duly
exploded; but Hitler survived, and the coup in Berlin miscarried. The Nazi reaction was savage:
besides 200 immediately implicated conspirators, 5,000 people who were more remotely linked with
the plot or were altogether unconnected with it were put to death. Kluge committed suicide
on August 17, Rommel on October 14. Fear permeated and paralyzed the German high command in
the weeks that followed.
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Adolf Hitler (right) and Benito Mussolini (left) at the damaged Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair) field headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, after an
assassination attempt on Hitler, July 1944.Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy

July PlotOverview of the July Plot, 1944.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

On July 31, 1944, the Americans on the Allies’ right, newly supported by the landing of the U.S. 3rd
Army under Patton, broke through the German defenses at Avranches, the gateway from Normandy
into Brittany. On August 7 a desperate counterattack by four panzer divisions from Mortain, east of
Avranches, failed to seal the breach, and American tanks poured southward through the gap and
flooded the open country beyond. Though some of the U.S. forces were then swung southwestward
in the hope of seizing the Breton ports in pursuance of the original prescription of “Overlord” and
though some went on in more southerly directions toward the crossings of the Loire, others were
wheeled eastward—to trap, in the Falaise “pocket,” a large part of the German forces retreating
southward from the pressure of the Allies’ left at Caen. The Americans’ wide eastward flanking
maneuver after the breakout speedily produced a general collapse of the German position in northern
France.
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The town of Caen, France, after being taken by Allied forces, July 17, 1944.AP Images

Meanwhile, more and more Allied troops were being landed in Normandy. On August 1, two army
groups were constituted: the 21st (comprising the British and Canadian armies) under Montgomery;
and the 12th (for the Americans) under Bradley. By the middle of August an eastward wheel wider
than that which had cut off the Falaise pocket had brought the Americans to Argentan, southeast of
Falaise and level with the British and Canadian advance on the left (north) of the Allies’ front, so that
a concerted drive eastward could now be launched; and on August 19 a U.S. division successfully
crossed the Seine at Mantes-Gassicourt. Already on August 17 the Americans on the Loire had taken
Orléans. The clandestine French Resistance in Paris rose against the Germans on August 19; and a
French division under General Jacques Leclerc, pressing forward from Normandy, received the
surrender of the German forces there and liberated the city on August 25.
The German forces would have had ample time to pull back to the Seine River and to form a strong
defensive barrier line there had it not been for Hitler’s stubbornly stupid orders that there should be
no withdrawal. It was his folly that enabled the Allies to liberate France so quickly. The bulk of the
German armoured forces and many infantry divisions were thrown into the Normandy battle and kept
there by Hitler’s “no withdrawal” orders until they collapsed and a large part of them were trapped.
The fragments were incapable of further resistance, and their retreat (which was largely on foot) was
soon outstripped by the British and American mechanized columns. More than 200,000 German
troops were taken prisoner in France, and 1,200 German tanks had been destroyed in the fighting.
When the Allies approached the German border at the beginning of September, after a sweeping
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drive from Normandy, there was no organized resistance to stop them from driving on into the heart
of Germany.

Meanwhile, “Operation Dragoon” (formerly “Anvil”) was launched on August 15, 1944, when the
U.S. 7th Army and the French 1st Army landed on the French Riviera, where there were only four
German divisions to oppose them. While the Americans drove first into the Alps to take Grenoble,
the French took Marseille on August 23 and then advanced eastward through France up the Rhône
Valley, to be rejoined by the Americans north of Lyon early in September. Both armies then moved
swiftly northeastward into Alsace.
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World War II: paratroopersU.S. paratroopers landing in southern France, 1944.U.S. Air Force photograph

Strasbourg; World War IIA U.S. light tank passing through Strasbourg, France, after the city's liberation in November 1944. Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc.

In the north, however, some discord had arisen among the Allied commanders after the crossing of
the Seine. Whereas Montgomery wanted to concentrate on a single thrust northeastward
through Belgium into the heavily industrialized Ruhr Valley (an area vital to Germany’s war effort),
the U.S. generals argued for continuing to advance eastward through France on a broad front, in
accordance with the pre-invasion plan. Eisenhower, by way of compromise, decided on August 23
that Montgomery’s drive into Belgium should have the prior claim on resources
until Antwerp should have been captured but that thereafter the pre-invasion plan should be resumed.
Consequently, Montgomery’s 2nd Army began its advance on August 29, entered Brussels on
September 3, took Antwerp, with its docks intact, on September 4, and went on, three days later, to
force its way across the Albert Canal. The U.S. 1st Army, meanwhile, supporting Montgomery on
the right, had taken Namur on the day of the capture of Antwerp and was nearing Aachen. Far to the
south, however, Patton’s U.S. 3rd Army, having raced forward to take Verdun on August 31, was
already beginning to cross the Moselle River near Metz on September 5, with the obvious possibility
of achieving a breakthrough into Germany’s economically important Saarland. Eisenhower,
therefore, could no longer devote a preponderance of supplies to Montgomery at Patton’s expense.
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Montgomery nevertheless attempted a thrust to cross the Rhine River at Arnhem, the British 1st
Airborne Division being dropped ahead there to clear the way for the 2nd Army; but the Germans
were just able to check the thrust, thus isolating the parachutists, many of whom were taken prisoner.
By this time, indeed, the German defense was rapidly stiffening as the Allies approached the German
frontiers: the U.S. 1st Army spent a month grinding down the defenses of Aachen, which fell at last
on October 20 (the first city of prewar Germany to be captured by the western Allies); and the 1st
Canadian Army, on the left of the British 2nd, did not clear the Schelde estuary west of Antwerp,
including Walcheren Island, until early November. Likewise, Patton’s 3rd Army was held up before
Metz.
The Allies’ amazing advance of 350 miles in a few weeks was thus brought to a halt. In early
September the U.S. and British forces had had a combined superiority of 20 to 1 in tanks and 25 to 1
in aircraft over the Germans, but by November 1944 the Germans still held both the Ruhr Valley and
the Saarland, after having been so near collapse in the west in early September that one or the other
of those prizes could have easily been taken by the Allies. The root of the Allied armies’
sluggishness in September was that none of their top planners had foreseen such a complete collapse
of the Germans as occurred in August 1944. They were therefore not prepared, mentally or
materially, to exploit it by a rapid offensive into Germany itself. The Germans thus obtained time to
build up their defending forces in the west, with serious consequences both for occupied Europe and
the postwar political situation of the Continent.

The Eastern Front, June–December 1944

After a successful offensive against the Finns on the Karelian Isthmus had culminated in the capture
of Viipuri (Vyborg) on June 20, 1944, the Red Army on June 23 began a major onslaught on the
Germans’ front in Belorussia. The attackers’ right wing took the bastion town of Vitebsk
(Vitebskaya) and then wheeled southward across the highway from Orsha to Minsk; their left wing,
under General Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky, broke through just north of the Pripet
Marshes and then drove forward for 150 miles in a week, severing the highway farther to the west,
between Minsk and Warsaw. Minsk itself fell to the Red Army on July 3; and, though the Germans
extricated a large part of their forces from the Soviet enveloping movement, the Soviet tanks raced
ahead, bypassing any attempts to block their path, and were deep into Lithuania and
northeastern Poland by mid-July. Then the Soviet forces south of the Pripet Marshes struck too,
capturing Lwów and pushing across the San River. This increase of pressure on the Germans enabled
Rokossovsky’s mobile columns to thrust still farther westward: they reached the Vistula River, and
one of them, on July 31, even penetrated the suburbs of Warsaw. The Polish underground in Warsaw
thereupon rose in revolt against the Germans and briefly gained control of the city. But three SS
armoured divisions arrived to suppress the revolt in Warsaw, and the Soviet Red Army stood idly by
across the Vistula while the Germans crushed the insurrection. Although the Soviet halt outside
Warsaw was a purposeful move, it is true that the unprecedented length and speed of the Red Army’s
advance—450 miles in five weeks—had overstrained the Soviet communications. The halt on the
Vistula was to last six months.
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On August 20, however, two Soviet thrusts were launched in another direction—against the
German salient in Bessarabia. A new government came to power in Romania on August 23 and not
only suspended hostilities against the U.S.S.R. but also, on August 25, declared war against
Germany. This long-premeditated volte-face opened the way for three great wheeling movements by
the Red Army’s left wing through the vast spaces of southeastern and central Europe: southwestward
across Bulgaria, where they met no opposition; westward up the Danube Valley and over the
Yugoslav frontier; and northwestward through the Carpathians into Transylvania. The Germans
could only try to hold the threatened centres of communication long enough for the withdrawal of
their forces from Greece and from southern Yugoslavia. Belgrade fell to a concerted action by the
Red Army and Tito’s Partisan forces on October 20, 1944; and a rapid drive from the Transylvanian
sector into the Hungarian Plain brought Soviet forces up to the suburbs of Budapest on November 4.
Budapest, however, was stubbornly defended: by the end of the year, it was enveloped but still
holding out.
At the northern end of the Eastern Front, Finland had capitulated early in September, and the
following weeks saw a series of scythelike strokes by the Red Army against the German forces
remaining in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. By mid-October the remnants of those forces were
cornered in Courland, but the subsequent Soviet attempt to break through from Lithuania into East
Prussia was repelled.
Air warfare, 1944

The Allies’ strategic air offensive against Germany began to attain its maximum effectiveness in the
opening months of 1944. Both the U.S. air forces concerned, namely, the 8th in England and the 15th
in Italy, were increased in numbers and improved in technical proficiency. By the end of 1943 the 8th
Bomber Command alone could mount attacks of 700 planes, and early in 1944 regular 1,000-bomber
attacks became possible. Even more important was the arrival in Europe of effective long-range
fighters, chief of which, the P-51 Mustang, was capable of operating at maximum bomber range. The
U.S. fighters could now get the better of the Luftwaffe in the air over Germany, so that whereas 9.1
percent of bombers going out had been lost and 45.6 percent damaged in October 1943, the
corresponding figures were only 3.5 percent and 29.9 percent in February 1944, though in that very
month a massive and very difficult attack at extreme range had been made on the German aircraft
industry. Carl Spaatz, commanding general of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, in May 1944
initiated an offensive against Germany’s synthetic-oil production—an offensive that was to become
more and more harmful to the German war effort after the loss of Romania’s oil fields to the Soviet
Union. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe’s resistance dwindled almost to nothing as its fighter plane
production dropped and most of its remaining trained pilots died in aerial combat.
The RAF Bomber Command launched nearly 10,000 sorties in March 1944 and dropped some
27,500 tons of bombs, about 70 percent of this effort being concentrated on Germany; but in the
following months its offensive was largely diverted to the intensive preparation and, later, to the
support of the Allied landings in France. Nevertheless, it joined usefully in the U.S. offensive against
German oil production, continued to play its part in the Battle of the Atlantic, and also assumed the
task of bombing the launching ramps of the Germans’ “V” missiles. By early 1945, the unending
Allied bombing and strafing raids on bridges, roads, rail facilities, locomotives, and supply columns
had paralyzed the German transportation system.
The “V” missiles, flying bombs and long-range rockets, were the new weapons on which Hitler had
vainly been counting to reduce Great Britain to readiness for peace. His faith in them had indeed
been a major motive for his insistence on holding the sites, in northernmost France, from which they
were initially to be aimed at London. The V-1 missiles were first launched on June 13, 1944, mostly
from sites in the Pas-de-Calais; the V-2 missiles were launched a few months later, on September 8,
 249

from sites in the Netherlands (after the Allies’ occupation of the Pas-de-Calais on their way to
Belgium). The V-2 offensive was maintained until March 1945.

Wernher von Braun: V-2 missileWernher von Braun holding a model of the German V-2 missile that he helped to develop beginning in
1936.MSFC/NASA

Allied policy and strategy: Octagon (Quebec II) and Moscow, 1944

The progress of the Soviet armies toward central and southeastern Europe made it all the more urgent
for the western Allies to come to terms with Stalin about the fate of the “liberated” countries of
eastern Europe. London had already proposed to Moscow in May 1944 that Romania and Bulgaria
should be zones for Soviet military operation, Yugoslavia and Greece—whose royalist governments
in exile were under British protection—for British; and Roosevelt had approved this proposition in
June.

The Soviet Union had in February 1944 sent a military mission to Josip Tito’s Communist Partisans
in Yugoslavia (the Partisans had become the sole Yugoslavian recipients, since the Tehrān
Conference, of western aid, though their royalist rivals, the Chetniks, were not publicly disavowed by
Churchill until May 25). Along with this, a would-be government of Greece had been set up in
March by the EAM (National Liberation Front), which was a Communist movement controlling a
military organization, the ELAS (National Popular Liberation Army), in opposition to
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the EDES (Greek Democratic National Army), which was loyal to the British-backed government in
exile. The Polish question, moreover, was still unresolved, and in July the Soviets established, at
Lublin, a Committee of National Liberation independent of the London Poles. In Romania, despite
the government’s change of side in August, the Soviets proceeded to disband the Romanian Army;
and early in September they declared war on Bulgaria, invaded that country, and sponsored a
Communist revolution there.
With this background, Churchill and Roosevelt met again for their second Quebec Conference, code-
named “Octagon,” which lasted from September 11 to 16. The most important decision made at the
conference was that Roosevelt and Churchill together approved the European Advisory
Commission’s scheme for the division of defeated Germany into U.S., British, and Soviet zones of
occupation (the southwest, the northwest, and the east, respectively) and also the radical plan
elaborated by the U.S. secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., for turning Germany “into a
country primarily agricultural and pastoral” without “war-making industries.” The Morgenthau Plan,
however, was subsequently revoked.
The next conference of the Allies was held in Moscow October 9–20, 1944, between Churchill and
Stalin, with U.S. ambassador W. Averell Harriman also present at most of their talks. Disagreement
persisted over Poland. Stalin, however, consented readily to Churchill’s provisional suggestion for
zones of influence in southeastern Europe: the U.S.S.R. should be preponderant in Romania and in
Bulgaria, the western powers in Greece, and western and Soviet influences should counterbalance
one another evenly in Yugoslavia and in Hungary. The timing of the next western and Soviet
offensives against Germany was also agreed, and some accord was reached about the scale of the
eventual Soviet participation in the war against Japan.

The Philippines and Borneo, from September 1944

On July 27–28, 1944, Roosevelt had approved MacArthur’s argument that the next objective in the
Pacific theatre of the war should be the Philippine Archipelago (which was comparatively near to the
already conquered New Guinea). The initial steps toward the Philippines were taken almost
simultaneously, in mid-September 1944: MacArthur’s forces from New Guinea seized Morotai, the
northeasternmost isle of the Moluccas, which was on the direct route to Mindanao, southernmost
landmass of the Philippines; and Nimitz’ fleet from the east landed troops in the Palau Islands.
Already by mid-September the Americans had discovered that the Japanese forces were
unexpectedly weak not only on Mindanao but also on Leyte, the smaller island north of the Surigao
Strait. With this knowledge they decided to bypass Mindanao and to begin their invasion of the
Philippines on Leyte. On October 17–18, 1944, American forces seized offshore islets in Leyte Gulf,
and on October 20 they landed four divisions on the east coast of Leyte.
The threat to Leyte was the signal for the Japanese to put into effect their recently formulated plan
“Sho-Go” (“Operation Victory”), whereby the Allies’ next attempts at invasion were to be countered
by concerted air attacks. Though in the case of Leyte the Japanese Army and Navy air forces in the
immediate theatre numbered only 212 planes, it was hoped that the dispatch of four carriers under
Vice Admiral Ozawa, with 106 planes, southward from Japanese waters would lure the U.S. aircraft
carriers away from Leyte Gulf and that the suicidal “kamikaze” tactics of the Japanese airmen would
save the situation. (Kamikaze pilots deliberately crashed their bomb-armed planes into enemy ships.)
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At the same time, however, a Japanese naval force from Singapore was to sail to Brunei Bay and
there split itself into two groups that would converge on Leyte Gulf from the north and from the
southwest: the stronger group, under Vice Admiral Kurita Takeo, would enter the Pacific through
the San Bernardino Strait between the Philippine islands of Samar and Luzon; the other, under Vice
Admiral Nishimura Teiji, would pass through the Surigao Strait.
Kurita’s fleet (five battleships, 12 cruisers, 15 destroyers) lost two of its heavy cruisers to U.S.
submarine attack on October 23, when it was off Palawan; and one of the mightiest of Japan’s
battleships, the Musashi, was sunk by aerial attack the next day. On October 25, however, Kurita
made his way unopposed through the San Bernardino Strait, since the commander of the U.S. 3rd
Fleet, Admiral Halsey, had diverted his main strength toward the bait dangled by Ozawa farther to
the north. Three groups of U.S. escort carriers, met by Kurita on his way toward Leyte Gulf, suffered
heavy damage; but, meanwhile, Nishimura’s fleet (two battleships, one heavy cruiser, four
destroyers) had been detected on its way to the Surigao Strait and, on its entry into Leyte Gulf in the
early hours of October 25, had been practically annihilated by the U.S. 7th Fleet. Kurita consequently
turned back from his rendezvous in Leyte Gulf; and the Japanese defeat in the war’s greatest naval
confrontation was sealed by Ozawa’s losses to Halsey: all of his four carriers, together with a light
cruiser and two destroyers. The Japanese Navy’s “Sho-Go” as it transpired in the Battle of Leyte
Gulf had not only failed to inflict serious damage on the Americans but had resulted in serious losses
for the Japanese. These losses amounted to three battleships, one large aircraft carrier, three light
carriers, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and 11 destroyers, while the United States lost only
one light carrier, two escort carriers, and three destroyers. The battle reduced the Japanese Navy to
vestigial strength and cleared the way for the U.S. occupation of the Philippines.
Defeat in the gulf, however, did not prevent the Japanese from landing reinforcements on the west
coast of Leyte. They put up so stubborn a resistance that the Americans themselves had to be
reinforced before Ormoc fell on December 10, 1944; it was not before December 25 that the
Americans could claim control of all Leyte—though there was still some mopping up to be done.
Altogether, the defense of Leyte cost the Japanese some 75,000 combatants killed or taken prisoner.

From Leyte the Americans proceeded first, on December 15, to the invasion of Mindoro, the largest
of the islands immediately south of Luzon. Kamikaze counterattacks made this conquest more costly;
and they were to be continued after the Americans had surprised the Japanese by landing, on January
9, 1945, at Lingayen Gulf on the west coast of Luzon itself, the most important island of the
Philippines. The local Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Yamashita Tomoyuki, with no hope
of reinforcement, opted for tying the enemy forces down as long as possible by a static defense in
three mountainous sectors—west, northwest, and east of the Central Plains behind Manila.
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World War II: invasion of Mindoro, PhilippinesBarrage rockets during the invasion of Mindoro, Philippines, in December 1944. Launched in
salvoes from landing craft, rockets smothered Japanese beach defenses as U.S. forces began the amphibious assault. UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos

Manila itself was also strongly defended by the Japanese. One U.S. corps, however, was approaching
it from Lingayen over the Central Plains; a second corps was landed at Subic Bay, at the northern end
of the Bataan Peninsula, on January 29, 1945, to make contact with the former corps at Dinalupihan a
week later; and troops made an amphibious landing at Nasugbu, south of Manila Bay, on January 31.
Manila was then invested, and during the siege the bay was cleared by the occupation of the southern
tip of Bataan Peninsula on February 15 and by the reduction of Corregidor Island in the following
fortnight. On March 3 Manila fell at last to the Americans.
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World War II: Allied forces recaptured Manila, PhilippinesManila, Philippines, in the aftermath of its recapture by Allied forces in early
1945.U.S. Navy

The Japanese resistance on Luzon continued in the mountains, and east of Manila it went on until
mid-June 1945. Mindanao, meanwhile, was likewise being reduced. A U.S. division landed at
Zamboanga, on the southwestern peninsula, on March 10, 1945, and a corps began the occupation of
the core of the island on April 17.

The last phase of the U.S. campaign in the Philippines coincided with the opening of the reconquest
of Borneo from the Japanese, chiefly by Australian forces. Tarakan Island, off the northeast coast,
was invaded on May 1; Brunei on the northwest coast was invaded on June 10; and Balikpapan, on
the east coast far to the south of Tarakan, was attacked on July 1. The subsequent collapse of the
Japanese defenses around Balikpapan deprived Japan of the oil supplies of southern Borneo.

Burma and China, October 1944–May 1945

Chiang Kai-shek’s demand for the recall of the talented but abrasive Stilwell was satisfied in October
1944, and some reorganization of the Allies’ commands in Southeast Asia followed. While
 254

Lieutenant General Daniel Sultan took Stilwell’s place, Major General A.C. Wedemeyer became

commander of U.S. forces in the China theatre and Sir Oliver Leese commander of the land forces
under Mountbatten.
On the northern wing of the Burma front, a three-pronged drive by NCAC forces southward
from Myitkyina to the Irrawaddy River had been planned by Stilwell. Launched under Sultan, the
triple drive was at first only partially successful: the right took Indaw and Katha early in December
and effected a junction with Slim’s British 14th Army, and the centre reached Shwegu, across the
river; but the left, though it took Bhamo, was checked 60 miles west of Wan-t’ing. Sultan thereupon
decided to push farther southward, both on the right against Kyaukme, on the Burma Road northeast
of Mandalay, and on the left against Wan-t’ing. Threatened with envelopment, the Japanese fell back
from Wan-t’ing, which Sultan’s troops promptly occupied. Convoys up the Burma Road from Wan-
t’ing to K’un-ming were resumed on January 18, 1945.
For central Burma, meanwhile, Slim had thought, after his victory at Imphāl, that he must
immediately seize the crossings of the Chindwin River at Sittaung and at Kalewa and then advance
southward against Mandalay itself. He did indeed effect the Chindwin crossings, but in mid-
December 1944 he saw that the Japanese were in any case going to withdraw altogether to the left
bank of the Irrawaddy. Thereupon, he changed his plan: his objective should rather be Meiktila,
which lay east of the Irrawaddy and was a vital centre of Japanese communications between
Mandalay and Rangoon to the south. To conceal his new intention, he allowed one of the corps
already directed against Mandalay to continue its eastward advance, but the other corps was
surreptitiously moved over a circuitous route of 300 miles southward to Pakokku, which lay south of
the Chindwin–Irrawaddy confluence and northwest of Meiktila. While the crossing of
the Irrawaddy by the former corps on both sides of Mandalay distracted the attention of the Japanese,
the latter corps took Meiktila on March 3, 1945, and held it against fierce counterattacks. Mandalay
fell 10 days later, and the whole area was under the 14th Army’s control by the end of the month.
When the action was over, two Japanese armies had lost one-third of their fighting strength.
It remained for Slim to capture the Burmese capital, Rangoon. Allied ground forces advanced on
Rangoon along two routes from the north: one corps, having moved down the Sittang Valley east of
the Irrawaddy, took Pegu; the other, moving down the river, took Prome (Pye). The monsoon,
however, was imminent, and to forestall it a small combined operation was undertaken: parachute
troops were dropped at Elephant Point, on the coast south of Rangoon, on May 1, 1945; and an
Indian division, landing at Rangoon itself the next day, took the city without opposition, just when
the monsoon rains were beginning to fall. The recapture of Burma was essentially complete with the
taking of Rangoon.
The German offensive in the west, winter 1944–45

Hitler still hoped to drive the Allies back and still adhered to his principle of concentrating on
the war in the west. Late in 1944, therefore, he assembled on the Western Front all the manpower
that had become available as a consequence of his second “total mobilization”: a decree of October
18 had raised a Volkssturm, or “home guard,” for the defense of the Third Reich, conscripting all
able-bodied men between the ages of 16 and 60 years.
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World War II: Germany's “home guard”With German military losses mounting, Adolf Hitler orders all able-bodied men between the ages of 16
and 60 to defend their homeland, 1944.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

In mid-November all six Allied armies on the Western Front had launched a general offensive; but,
though the French 1st Army and the U.S. 7th had reached the Rhine River in Alsace, there were only
small gains on other sectors of the front. Meanwhile, the German defense was being continuously
strengthened with hastily shifted reserves and with freshly raised forces, besides the troops that had
managed to make their way back from France. The German buildup along the front was by now
progressing faster than that of the Allies, despite Germany’s great inferiority of material resources. In
mid-December 1944 the Germans gave the Allied armies a shock by launching a sizable
counteroffensive. The Germans amassed 24 divisions for the attack. Under the overall command of
the reinstated Rundstedt, this attack was to be delivered through the wooded hill country of
the Ardennes against the weakest sector of the U.S.-manned front, between Monschau (southwest of
Aachen) and Echternach (northwest of Trier). While the 5th Panzer Army on the left, under the
talented commander General Hasso von Manteuffel, with its own left flank covered by the German
7th Army, was to wheel northwestward after the breakthrough and to cross the Meuse River of
Namur in a drive on Brussels, the 6th Panzer Army on the right, under SS General Sepp Dietrich,
was to wheel more sharply northward against the Allies’ important supply port of Antwerp. Thus, it
was hoped, the British and Canadian forces at the northern end of the front could be cut off from
their supplies and crushed, while the U.S. forces to the south were held off by the German left.
The offensive was prepared with skill and secrecy and was launched on December 16, 1944, at a time
when mist and rain would minimize the effectiveness of counteraction from the air. The leading
wedge of the attack by eight German armoured divisions along a 75-mile front took the Allies by
surprise; and the 5th Panzer Army, which achieved the deeper penetration, reached points within 20
miles of the crossings of the Meuse River at Givet and at Dinant. U.S. detachments, however, stood
firm, albeit outflanked, at Bastogne and at other bottlenecks in the Ardennes; and there followed
 256

what is popularly remembered as the Battle of the Bulge. By December 24 the German drive had
narrowed but deepened, having penetrated about 65 miles into the Allied lines along a 20-mile front.
But by this time the Allies had begun to respond. Montgomery, who had taken charge of the situation
in the north, swung his reserves southward to forestall the Germans on the Meuse. Bradley,
commanding the Allied forces south of the German wedge, sent his 3rd Army under Patton to the
relief of Bastogne, which was accomplished on December 26. The weather cleared, and as many as
5,000 Allied aircraft began to bomb and strafe the German forces and their supply system. During
January 8–16, 1945, the German attackers were compelled to withdraw, lest the salient that they had
driven into the Allied front be cut off in its turn. Though their abortive offensive inflicted much
damage and upset the Allies’ plans, the Germans spent too much of their strength on it and thereby
forfeited whatever chance they had had of maintaining prolonged resistance later. The Germans
sustained 120,000 casualties and the Americans sustained about 75,000 in the Battle of the Bulge.

The Soviet advance to the Oder, January–February 1945

At the end of 1944 the Germans still held the western half of Poland, and their front was still 200
miles east of where it had been at the start of the war in 1939. The Germans had checked the Soviets’
summer offensive and had established a firm line along the Narew and Vistula rivers southward to
the Carpathians, and in October they repelled the Red Army’s attempted thrust into East Prussia.
Meanwhile, however, the Soviet left, moving up from the eastern Balkans, had been gradually
pushing around through Hungary and Yugoslavia in a vast flanking movement; and the absorption of
German forces in opposing this side-door approach detracted considerably from the Germans’
capacity to maintain their main Eastern and Western fronts.
The Soviet high command was now ready to exploit the fundamental weaknesses of the German
situation. Abundant supplies for their armies had been accumulated at the railheads. The mounting
stream of American-supplied trucks had by this time enabled the Soviets to motorize a much larger
proportion of their infantry brigades and thus, with the increasing production of their own tanks, to
multiply the number of armoured and mobile corps for a successful breakthrough.

Before the end of December ominous reports were received by Guderian—who, in this desperately
late period of the war, had been made chief of the German general staff. German Army intelligence
reported that 225 Soviet infantry divisions and 22 armoured corps had been identified on the front
between the Baltic and the Carpathians, assembled to attack. But when Guderian presented the report
of these massive Soviet offensive preparations, Hitler refused to believe it, exclaiming: “It’s the
biggest imposture since Genghis Khan! Who is responsible for producing all this rubbish?”
If Hitler had been willing to stop the Ardennes counteroffensive in the west, troops could have been
transferred to the Eastern Front; but he refused to do so. At the same time he refused Guderian’s
renewed request that the 30 German divisions now isolated in Courland (on the Baltic seacoast in
Lithuania) should be evacuated by sea and brought back to reinforce the gateways into Germany. As
a consequence, Guderian was left with a mobile reserve of only 12 armoured divisions to back up the
50 weak infantry divisions stretched out over the 700 miles of the main front.
 257

The Soviet offensive opened on January 12, 1945, when Konev’s armies were launched against the
German front in southern Poland, starting from their bridgehead over the Vistula River near
Sandomierz. After it had pierced the German defense and produced a flanking menace to the central
sector, Zhukov’s armies in the centre of the front bounded forward from their bridgeheads
nearer Warsaw. That same day, January 14, Rokossovsky’s armies also joined in the offensive,
striking from the Narew River north of Warsaw and breaking through the defenses covering this
flank approach to East Prussia. The breach in the German front was now 200 miles wide.
On January 17, 1945, Warsaw was captured by Zhukov, after it had been surrounded; and on January
19 his armoured spearheads drove into Łódź. That same day Konev’s spearheads reached the Silesian
frontier of prewar Germany. Thus, at the end of the first week the offensive had been carried 100
miles deep and was 400 miles wide—far too wide to be filled by such scanty reinforcements as were
belatedly provided.

The crisis made Hitler renounce any idea of pursuing his offensive in the west; but, despite
Guderian’s advice, he switched the 6th Panzer Army not to Poland but to Hungary in an attempt to
relieve Budapest. The Soviets could thus continue their advance through Poland for two more weeks.
While Konev’s spearheads crossed the Oder River in the vicinity of Breslau (Wrocław) and thus
cut Silesia’s important mineral resources off from Germany, Zhukov made a sweeping advance in the
centre by driving forward from Warsaw, past Poznań, Bydgoszcz, and Toruń, to the frontiers of
Brandenburg and of Pomerania. At the same time Rokossovsky pushed on, through Allenstein
(Olsztyn), to the Gulf of Danzig, thus cutting off the 25 German divisions in East Prussia. To defend
the yawning gap in the centre of the front, Hitler created a new army group and put Heinrich
Himmler in command of it with a staff of favoured SS officers. Their fumbling helped to clear the
path for Zhukov, whose mechanized forces by January 31, 1945, were at Küstrin, on the lower Oder,
only 40 miles from Berlin.
Zhukov’s advance now came to a halt. Konev, however, could still make a northwesterly sweep
down the left bank of the middle Oder, reaching Sommerfeld, 80 miles from Berlin, on February 13,
and the Neisse River two days later. The Germans’ defense benefited from being driven back to the
straight and shortened line formed by the Oder and Neisse rivers. This front, extending from the
Baltic coast to the Bohemian frontier, was less than 200 miles long. The menace of the
Soviets’ imminent approach to Berlin led Hitler to decide that most of his fresh drafts of troops must
be sent to reinforce the Oder; the way was thus eased for the crossing of the Rhine River by the
American and British armies.
On February 13, 1945, the Soviets took Budapest, the defense of which had entailed the Germans’
loss of Silesia.

Yalta
Roosevelt’s last meeting with Stalin and Churchill took place at Yalta, in Crimea, February 4–11,
1945. The conference is chiefly remembered for its treatment of the Polish problem: the western
Allied leaders, abandoning their support of the Polish government in London, agreed that
the Lublin committee—already recognized as the provisional government of Poland by the Soviet
 258

masters of the country—should be the nucleus of a provisional government of national unity, pending
free elections. But while they also agreed that Poland should be compensated in the west for the
eastern territories that the U.S.S.R. had seized in 1939, they declined to approve the Oder–Neisse
line as a frontier between Poland and Germany, considering that it would put too many Germans
under Polish rule. For the rest of “liberated Europe” the western Allied leaders obtained nothing
more substantial from Stalin than a declaration prescribing support for “democratic elements” and
“free elections” to produce “governments responsive to the will of the people.”

Yalta Conference(From left) Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference, 1945.AP Images

For Germany the conference affirmed the project for dividing the country into occupation zones, with
the difference that the U.S. zone was to be reduced in order to provide a fourth zone, for the French
to occupy. Roosevelt and Churchill, however, had already discarded the Morgenthau Plan for the
postwar treatment of Germany; and Yalta found no comprehensive formula to replace it. The three
leaders simply pledged themselves to furnish the defeated Germans with the necessities for survival;
to “eliminate or control” all German industry that could be used for armaments; to bring
major war criminals to trial; and to set up a commission in Moscow for the purpose of determining
what reparation Germany should pay.
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The German collapse, spring 1945

Before their ground forces were ready for the final assault on Germany, the western Allies intensified
their aerial bombardment. This offensive culminated in a series of five attacks on Dresden, launched
by the RAF with 800 aircraft in the night of February 13–14, 1945, and continued by the U.S. 8th Air
Force with 400 aircraft in daylight on February 14, with 200 on February 15, with 400 again on
March 2, and, finally, with 572 on April 17. The motive of these raids was allegedly to promote the
Soviet advance by destroying a centre of communications important to the German defense of the
Eastern Front; but, in fact, the raids achieved nothing to help the Red Army militarily and succeeded
in obliterating the greater part of one of the most beautiful cities of Europe and in killing up to
25,000 people.

World War II: aerial bombing offensiveAllied strategic bombing over Germany escalating in 1943.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

The main strength of the ground forces being built up meanwhile for the crossing of the Rhine was
allotted to Montgomery’s armies on the northern sector of the front. Meanwhile, some of the U.S.
generals sought to demonstrate the abilities of their own less generously supplied forces. Thus,
Patton’s 3rd Army reached the Rhine at Coblenz (Koblenz) early in March, and, farther downstream,
General Courtney H. Hodges’ 1st Army seized the bridge over the Rhine at Remagen south of Bonn
and actually crossed the river, while, still farther downstream, Lieutenant General William H.
Simpson’s 9th Army reached the Rhine near Düsseldorf. All three armies were ordered to mark time
until Montgomery’s grand assault was ready; but, meanwhile, they cleared the west bank of the river,
and eventually, in the night of March 22–23, the 3rd Army crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim, between
Mainz and Mannheim, almost unopposed.
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Mark V Panther tankA U.S. soldier inspecting a damaged German Mark V Panther tank, Kelberg, Germany, 1945.U.S. Army Photograph

At last, in the night of March 23–24, Montgomery’s attack by 25 divisions was launched across a
stretch—30 miles long—of the Rhine near Wesel after a stupendous bombardment by more than
3,000 guns and waves of attacks by bombers. Resistance was generally slight; but Montgomery
would not sanction a further advance until his bridgeheads were consolidated into a salient 20 miles
deep. Then the Canadian 1st Army, on the left, drove ahead through the Netherlands, the British 2nd
went northeastward to Lübeck and to Wismar on the Baltic, and the U.S. armies swept forward
across Germany, fanning out to reach an arc that stretched from Magdeburg (9th Army) through
Leipzig (1st) to the borders of Czechoslovakia (3rd) and of Austria (7th and French 1st).
 261

World War II: Allies entering bomb-damaged Nürnberg U.S. tanks entering bomb-damaged Nürnberg, Germany, April 1945.U.S. Army Photo

Guderian had tried to shift Germany’s forces eastward to hold the Red Army off; but Hitler, despite
his anxiety for Berlin, still wished to commit the 11th and 12th armies—formed from his last
reserves—to driving the western Allies back over the Rhine and, on March 28, replaced Guderian
with General Hans Krebs as chief of the general staff.
The dominant desire of the Germans now, both troops and civilians, was to see the British and
American armies sweep eastward as rapidly as possible to reach Berlin and occupy as much of the
country as possible before the Soviets overcame the Oder line. Few of them were inclined to assist
Hitler’s purpose of obstruction by self-destruction. On March 19 (the eve of the Rhine crossing),
Hitler had issued an order declaring that “the battle should be conducted without consideration for
our own population.” His regional commissioners were instructed to destroy “all industrial plants, all
the main electricity works, waterworks, gas works” together with “all food and clothing stores” in
order to create “a desert” in the Allies’ path. When his minister of war production, Albert Speer,
protested against this drastic order, Hitler retorted: “If the war is lost, the German nation will also
perish. So there is no need to consider what the people require for continued existence.” Appalled at
such callousness, Speer was shaken out of his loyalty to Hitler: he went behind Hitler’s back to the
army and industrial chiefs and persuaded them, without much difficulty, to evade executing Hitler’s
decree. The Americans and the British, driving eastward from the Rhine, met little opposition and
reached the Elbe River 60 miles from Berlin, on April 11. There they halted.
On the Eastern Front, Zhukov enlarged his bridgehead across the Oder early in March. On their far
left the Soviets reached Vienna on April 6; and on the right they took Königsberg on April 9. Then,
 262

on April 16, Zhukov resumed the offensive in conjunction with Konev, who forced the crossings of
the Neisse; this time the Soviets burst out of their bridgeheads, and within a week they were driving
into the suburbs of Berlin. Hitler chose to stay in his threatened capital, counting on some miracle to
bring salvation and clutching at such straws as the news of the death of Roosevelt on April 12. By
April 25 the armies of Zhukov and Konev had completely encircled Berlin, and on the same day they
linked up with the Americans on the Elbe River.
Isolated and reduced to despair, Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun, during the night of April 28–
29, and on April 30 he committed suicide with her in the ruins of the Chancellery, as the advancing
Soviet troops were less than a half mile from his bunker complex; their bodies were hurriedly
cremated in the garden. The “strategy” of Hitler’s successor, Dönitz, was one of capitulation and of
saving as many as possible of the westward-fleeing civilians and of his German troops
from Soviet hands. During the interval of surrender, 1,800,000 German troops (55 percent of the
Army of the East) were transferred into the British–U.S. area of control.

World War II: Soviet army entering BerlinAs Soviet troops entered Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, April 1945.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises
GmbH, Mainz

On the Italian front, the Allied armies had long been frustrated by the depletion of their forces for the
sake of other enterprises; but early in 1945 four German divisions were transferred from Kesselring’s
command to the Western Front, and in April the thin German defenses in Italy were broken by an
Allied attack. A surrender document that had been signed on April 29 (while Hitler was still alive)
finally brought the fighting to a conclusion on May 2.
The surrender of the German forces in northwestern Europe was signed at Montgomery’s
headquarters on Lüneburg Heath on May 4; and a further document, covering all the German forces,
was signed with more ceremony at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims, in the presence of Soviet as
 263

well as U.S., British, and French delegations. At midnight on May 8, 1945, the war in Europe was
officially over.



 264

World War II: V-E DayPeople in New York City celebrating the end of the European phase of World War II, May 8, 1945.Encyclopædia Britannica,
Inc.

World War II: German surrenderWar in Europe ending with Germany's unconditional surrender, May 1945.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH,
Mainz

Potsdam
The last inter-Allied conference of World War II, code-named “Terminal,” was held at the suburb of
Potsdam, outside ruined Berlin, from July 17 to August 2, 1945. It was attended by the Soviet, U.S.,
and British heads of government and foreign ministers: respectively, Stalin and Molotov;
President Harry S. Truman (Roosevelt’s successor) and James F. Byrnes; and Churchill and Anthony
Eden, the last-named pair being replaced by Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin after
Great Britain’s change of government following a general election.
 265

World War II: Potsdam ConferenceOverview of the Potsdam Conference.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

Operations against Japan were discussed, and the successful testing of an atomic bomb in the United
States was divulged to Stalin. Pending the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, a declaration was
issued on July 26 calling on Japan to surrender unconditionally and forecasting the territorial
spoliation of the empire and the military occupation of Japan proper as well as the prosecution of war
criminals, yet still promising that the Japanese people would not be enslaved or the nation destroyed.
Time was spent discussing the peace settlement and its procedure. Stalin induced Truman and Attlee
to consent provisionally to the Soviet Union’s demands that it should take one-third of Germany’s
naval and merchant fleet; have the right to exact reparations from its occupied zones of Germany and
of Austria and also from Finland, Hungary, Romania, and even Bulgaria; and should furthermore
receive a percentage of reparation from the western-occupied zones. The total amounts of all these
exactions were, however, to be determined at a later date.
There was a profound disagreement at the conference about the Balkan areas occupied by the Red
Army in which representatives of the western powers were allowed little say, and about the area east
of the Oder–Neisse line, all of which the Soviets had arbitrarily put under Polish administration. The
western statesmen protested at these lone-handed arrangements but perforce accepted them.

The end of the Japanese war, February–September 1945

 266

While the campaign for the Philippines was still in progress, U.S. forces were making great steps in
the direct advance toward their final objective, the Japanese homeland. Aerial bombardment was, of
course, the prerequisite of the projected invasion of Japan—which was to begin, it was imagined,
with landings on Kyushu, the southernmost of the major Japanese islands.
Iwo Jima and the bombing of Tokyo

With U.S. forces firmly established in the Mariana Islands, the steady long-range bombing of Japan
by B-29s under the command of General Curtis E. LeMay continued throughout the closing months
of 1944 and into 1945. But it was still 1,500 miles from Saipan to Tokyo, a long flight even for the
B-29s. Strategic planners therefore fixed their attention on the little volcanic island of Iwo Jima in
the Bonin Islands, which lay about halfway between the Marianas and Japan. If Iwo Jima could be
eliminated as a Japanese base, the island could then be immensely valuable as a base for U.S. fighter
planes defending the big bombers.

World War II: Iwo JimaU.S. Coast Guard and Navy vessels landing supplies on the Marine beachhead at Iwo Jima, February 1945.Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.

The Japanese were determined to hold Iwo Jima. As they had done on other Pacific islands, they had
created underground defenses there, making the best possible use of natural caves and the rough,
rocky terrain. The number of Japanese defenders on the island, under command of Lieutenant
General Kuribayashi Tadamichi, was more than 20,000.
 267

Injured U.S. Marines being treated at an aid station on Iwo Jima, 1945.U.S. Department of Defense

Day after day before the actual landing the island was subjected to intense bombardment by naval
guns, by rockets, and by air strikes using napalm bombs. But the results fell far short of expectations.
The Japanese were so well protected that no amount of conventional bombing or shelling could
knock them out. U.S. Marines landed on Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945, and encountered an
obstinate resistance. Meanwhile, kamikaze counterattacks from the air sank the light carrier Bismarck
Sea and damaged other ships; and, though the U.S. flag was planted on Mount Suribachi on February
23, the isle was not finally secured until March 16. Iwo Jima had cost the lives of 6,000 Marines, as
well as the lives of nearly all the Japanese defenders; but in the next five months more than 2,000 B-
29 bombers were able to land on it.
 268

U.S. Marines raising the American flag over Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, in February 1945.Joe Rosenthal/AP

Meanwhile, a new tactic had been found for the bombing of Japan from bases in the Marianas.
Instead of high-altitude strikes in daylight, which had failed to do much damage to the industrial
centres attacked, low-level strikes at night, using napalm firebombs, were tried, with startling
success. The first, in the night of March 9–10, 1945, against Tokyo, destroyed about 25 percent of
the city’s buildings (most of them flimsily built of wood and plaster), killed more than 80,000 people,
and made 1,000,000 homeless. This result indicated that Japan might be defeated without a massive
invasion by ground troops, and so similar bombing raids on such major cities as Nagoya, Ōsaka,
Kōbe, Yokohama, and Toyama followed. Japan literally was being bombed out of the war.
Okinawa
Plans for invasion, however, were not immediately discarded. Okinawa, largest of the Ryukyu
Islands strung out northeastward from Taiwan, had been regarded as the last stepping-stone to be
taken toward Kyushu, which was only 350 miles away from it. It had therefore been subjected to a
series of air raids from October 1944, culminating in March 1945 in an attack that destroyed
hundreds of Japanese planes; but there were still at least 75,000 Japanese troops on the island,
commanded by Lieutenant General Ushijima Mitsuru. The invasion of Okinawa was, in fact, to be
the largest amphibious operation mounted by the Americans in the Pacific war.
Under the overall command of Nimitz, with Admiral Raymond Spruance in charge of the actual
landings and with Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., commanding the ground forces,
the operation began with the occupation of the Kerama Islets, 15 miles west of Okinawa, on March
26, 1945. Five days later a landing was made on Keise-Jima, whence artillery fire could be brought
 269

to bear on Okinawa itself. Then, on April 1, some 60,000 U.S. troops landed on the central stretch of
Okinawa’s west coast, seizing two nearby airfields and advancing to cut the island’s narrow waist.
Koiso’s government in Tokyo resigned on April 5, and the U.S.S.R. on the same day refused to
renew its treaty of nonaggression with Japan.

U.S. Marines battling for control of a ridge near Naha, Okinawa, May 1945.U.S. Department of Defense

The first major counterattack on Okinawa by the Japanese, begun on April 6, involved not only 355
kamikaze air raids but also the Yamato, the greatest battleship in the world (72,000 tons, with nine
18.1-inch [460-millimetre] guns), which was sent out on a suicidal mission with only enough fuel for
the single outward voyage and without sufficient air cover. The Japanese hoped the Yamato might
finish off the Allied fleet after the latter had been weakened by kamikaze attacks. In the event,
the Yamato was hit repeatedly by bombs and torpedoes and was sunk on April 7. Equally suicidal
was a new Japanese weapon, baka, which claimed its first victim, the U.S. destroyer Abele, off
Okinawa on April 12. Baka was a rocket-powered glider crammed with explosives which was towed
into range by a bomber and was then released to be guided by its solitary pilot into the chosen target
for their mutual destruction.
The U.S. ground forces invading Okinawa met little opposition on the beaches because Ushijima had
decided to offer his main resistance inland, out of range of the enemy’s naval guns. In the southern
half of the island this resistance was bitterest: it lasted until June 21, and Ushijima killed himself the
next day. The campaign for Okinawa was ended officially on July 2. For U.S. troops it had been the
 270

longest and bloodiest Pacific campaign since Guadalcanal in 1942. Taking the island had cost the
Americans 12,000 dead and 36,000 wounded, with 34 ships sunk and 368 damaged, and the Japanese
losses exceeded 100,000 dead.

Japanese soldier flushed from a cave by a smoke grenade surrendering to U.S. Marines on Okinawa, 1945.U.S. Department of Defense

On April 3, 1945, two days after the first landing on Okinawa, the U.S. command in the Pacific was
reorganized: MacArthur was henceforth to be in command of all army units and also in operational
control of the U.S. Marines for the invasion of Japan; Nimitz was placed in command of all navy
units.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki
 271

Throughout July 1945 the Japanese mainlands, from the latitude of Tokyo on Honshu northward to
the coast of Hokkaido, were bombed just as if an invasion was about to be launched. In fact,
something far more sinister was in hand, as the Americans were telling Stalin at Potsdam.
In 1939 physicists in the United States had learned of experiments in Germany demonstrating the
possibility of nuclear fission and had understood that the potential energy might be released in an
explosive weapon of unprecedented power. On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein had warned
Roosevelt of the danger of Nazi Germany’s forestalling other states in the development of an atomic
bomb. Eventually, the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development was created in June 1941
and given joint responsibility with the war department in the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic
bomb. After four years of intensive and ever-mounting research and development efforts, an atomic
device was set off on July 16, 1945, in a desert area near Alamogordo, New Mexico, generating an
explosive power equivalent to that of more than 15,000 tons of TNT. Thus the atomic bomb was
born. Truman, the new U.S. president, calculated that this monstrous weapon might be used to defeat
Japan in a way less costly of U.S. lives than a conventional invasion of the Japanese homeland.
Japan’s unsatisfactory response to the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration decided the matter. (See Sidebar:
The decision to use the atomic bomb.) On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb carried from Tinian
Island in the Marianas in a specially equipped B-29 was dropped on Hiroshima, at the southern end
of Honshu: the combined heat and blast pulverized everything in the explosion’s immediate vicinity,
generated fires that burned almost 4.4 square miles completely out, and immediately killed some
70,000 people (the death toll passed 100,000 by the end of the year). A second bomb, dropped
on Nagasaki on August 9, killed between 35,000 and 40,000 people, injured a like number, and
devastated 1.8 square miles.



 272

B-29 Superfortress Enola GayThe B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay took off from the Mariana Islands on August 6, 1945, bound for Hiroshima,
Japan—where, with the dropping of the atomic bomb, it heralded a new and terrible concept of warfare. From The Second World War: Allied
Victory (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

World War II: total destruction of Hiroshima, JapanTotal destruction of Hiroshima, Japan, following the dropping of the first atomic bomb, on
August 6, 1945.U.S. Air Force photo

The Japanese surrender

News of Hiroshima’s destruction was only slowly understood in Tokyo. Many members of the
Japanese government did not appreciate the power of the new Allied weapon until after the Nagasaki
attack. Meanwhile, on August 8, the U.S.S.R. had declared war against Japan. The combination of
these developments tipped the scales within the government in favour of a group that had, since the
spring, been advocating a negotiated peace. On August 10 the Japanese government issued a
statement agreeing to accept the surrender terms of the Potsdam Declaration on the understanding
that the emperor’s position as a sovereign ruler would not be prejudiced. In their reply the Allies
granted Japan’s request that the emperor’s sovereign status be maintained, subject only to their
supreme commander’s directives. Japan accepted this proviso on August 14, and the
emperor Hirohito urged his people to accept the decision to surrender. It was a bitter pill to swallow,
though, and every effort was made to persuade the Japanese to accept the defeat that they had come
to regard as unthinkable. Even princes of the Japanese Imperial house were dispatched to deliver the
 273

Emperor’s message in person to distant Japanese Army forces in China and in Korea, hoping thus
to mitigate the shock. A clique of diehards nevertheless attempted to assassinate the new prime
minister, Admiral Suzuki Kantarō; but by September 2, when the formal surrender ceremonies took
place, the way had been smoothed.
Truman designated MacArthur as the Allied powers’ supreme commander to accept Japan’s formal
surrender, which was solemnized aboard the U.S. flagship Missouri in Tokyo Bay: the Japanese
foreign minister, Shigemitsu Mamoru, signed the document first, on behalf of the Emperor and his
government. He was followed by General Umezu Yoshijiro on behalf of the Imperial General
Headquarters. The document was then signed by MacArthur, Nimitz, and representatives of the other
Allied powers. Japan concluded a separate surrender ceremony with China in Nanking on September
9, 1945. With this last formal surrender, World War II came to an end.

World War II; MacArthur, DouglasOn the deck of the battleship USS Missouri, General Douglas MacArthur invites representatives of Japan to
sign the terms of surrender, thus formally ending World War II. From The Second World War: Allied Victory (1963), a documentary by
Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Costs of the war

Killed, wounded, prisoners, or missing

The statistics on World War II casualties are inexact. Only for the United States and the British
Commonwealth can official figures showing killed, wounded, prisoners or missing for the armed
forces be cited with any degree of assurance. For most other nations, only estimates of varying
reliability exist. Statistical accounting broke down in both Allied and Axis nations when whole
armies were surrendered or dispersed. Guerrilla warfare, changes in international boundaries, and
 274

mass shifts in population vastly complicated postwar efforts to arrive at accurate figures even for the
total dead from all causes.

World War II: prisoners of warDiscussion of German and Soviet POWs during World War II.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

Civilian deaths from land battles, aerial bombardment, political and racial executions, war-induced
disease and famine, and the sinking of ships probably exceeded battle casualties. These civilian
deaths are even more difficult to determine, yet they must be counted in any comparative evaluation
of national losses. There are no reliable figures for the casualties of the Soviet Union and China, the
two countries in which casualties were undoubtedly greatest. Mainly for this reason, estimates of
total dead in World War II vary anywhere from 35,000,000 to 60,000,000—a statistical difference of
no small import. Few have ventured even to try to calculate the total number of persons who were
wounded or permanently disabled.
 275

World War II: MV Wilhelm GustloffThe Soviet sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945, one of the greatest maritime disasters in
history.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

However inexact many of the figures, their main import is clear. The heaviest proportionate human
losses occurred in eastern Europe where Poland lost perhaps 20 percent of its prewar
population, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union around 10 percent. German losses, of which the greater
proportion occurred on the Eastern Front, were only slightly less severe. The nations of western
Europe, however great their suffering from occupation, escaped with manpower losses that were
hardly comparable with those of World War I. In East Asia, the victims of famine and pestilence in
China are to be numbered in the millions, in addition to other millions of both soldiers and civilians
who perished in battle and bombardment.
The table contains what appear to be the best available statistics on armed forces casualties of all
types resulting from battle, of civilian deaths from war-related causes, and estimated total deaths in
each of the major nations involved in World War II. Figures rounded to thousands (and this device
has been employed in all cases for total deaths) are estimates of varying reliability while omissions in
any category indicate that any estimate would be the wildest of conjectures. Estimated casualties of
resistance movements have been included in military figures, other victims of Nazi persecution in the
civilian ones. In the latter category fall about 5,700,000 Jews, more than half of them from Poland,
who died in Nazi concentration and death camps.
World War II casualties

1
Figures for deaths, insofar as possible, exclude those who died of natural causes or were suicides. 2As far as possible the figures

in this column exclude those who died in captivity. 3Figures for all Commonwealth nations include those still missing in 1946,
 276

World War II casualties

some of whom may be presumed dead. 4This figure comprises 60,595 killed in aerial bombardment, 30,248 in the merchant

marine service, 624 in women's auxiliary services, and 1,206 in the Home Guard. 5The figures for China comprise casualties of

the Chinese Nationalist forces during 1937–45, as reported in 1946, and do not include figures for local armies and communists.

Estimates of 2,200,000 military dead and 22,000,000 civilian deaths appear in some compilations but are of doubtful

accuracy. 6Czech military figures include only those who fought on the Allied side, not Sudeten Germans and others who served

in the German army. 7Includes merchant marine personnel who served with Allies. 8French military casualties include those

dead from all causes in the campaign of 1939–40, those of Free French, of rearmed French units that fought with Allies during

1942–45, and of French units that fought with Axis forces in Syria and North Africa during 1941–42 (1,200 dead). 9These figures

released in 1946 are possibly too high. Merchant seamen are included with military dead. 10Military figures drawn from

statement released by Polish government in 1946 and include casualties in the campaign of 1939, those of the underground, of

Polish forces serving with British and Soviet armies, and those incurred in the Warsaw Uprising. Civilian casualty figures, which

include 3,200,000 Jews, are based on this statement as modified by the calculations of population experts. 11Military figures

include those of Army Ground and Air Forces and those of the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. There were an additional

115,187 deaths of U.S. servicemen from non-battle causes. Civilians listed in 1946 as dead or missing include 5,638 of the

merchant marine service. 12Available estimates of Soviet casualties vary widely. A Soviet officer who served with the high

command in Berlin and left the Soviet service in 1949 placed total military losses at 13,600,000—8,500,000 dead or missing in

battle; 2,600,000 dead in prison camps; 2,500,000 died of wounds—and estimated civilian casualties at 7,000,000. These figures

have been widely accepted in Germany, but most U.S. compilations, based on Soviet announcements, list 6,000,000 to

7,500,000 battle deaths. Calculations made on the basis of population distribution by age and sex in the 1959 U.S.S.R. census

give some credence to the higher figures, for they seem to indicate losses of from 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 males of military

age in World War II. The figures used here are a compromise estimate, not intended to obscure the fact that Soviet casualties

are, in reality, unknown in the West. 13Estimates based on fragmentary data. 14Military estimates include men from outside
Germany who served with the German armed forces and are based on the assumption that about 1,000,000 of the 1,250,000

men still listed as missing in Soviet territory in 1955 were dead. In addition, perhaps 250,000 military personnel died of natural

causes, committed suicide, or were executed. Civilian figures are for Germany and Austria only, and they do not include an

estimated 2,384,000 German deaths during 1944–46 resulting from Soviet invasion and forced transfers of population in the

eastern provinces given to Poland after the war. 15Figures for dead include those listed as still missing in compilation made by

the Italian government in 1952 (131,419 military personnel and 3,651 civilians), but not 49,144 military deaths from natural

causes or suicide. Known dead from enemy action amounted to 110,823, making a total of 159,957 military deaths from all

causes if the missing are not included. Of this number, 92,767 occurred before the 1943 Armistice, 67,190 afterward. 16Based on

an estimate of 1,600,000 total military deaths on the assumption that about half of those listed as missing in Soviet territory in

1949 were dead. About 300,000 of these probably resulted from causes not related to battle.
 277

World War II casualties

military

prisoners
killed, died of civilian deaths estimated total
country wounded or
wounds, or in prison1 due to war deaths
missing2

Allied Powers

Belgium 12,000 — — 76,000 88,000

Brazil 943 4,222 — — 1,000

British
373,372 475,047 251,7243 92,673 466,000
Commonwealth

23,365 39,803 32,393 — 24,000

 Australia

37,476 53,174 10,888 — 38,000

 Canada

24,338 64,354 91,243 — —

 India

10,033 19,314 10,582 — 10,000

 New Zealand

6,840 14,363 16,430 — 7,000

 South Africa

 United 264,443 277,077 213,919 92,6734 357,000

Kingdom

6,877 6,972 22,323 — 7,000

 Colonies

China5 1,310,224 1,752,951 115,248 — —

Czechoslovakia6 10,000 — — 215,000 225,000

Denmark 1,800 — — 2,0007 4,000

France8 213,324 400,000 — 350,000 563,000

 278

World War II casualties

Greece9 88,300 — — 325,000 413,000

Netherlands 7,900 2,860 — 200,000 208,000

Norway 3,000 — — 7,000 10,000

Poland10 123,178 236,606 420,760 5,675,000 5,800,000

Philippines 27,000 — — 91,000 118,000

United States11 292,131 671,801 139,709 6,000 298,000

U.S.S.R.12 11,000,000 — — 7,000,000 18,000,000

Yugoslavia 305,000 425,000 — 1,200,000 1,505,000

Axis Powers

Bulgaria13 10,000 — — 10,000 20,000

Finland 82,000 50,000 — 2,000 84,000

Germany14 3,500,000 5,000,000 3,400,000 780,000 4,200,000

Hungary13 200,000 — 170,000 290,000 490,000

Italy15 242,232 66,000 350,000 152,941 395,000

Japan 1,300,00016 4,000,000 810,000 672,000 1,972,000

Romania13 300,000 — 100,000 200,000 500,000

Human and material cost

 279

There can be no real statistical measurement of the human and material cost of World War II. The
money cost to governments involved has been estimated at more than $1,000,000,000,000 but this
figure cannot represent the human misery, deprivation, and suffering, the dislocation of peoples and
of economic life, or the sheer physical destruction of property that the war involved.
Europe

The Nazi overlords of occupied Europe drained their conquered territories of resources to feed the
German war machine. Industry and agriculture in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark,
and Norway were forced to produce to meet German needs with a resulting deprivation of their own
peoples. Italy, though at first a German ally, fared no better. The resources of the occupied territories
in eastern Europe were even more ruthlessly exploited. Millions of able-bodied men and women
were drained away to perform forced labour in German factories and on German farms. The whole
system of German economic exploitation was enforced by cruel and brutal methods, and the guerrilla
resistance it aroused was destructive in itself and provoked German reprisals that were even more
destructive, particularly in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the occupied portions of the Soviet Union.
Great Britain, which escaped the ravages of occupation, suffered heavily from the German aerial
blitz of 1940–41 and later from V-bombs and rockets. On the other side, German cities were leveled
by Allied bombers, and in the final invasion of Germany from both east and west there was much
retaliatory devastation, destruction, and pillage.

The destruction of physical plant was immense and far exceeded that of World War I, when it was
largely confined to battle areas. France estimated the total cost at an amount equivalent to three times
the total French annual national income. Belgium and the Netherlands suffered damage roughly in
similar proportions to their resources. In Great Britain about 30 percent of the homes were destroyed
or damaged; in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands about 20 percent. Agriculture in all the
occupied countries suffered heavily from the destruction of facilities and farm animals, the lack of
machinery and fertilizers, and the drain on manpower. Internal transport systems were completely
disrupted by the destruction or confiscation of railcars, locomotives, and barges, and the bombing of
bridges and key rail centres. By 1945 the economies of the continental nations of western Europe
were in a state of virtually complete paralysis.
In eastern Europe the devastation was even worse. Poland reported 30 percent of its buildings
destroyed, as well as 60 percent of its schools, scientific institutions, and public
administration facilities, 30–35 percent of its agricultural property, and 32 percent of its mines,
electrical power, and industries. Yugoslavia reported 20.7 percent of its dwellings destroyed. In the
battlegrounds of the western portion of the Soviet Union, the destruction was even more complete.
In Germany itself, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that in 49 of the largest cities, 39
percent of the dwelling units were destroyed or seriously damaged. Central business districts had
generally been reduced to rubble, leaving only suburban rings standing around a destroyed core.
Millions throughout Europe were rendered homeless. There were an estimated 21,000,000 refugees,
more than half of them “displaced persons” who had been deported from their homelands to perform
forced labour. Other millions who had remained at home were physically exhausted by five years of
strain, suffering, and undernourishment. The roads of Europe were swamped by refugees all through
1945 and into 1946 as more than 5,000,000 Soviet prisoners of war and forced labourers returned
eastward to their homeland and more than 8,000,000 Germans fled or were evacuated westward out
of the Soviet-occupied portions of Germany. Millions of other persons of almost every European
nationality also returned to their own countries or emigrated to new homes in other lands.
 280

World War II: German refugeesAs the Soviet army advances into eastern Europe, hundreds of thousands of Germans flee.Contunico © ZDF
Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

World War II: aftermath in EuropeIn the aftermath of World War II, many Europeans lacked adequate food, shelter, and resources. Contunico ©
ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

World War II: refugeesMillions of refugees from eastern Europe fleeing to the West after World War II.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz

The Far East

The devastation of World War II in China was inflicted on a country that was already suffering from
the economic ills of overpopulation, underdevelopment, and a half-century of war, political disunity,
and unrest. The territory occupied by Japanese forces was roughly equivalent to that occupied by the
Axis in Europe and the period of occupation was longer. That area of China unoccupied by the
Japanese was virtually cut off from the outside world after the Japanese conquest of Burma in early
1942, and its economy continually tottered on the brink of collapse. In both areas,
famines, epidemics, and civil unrest were recurrent, much farmland was flooded, and millions of
refugees fled their homes, some several times. Cities, towns, and villages were laid waste by aerial
bombardment and marching armies. The transportation system, poor to begin with, was thoroughly
disrupted. Most of the limited number of hospitals and health institutions in China were destroyed or
lost.
In India famine was recurrent, and the Indian economy was severely strained to support the burden
the Allied military authorities placed upon it. The Philippines suffered from three years of Japanese
occupation and exploitation and from the destruction wrought in the reconquest of the islands by the
Americans in 1944–45. The harbour at Manila was wrecked by the retreating Japanese, and many
portions of the city were demolished by bombardment.
In Japan the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found the damage to urban centres comparable to that in
Germany. In the aggregate, 40 percent of the built-up areas of 66 Japanese cities was destroyed, and
approximately 30 percent of the entire urban population of Japan lost their homes and many of their
possessions. Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered the peculiar and lasting damage done by atomic
explosion and radiation.
John Graham Royde-SmithThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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STA Salient features of Indian Society, Diversity of India | GS -1 | UPSC –

IAS
India is one of the most religiously and ethnically diverse nations in the world, with some of the
most deeply religious societies and cultures. Religion plays a central and definitive role in the
life of many of its people. Although India is a secular Hindu-majority country.

What is the Concept Indian Society ? | UPSC – IAS

Whenever we try to understand society the fact that immediately comes to our mind is the people
around us. With them we have relationships both of formal and informal nature.

 The formal nature of relationship is defined by rules regulations and the principles of

organizations in which we live. For example in school a student learns to understand what kind of
respect .she/he has to extend to his\her teacher and fellow students.
 Thus rules are well established that regulate their behaviors in schools. Similarly as he grows up,
joins a college or the university, rules accordingly change and students learn to adjust themselves.
After completing his education when he joins the service he is governed by the rules of the office.
In other words the society has a formal setting in which a person is governed by impersonal
rules and therefore, he feels a degree of constrain to adjust to the rule. Therefore, a society
which has formal institutions people tend to acquire the knowledge about the
 Existing procedures
 Etiquettes,
 Manners and
 Behavior.
However, in informal settings it is not the rules that govern our behavior in society but is
the traditions and norms that govern our behavior and the relationships that we tend to develop
with each other.
 There are many groups which can be cited as an example of informal settings where relationships
are defined by the personalized nature. Family, kinship group, village communities are some
such groups where we have relationships that are defined by the norms, traditions and
customary practices.
Viewed in the context mentioned above it is said that society is all about social relationships
that we have with people around us. Sociologists have also defined ‘society as network of
social relationship’, ‘pattern of interaction’, ‘interpretative understanding of social
action’ in which interacting individuals are aware of the positions of each other.
 Sociologists are the one who try to understand a disciplined understanding of the wide range of
relationships that individuals have with each other and the groups in which they live. They have
talked about different types of societies termed as ‘simple’ and ‘compound.‘
 Be it simple or complex the fact that remains unchanged is that each society has its own culture,
traditions, social structure and the normative-patterns which are characterized by stability and
change.
 That means the structure,culture, the norms of society and its traditions never remain
static. They always remain in state of flux. Two factors which account for fluidity and change are
internal and external. That Means there are both internal and also external factors of change.
What is the Nature Indian Society ? | UPSC – IAS
The nature of Indian society cannot be understood without having a proper examination of its
culture and social structure. So far as the culture of Indian society is concerned it is considered to
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represent the ultimate values and the normative framework of Indian society. Normally the
culture includes both the physical and non-physical aspects of people’s life.

 Physical aspects refer to tangible things such as material objects.-

 Non-physical aspects refer to non-tangible and non-material objects such as ideas thoughts,
feelings, prejudices etc.
in this context the Indian society and its plural character has to be understood in the background
of not the culture only but also its social structure and traditions. Both must be seen as a process
of continuity and change.

The salient characteristic of Indian society has to be understood in historical backdrop as the

Indian society has its origin 5000 years back when Indus valley civilization emerged as the first
known civilization which has two notable culture known as Mohenjo-Daro and Harappan
culture, both represented diversity richness and vitality in its long traditions of inhabiting people
of diverse socio cultural cities.
 It is pertinent to note here that during a long period of the first known civilization indian society
experienced several waves of immigrants. Those who visited India brought their own culture,
tradition; language and religion. Needless to mention the ethnic group compositions of the
visitors varied in range and scope.
 What is important to note however is the fact that all these cultural tradition that the
immigrants brought added to the richness, vitality and diversity of Indian society.
 It is often perceived by the historians that India represented one monolithic culture which
brought all the migrants groups culture integrated into one grand society called Hindu society.
This however will misrepresent the fact and reality of Indian Society. The noted sociologists
of the Indian origin M.N Srinivas, in particular, is of the opinion that the cognitive
understanding of the Indian society relies heavily on the indological evidence and therefore
they tend to understand Indian society in terms of scriptural texts available.
 Needless to mention that such a perspective may be called a ‘book view’ of understanding Indian
society that highlights the glory of vedic age of Indian History.
 A closer and pointed analytical focus however would like to examine the dynamics of Indian
society keeping in mind the empirical situation that obtains in the field. The studies conducted by ”
historians –  like DD Kosambi point out the material conditions of earlier time to understand
the society of those days.
Evolution of indian Society | UPSC – IAS
The evolutionary course of Indian society and the life and the people suggest that there was co-
existence of plural culture traditions of Indian society. The contemporary Indian society reveals
different levels of social evolution that consisted following stages of its development.

 Primitive hunters and food gatherers

 Shifting cultivators who used digging sticks and hoes.
 Nomads of different types which Included breeders of goats, sheep and cattle
 Settled agriculturist who used the plough for cultivation.
 Artisans and landed as well as aristocracies of ancient lineage.
When we focus attention on the religious groupings of ancient times we find the evidence of 
several world’s major religious grouping which includes:-
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 Hinduism
 Islam
 Christianity
 Buddhism
 Sikhism
 Jainism etc.
1931 census classified Indian population under ten religious groups. This shows the diversity of
religious groups reported in the census data in the first quarter of 20th century.

The- three main dimension of their roles in their social structure may be examined under
following heads:-

 The relation between different castes and religious groups

 General role of religion in the economic development

 Religion and castes determining socioeconomic privileges of people.

Constituents of Indian Social Structure | UPSC – IAS
Social structure, in sociology, the distinctive, stable arrangement of institutions whereby human
beings in a society interact and live together. Social structure is often treated together with the
concept of social change, which deals with the forces that change the social structure and the
organization of society.

The following groups are considered to be the mainstay of Indian social structure:

 The village-community
 The caste system
 The joint family system
 The kinship groups
 Ethnic groups and Minorities
 Rural ,urban and tribal social structure
Characteristics of Indian Society | UPSC – IAS
So far as the characteristics of Indian Society is concerned it is generally acknowledged that
Indian society is characterized by both unity and diversity.
The features of indian society is treated as  policy document and remains a cliche that very
often is echoed by social scientist  and the nationalist.
 The fact that remains a puzzle is that very often such a perspective is contested by those who try
to either propagate or portray Indian society in this manner.
 It is pertinent to mention here that a society which has evolved over a period of time witnessed
lot of turmoil and storm before it acquired a political character after its independence in 1947.
 In other words the modern Indian society harbours the salient character of its tradition and
cultural legacy of earlier days and also infuse in its overarching and ever expanding universe
the traits of global character.
Thus the characteristics of Indian society may be understood under following heads:-
 Unity
 Diversity
 Harmonious coexistence at global level
 Emerging centre of power in global context
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 Providing spiritual leadership

 Pragmatic rationality
 Spreading entrepreneurial skills
 Ambassador of global cultural traits having Indian flavour.
 Harbinger of cultural renaissance.
 Modernization of Indian tradition
Nature and extent of diversity | UPSC – IAS
“The diversity of India is tremendous; it is obvious; it lies on the surface and anybody can see it.
It concerns itself with physical appearances as well as with certain mental habits and traits. There
is little in common, to outward seeming, between the Pathan of the North-West and the Tamil in
the far South. Their racial stocks are not the same, though there may be common strands running
through them… Yet, with all these differences, there is no mistaking the impress of India on the
Pathan, as this is obvious on the Tamil. The Pathan and the Tamil are two extreme examples; the
others lie somewhere in between. All of them have their distinctive features, all of them have still
more the distinguishing mark of India.”  — The Variety and Unity of India, from Book – The
Discovery of India, 1946 
India is a vast country with various types of diversities. The entire society is divided by caste,
religion, language, race etc. But with all these diversities we live together as there is a
fundamental unity among us.
Diversity in india is found in terms of:-

 Race
 Religion
 Language
 Caste
 Culture
 Racial groups
Factors of Unity | UPSC – IAS
“Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there
was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages past,
whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen us.” — The Search for India, from The
Discovery of India, 1946
Unity in diversity is a concept of “unity without uniformity and diversity without
fragmentation” that shifts focus from unity based on a mere tolerance of physical, cultural,
linguistic, social, religious, political, ideological and/or psychological differences towards a
more complex unity based on an understanding that difference enriches human interactions.
The factors of unity in India are its:-

 Polity
 National Culture and festivals
 Geographical boundaries
 Education
 Legacy of great rulers
 Pilgrimage centers
Y CONNECTED

 About Us
 
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Role of Women and Women's

Ab

Organization
Role of Women
Historical data signified that women have many role in civilisation since ancient time and these
roles are changing over the period. In a society, status of people can be assessed by importance
of women in that culture. Many factors that rationalise the magnitude of India's ancient culture is
the respectable place granted to women. Several research studies have demonstrated that women
have raised their position and made a place in different sectors which has led to liberation and to
live better life. In ancient culture, women had to suffer from unequal condition, and but as the
time passed, females had enhanced their status to get equality to the men (Christina S.
Handayani, Ardhian Novianto, 2004). Earlier, women were only allowed for doing domestic
activity and their contribution in public was very restricted. It entails that the political sector was
only for male communities and the women were concern to the private sector. This notion is the
basic understanding of classic feminist theory which wants that women get the equal condition
comparing to men (Ann Brooks, 2009). The status of women in India has been subjected to many
great changes over the past decades. From equal status with men in ancient times through the
low points of the medieval period, to the promotion of equal rights by many reformers, the
history of women in India has been exciting. In contemporary India, women have joined high
offices. However, women in India generally are still exposed to numerous social issues.
According to a global study conducted by Thomson Reuters, India is the "fourth most unsafe
country" in the world for women.
According to Christina S. Handayani and Ardhian Novianto (2004), females only work in
western countries and their role in Asian countries in public-private is not limited like in western
countries. It is established in studies that Women are important in our society. Every woman has
her own job or duty in this modern society in which men are still dominant. A woman has to take
care of her own personal life and if she is a mother, she has to take care also about her children's
life too. Married women have lots of worries and they carry out a more stressful life than married
men.
Many studies have indicated that physiologically women are not equal to men and both are also
dissimilar psychologically. But there is not much difference between women and men in the
normal activities like eating, drinking, working, sleeping, resting and speaking. But women have
physical and physiological differences based on their functions like child-bearing and child-
rearing. It is well established in theoretical studies that women and men react differently when
they groom their children. Both women and men do what they have learnt during their childhood
as far as their reactions to various situations in their life.

Women in India
The status of women in India has undergone drastic changes over a Past few millennia. In
ancient time, the Indian women were completely devoted to their families. In the Medieval
period, known as 'Dark Age', the status of women was declined considerably. They were not
allowed to go out, and move with others. They were asked to stay at home and take care of their
children. In India, early marriage of a girl was practiced. After Independence women came
 287

forward in all the sectors and there is remarkable changes in the status of women in the field of
education, Art and Culture. A historical viewpoint to the complexities, India continues to face
from time to time since Independence. But the status of women in contemporary India is a sort of
inconsistency.

Role of Women in Prehistoric Time

Indus valley civilization: During the period of Indus valley civilization, status of women were
fairly good. They were given equal honour along as men in the culture. The adoration of mother
goddess demonstrates that they were respected in the form of mother. During Rig Vedic period,
woman had superior status and they got more liberty and equality with men. The position of wife
was a privileged one in the household and women had enhanced status to that of a man in
performing religious rites. In education sphere, both boys and girls were having equal
opportunities. After observing Upanayana Samskar, girls were permitted to spend their life in
Gurukul. In intellectual and spiritual life they occupied a position as man. Education of girls
were considered as an important qualification for marriage.
In Uttar Vedic Period: In this period, freedom of marriage continued and remarriage of widows
continued to be allowed. Though dowry system continued but not in the form of today's society.
The marriage ceremony was the same as in the previous period. As in the previous period the
picture of an ideal family life continued.

The Age of the Upanishads

Age of Sutras and Epics: The Grihya-sutras give comprehensive rules concerning the proper
seasons for marriage, qualifications of bride and bridegroom. The bride is at a mature age, over
15 or 16. The elaborate rites indicate that marriage was a holy bond and not a contract. The
women held a respectable status in the household. She was permissible to sing, dance and enjoy
life. Sati was not generally predominant. Widow Remarriage was permissible under certain
circumstances. On the whole the Dharma-sutras take a more humane attitude than the Smritis of
a later age. The Apastamba enforces several penalties on a husband who unfairly forsakes his
wife. On the other hand, a wife who forsakes her husband has to only perform self-punishment.
In case a matured girl was not married at a proper time by her father, she could choose her
husband after three years of waiting. The appealing feature of this period is the presence of
women teachers, many of whom possessed highest spiritual knowledge. The famous dialogue
between Yajnavalkya and his wife Maitreyi and Gargi Vachaknavi indicated how enlightened the
women of that age were. According to the Sarvanukramanika, there were as many as 20 women
among the authors of the Rig Veda. These stories stand in contrast to the later age when the
study of Vedic literature was prohibited to women under the most severe penalty.

In The Age 600 BC to 320 AD

In this period, marriage between the same caste was preferred although inter caste marriages
were widespread. Of the eight forms of marriage prescribed by the Dharma-sutras, the Arhsa
form of marriage was most popular. The bridegroom was selected by the girl's father. According
to Nearchus the Indians "marry without giving or taking dowries but the girls, as soon as they are
marriageable, are brought forward by their fathers and exposed in public, to be selected by a
person who outclasses in some form of physical exercise". This designated a modified form of
Svayamvara. While girls continued to be married around 16, there was a propensity to marry
them before they attained puberty. It was perhaps due to the anxiety to maintain their body
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purity. Lowering of the marriage age affected their education and culture unfavourably. After
Extreme emphasis was now laid on the physical chastity of women which dejected widow
remarriage, divorce and encouragement of sati.
It was also found that females during this period were active in such public economic activities
as wage-labour in state-owned textile factories as well as serving as temple dancers, courtesans,
and court attendants. There is less information on lower class women other than some comments
on labouring women and the need to give works as spinners to such underprivileged women as
widows and "defective girls."
In the beginning of this period, there were well educated women holding an honourable position
in society and household. There were lifetime students of sacred texts or those who followed
their study till marriage. Buddhist and Jain nuns relinquished the world for the sake of spiritual
salvation. Jain texts refer to Jayanti who performed discussions with Mahavira himself and later
on became a nun.
In spite of the advancement, there were increasing infirmities. Earlier the girls went through the
Upanayana ceremony but now it was only a formality. Manu laid down that marriage was equal
to Upanayana while Yajnavalkya took the step of prohibiting Upanayana ceremony for girls. The
wife who performed Vedic sacrifices was denied the right to do so. Narada is however, more
thoughtful towards women. Greek writers have indicated that sati existed, was in trend in
Punjab, possibly confined to the fighter class only. Women courtesans were not looked down by
spiritual leaders or kings. Some of them were highly accomplished and in the point of culture,
standing resembled the Hetairai of Athens. A famous courtesan Amrapali who lived during the
sovereignty of Bimbisara (300 to 273 BC) was a beauty whom Buddha visited.
Chandragupta Maurya, the originator of the dynasty, was apparently assisted by Kautilya, a
Brahman prime minister, who composed the Arthasastra, a handbook of state craft which is often
compared to Machiavelli's The Prince. This collection documents that women had property
rights to the Stridhan, which was the gift made to a woman at the time of her marriage by her
parents and subsequently increased by her husband. Stridhan was generally in the form of
jewellery, which many cultural groups was a suitable way of carrying extra wealth, but could
include certain rights to immovable property. There were eight forms of marriage. They ranged
from the most significant, involving the gift of a virgin daughter (Kanyadan) by her father to
another male, to marriage by kidnapping while the woman is incapacitated through sleep or
intoxication. Marriage was both a secular and sacred institution. Widows had a right of remarry.
Although, when they did so, they lost rights to any property inbred from their deceased
husbands. In this period, women were allowed to participate in public economic activities as
wage-labour in state-owned factories as well as serving as temple dancers, courtesans.

Period of 320 to 750 A D

The Gupta Empire was observed as the classical age of Indian culture because of its legendary
and artistic happenings. Some information on roles for leading women comes from the Kama
Sutra, a manual about the many ways to acquire pleasure, a legitimate goal for Hindu men in the
householder, or second stage, of their lives. Women were allowed to be educated, to give and to
receive sexual pleasure, and to be faithful wives. There was an increasing tendency to lower the
marriageable age of girls with girls being married before or after puberty. Marriage within the
same caste was preferred but forbidden within certain degrees of relationship. Girls of high
families had ample opportunities for acquiring ability in higher learning. In Vatsyayana's
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Kamasutra, instances of princess are mentioned whose intellect was sharpened by knowledge of
the Sasatras. The literary evidence of the Gupta age demonstrates that girls of high class also
those living in hermitages read works on ancient history & legend. Girls living in royal courts
were trained in singing & dancing too.
In the Gupta period, Sati was inscribed by some but strongly criticised by others. It was thought
that the custom was not extensively prevalent during this period. Probably due to the foreign
invasions and its significances for women, the custom of sati, though confined to the warrior
class earlier began to gain pervasive acceptance, be perceived as a great sacrifice. The tendency
to regard women as feebler and not of strong moral fibre got stronger during this period although
women as mother, sister continued to be highly esteemed. Remarriage of widows though coming
into disfavour was not forbidden. The only direction in which the position of women improved
was in the arena of proprietary rights. During this period, society began to discourage widow
remarriages, there began to arise a class of childless widows who needed money to maintain
themselves. Due to a lowering of the age of marriage, girls were not literate as earlier. This
degraded the status of women. Brides being too young and they did not have any choice in
marriage decisions. Love marriages were a thing of the past. During this period, marriage
became a binding union, but it was one sided in favour of the husband. Since women were not as
educated as before they did not know how to lead life in right way. The most striking
modifications may be the increased recognition in Katyayana of the women's right to property
and a noteworthy rule in Atri that allowed women ill-treated by robbers to recuperate her social
status. Some women enjoyed political power e.g. Prabhavati-gupta, daughter of Chandra-gupta II
who ruled the Vakataka kingdom on behalf of her son, in the 4th century a.d. Available Exisitng
literature designated that married women in higher families did not usually appear in public
without coverings.

Women in Early medieval Period

In this period as in previous time, women were generally considered mentally sub-standard.
Their responsibility was to obey their husband blindly. Women continued to be deprived of the
right to study the Vedas. Furthermore, the eligible age for girls to marriage was lowered, thus
depriving their opportunities to get higher education. However, from some of the dramatic works
of the period, it was found the court ladies and even the queen's maids capable of composing
excellent Sanskrit and prakrit verses. Daughters of high administrators, courtesans and
concubines were also supposed to be highly skilled in the various arts, including poetry.
If a girl's guardian cannot find her a match before she becomes of marriageable age, then she can
choose her partner. While love marriages were known they were honoured after approval of the
girl's custodians. Sometimes, girls with the approval of their parents opted for a Svayamvara
ceremony. Remarriage was allowed under certain condition when the husband had deserted or
died, or adopted the life of a recluse, or was impotent or had become an out caste.
In general, women were mistrusted. They were kept in privacy and their life was governed by the
male relation, father, brother, husband, son. However, within the home they were given
privileged. If a husband abandoned even a guilty-wife, she was to be given maintenance. With
the evolution of property rights in land, the property right of women also increased. In order to
preserve the property of a family, women were given the right to inherit the property of their
male relations. With some reservation, a widow was permitted to the entire estate of her husband
if he died sonless. Daughters also had the right to succeed to the properties of a widow. Thus, the
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growth of feudal society supported the concept of private property. The practice of sati was made
mandatory by few authors, but predestined by others. Purdah was not dominant during this
period. Generally, their culture was high

Women in medieval India

Medieval Indian history continued for 500 years. It is principally dominated by Muslim rulers.
Muslim appeared in India as a warrior class. Their rule in India is divided into two Eras; The Era
of Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Era. The only women who has power and gained the thrown
of Delhi was Razia Sultan. She was not only a wise monarch but also a women of determined
courage. She proved herself as the role of model for politically empowered women in India. In
Mughal Period, India saw the rise of some renowned Muslim women. Qutluq Nigar Khanm
Babar's mother gave wise advice to her son Babar, during his difficult campaign for the recovery
of his father's heritage. Another example was Gulbadan Begum, women of excellent poetic talent
who wrote Humayun-namah. Nur Jahan and Jahan Ara took an active part in the state affairs.
Nurjahan was the greatest Muslim queen of India. She had good persona and military courage.
Mumtaj Mahal a princess of an exceptional beauty along with excellent intellectual talents and
aesthetic tastes. In India, there was also heroic women. Chandbibi, who appeared on the
battlements of the fort of Ahmednagar dressed in male outfit and put heart in the protectors of
that town against the influences of Akbar himself; Tara Bai, the Maharata heroine who was the
life and soul of Maharata resistance during the last determined attack of Aurangazeb;
Mangammal, whose benevolent rule is still a green memory in the South, and Ahalya Bai
Holkar, to whose administrative mastermind Sir John Malcolm has paid magnificent honour. The
Moghul princesses had vital role in the court life of Agra and Delhi. Jehanara, the partisan of
Dara Shikoh, Roshanara, the partisan of Aurangazeb, Zebunnissa, the daughter of Aurangazeb,
whose poems have come down to us and others represented the culture of the court. Jija Bai, the
mother of Shivaji, was more representative of Indian womanhood than the bejewelled princesses
who wrote poetry, played within the walls of their palaces or administered states. In the medieval
period, there were drastic changes in the social life of women. Dependence of women on their
husbands or other male relatives was a protuberant feature of this period. During this period
women were deprived of opportunities of any education, having lost the access to Streedhana or
dowry, they virtually became the subjugated class with dreadful results for themselves and the
nation. Indian women were politically, socially and economically indolent except for those
engaged in farming and weaving. Political demotion includes the barring of women from all
important decision- making processes. With the initiation of Muslims in India, the social
movement of Indian women was limited. They were banned to attend public functions and were
not free to partake as men's equals in religious functions like yajnas, obviously indicating a
deprivation of her role as she was kept in isolation. Another social malevolent that existed in
society during this period was child marriage. These pre-pubescent marriages harmfully affected
the health of the girls. These child brides were deprived of all intellectual, physical and spiritual
development. It virtually stabbed the delicate mind of Indian girl child. Her self-image was
wavering into shreds by the patriarchal family which repudiated her basic freedom. Indian
womanhood was cruelly locked. Likewise, most of the women thought that they have to serve at
home. Thus they were influenced by circumstances to accept their subordination and secondary
position. Men being providers, women became dependent on them economically, for their
survival except for the labour classes, where both men and women contributed in existence
farming and other occupations.
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Other social evils in this period were female infanticide, sati, child marriages, Purdah system or
zenana. The seclusion of women developed during the middle ages, due to the political
instability of Northern India, particularly due to various assaults. Muslims who came to India
were mainly soldiers and they did not give much importance to Hindu principles like chastity
and Pativrata dharma so the seclusion of women was fortified mainly by the Rajputs and the
other high castes like Brahmins. Polygamy was the first reason which contributed to the
demotion of women. Muslim rulers in India had big aim. Thus women came to be regarded as
tools of sensual satisfaction. Even among the Hindus, there was no limit for wives a man could
take. Marriage in Islam is a contract. But a Muslim man can have as many as four wives. Thus
even religion encouraged, there was the hopeless subservience of women. Islam also made
husband the head of the family and insisted that a wife should follow all his commands and
should serve him with greatest loyalty, whether he deserved for it or not.
Purdah gained acceptance with the advent of the Muslims. The purdah system existed among
Kshatriyas in the period of Dharma Sastras. But the Hindu women veiled only their face or
sometimes only covered their heads with sarees or "dupattas." But for Muslims it meant
complete covering. Dowry system was also prevalent during this period. It actually meant
"Stridhana" which included gifts, ornaments, property, and cash presented to her by her father or
her relatives. But in the medieval period, the term had special importance. It meant money or
"Dakshina" which was actually presented to the bride groom along with the bride. In Vedic
times, it guaranteed security for her. But during the middle-ages, women was not free to use it as
it was owned by her husband and his kith and kin. During the middle Ages, the term "Stridhana"
acquired huge magnitudes. The Hindus and Muslims favoured this custom of dowry. It could be
paid in cash or kind along with the bride. During the Vedic ages, it was given to bride for her
security when a crisis occurs. She was free to make use of this "Dhana". But the middle Ages
observed a sudden change. The Stridhana received by the groom belonged completely to the in-
laws. The bride did not have free access to this wealth, which lawfully belonged to her. Dowry
system existed even among the Muslims, especially among the Shias. With time, dowry became
a vital part of the marriage ceremony. This in a way contributed to female infanticide, as it
became a heavy burden on the poor. The birth of girls became a frightening to the majority of the
population. Another negative effect of the dowry system was that there was degradation of the
Indian woman. She began to be regarded as transportable and removable property by her
husband. Many law intellectuals and upholders of religion in the medieval age stated that it
literally induced physical as well as intellectual impairment on women in medieval India.
In the medieval period, widow's condition were more miserable. Inflexibility of caste system
deprived of them the right to freedom and social movement. Inhuman treatment was given to the
widow. She was forced to lead a life away from sophisticated pleasures. A widow was also
isolated from society as well as family. Another pre-requisite for a widow was shaving the
head. She was thus shamed mercilessly by modern society. The condition of the Muslim widow
was somewhat better owing to the fact that she could marry after a certain gap of time following
her husband's death.
According to Jauha, there was the practice of voluntary immolation by wives and daughters of
overpowered warriors, in order to avoid capture and resulting molestation by the opponent. The
practice was followed by the wives of defeated Rajput rulers, who are known to place a high
premium on honour. The medieval society of the time stimulated "Sati" which referred as self-
immolation of the widow. It was thought that by burning herself on the fire of her husband, she
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proves her devotion. Even the child widows were not safe from this grisly ritual. According to
Saroj Gulati "because of the continuous wars, there were chances of too many widows young
and old, and main issue was how to accommodate them without getting shame to the family or
creating problems for society." In this period, Sati was considered as the best course though it
was the nastiest crime committed on Indian women as it was inhumane.
Another heinous torture of women was prostitution which became a recognised institution. The
Devadasi system which was predominant among the Hindus and the courtesans who ornamented
the court of Muslim rulers, dishonoured the status of women in civilisation. Under the Devadasi
system, women were the brides of gods. But they were supposed to amuse kings, priests and
even members of the high classes. Actually, they were abused by the existing male-dominated
society.

Women in the Bhakti Movement

Bhakti movements which succeeded during the medieval age gave rise to a new course of man
and women who cared slightly for gender prejudice. The liberal current, which to some extent
extended the prospect of women, was the Bhakti movements, the medieval saints' movements.
Female poet-saints also played a significant role in the bhakti movement at large. However,
many of these women had to fight for acceptance within male dominated movement. Only
through demonstrations of their absolute devotion to the Divine, their outstanding poetry, and
persistent insistence of their spiritual equality with their contemporaries were these women
unwillingly acknowledged and accepted within their ranks. Their struggle shows to the strength
of patriarchal values within both society and within religious and social movements attempting
to pave the way for more egalitarian access to the Divine.
The imagery of bhakti poetry is chastised in the everyday, familiar language of ordinary people.
Women bhaktas wrote of the obstacles of home, family tensions, the absent husband,
meaningless household chores, and restrictions of married life, including their status as married
women. In many cases, they excluded traditional women's roles and societal norms by leaving
husbands and homes altogether, choosing to become wandering bhaktas; in some instances they
formed communities with other poet-saints. Their new focus was sheer devotion and worship of
their Divine Husbands.
While it is attractive to realise women's participation within the bhakti movement as a rebellion
against the patriarchal norms of the time, there is less evidence to support this perspective.
Women bhaktas were simply individuals attempting to lead lives of devotion. Staying largely
within the patriarchal philosophy that upheld the chaste and dutiful wife as ideal, these women
transferred the object of their devotion and their duties as the "lovers" or "wives" to their Divine
Lover or Husband. However, that their poetry became an important aspect of the bhakti
movement.
Additionally, it would seem that with the movement's northward advancement (15th through
17th centuries), its radical edge as it related to women's inclusion was toughened. Women took
part in the movement's earlier development (6th to 13th centuries). It is mainly male bhaktas and
saints that are today perceived as the spokespersons for the movement in its later manifestations.
The poetry of women bhaktas from this latter time period is normally not revealing of a rejection
of societal customs in terms of leaving family and homes in chase of divine love. Instead, some
of the later poet-saints stayed within the limits of the household while expounding on their souls'
journeys, their perpetual love for the Divine, as well as their never-ending search for fact.
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Women in Modern India

Modern India denotes to the era form 1700 A.D. to 1947 A.D. In the back ground of the
intellectual disturbance of the 18th and 19th century, there observed a worldwide demand for
establishing of independent and democratic nationalist societies which consistently emphasized
the fairness of women with men. Women in modern India have been influenced by the programs
of modification and upliftment which brought about a fundamental change in their status. With
the numerous reform movements and a steady change in the opinion of women in society, there,
a radical change in the position of women in modern India was seen. Before the British rule in
India, the life of women was rather domineering, and they were subject to a continual process of
subjugation and social domination. The women's youth was spent in the preparation of marriage
and her whole life was dependent on the male members of her family. Though a few women
became educated, got fame and commanded armies but most were deprived of men's
opportunities to gain knowledge, property and social position.
Status of women in India during the British period:
If comparing with past records of women status with contemporary life, it can be said that there
are important change in the position of women. Numerous studies of the English literature by a
section of the Indians which helped them to integrate the western democratic and liberal
ideology, an philosophy successively utilized by them to start social and religious reform
movements in India. During the British rule, several changes were made in the economic and
social structures of Indian society, and some considerable progress was accomplished in removal
of inequalities between men and women, in education, employment, social rights. Earlier to this
period, the status of women was in gloomy state.
In the British period, women were given opportunities for education. After the Bhakti
Movement, the Christian Missionaries took interest in the education of the girls. The Hunter
Commission too highlighted on the need for female education in 1882. The Calcutta, Bombay
and Madras institutions did not permit the admission of girls till 1875. It was only after 1882 that
girls were permitted to go for higher education. Since then, there has been a constant progress in
the extent of education among females. Though the number of girls studying at various levels
was low, yet there has been a marked increase in the number of female students at every level
from 1941 onwards. At the end of the Nineteenth Century, women in India suffered from
infirmities like, child-marriage, practice of polygamy, sale of girls for marriage purposes, severe
restrictions on widows, non-access to education and restricting oneself to domestic and child-
bearing functions. The Indian National Conference started in 1885 by Justice Ranade contained
these disabilities.
Renowned social reformer, Raja Ram Mohun Roy, who contributed immensely in getting the
Sati system abolished, raised voices against the child-marriage and fought for the right of legacy
for women. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar propelled a movement for the right of widows to re-
marry and also begged for educating women. Maharaja S. Rao, ruler of Baroda State worked for
deterrence of child-marriages, Polygamy and getting the rights of education to women, and the
right of re-marriage to widows. Other eminent personality like Swami Vivekananda, Annie
Besant, and Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Dayanand Saraswati also had interest in the social and
political rights of women. Gandhiji thought that, women should labour under no legal disability.
He said that equal treatment should be given to both boy and girl.
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Indian woman are well-known in various fields of life as politicians, orators, lawyers, doctors,
administrators and diplomats. They are not only trusted with work of responsibility but also they
do in their duties honestly and sincerely. In modern time women are actively participating in
every field of life. Women exercise their right to vote, contest for Parliament and Assembly, seek
appointment in public office and compete in other spheres of life with men. This demonstrates
that women in India has got more liberty and equality as compared to earlier period. They have
learned more liberty to contribute in the affairs of the country. They have been given impartiality
with men in making their future and sharing responsibilities for themselves, their family and
their country.
It is a truth that women are intelligent, devoted and efficient in work. In various fields, they are
now competing successfully with men. There are many women working in the Central
Secretariat. They are striving very hard to gain highest efficiency and perfection in the
administrative work. Their honesty of character is probably better than men. Generally it was
found that women are less vulnerable to corruption in form of bribery and favouritism. As a
matter of fact, they are progressively monopolising the jobs of receptionists and air-hostesses.
Another job in which Indian women are doing so well is that of teachers. Women's contributions
in politics and social services have also been significant. Lively example of Indira Gandhi who
excelled so brilliantly and ecstatically in the expanse of India's politics. She ruled this country for
more than a decade and took India winning out of Pakistan-war which resulted in the historic
creation of a new country, Bangladesh. In the field of social service, Indian women have also
done outstanding works. They have not only served the cause of the suffering humanity but have
also brought highest successes for the country, for example, Mother Teressa who sacrificed
whole life for welfare of society. She brought the Nobel Prize for India by her selfless services to
the poor, destitute and suffering people of our country in particular and the deprived and
handicapped people of the world in general.
It is well understood that the progress of a nation depends upon the care and skill with which
mothers give their children. The first and primary duty of Indian women should, therefore, be to
bring forth noble generations of patriots, warriors, scholars and statesmen. Since child's
education begins even in the womb and the impressions are formed in the mind of a child while
in mothers arms in which women play vital role (Tripathi, 1999).
There is no refuting of the fact that the role of women in India is significant and they contribute
in success of nation. Though they have to struggle against many handicaps and social evils in the
male subjugated society. The Hindu Code Bill has given the daughter and the son equal share of
the property. The Marriage Act no longer regards woman as the property of man. Marriage is
now considered to be a personal matter and if a partner is disappointed she or he has the right of
divorce. In order to prove themselves equal to the self-esteem and status given to them in the
Indian Constitution they have to shake off the restraints of slavery and fallacies. They should
help the government and the society in eliminating the sins of dowry.

Women's organization in India

Women's Organisations emerged in India as a result of the spread of education and the
establishment of the notion of the new woman. There was an improved level of communication
among women which made them aware of the different problems that they faced and their rights
and accountabilities in society. This awareness led to the upsurge of women's organisations that
fought for and signified women's causes.
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Pre-Independence:
An exclusive feature of the Indian women's crusade is the fact that early efforts at women's
liberation were set in motion by men. Social reformers such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Maharishi
Karve and Swami Dayanand Saraswati challenged the conventional subservience of women,
stimulated widow remarriage and supported female education and impartiality in matters of
religion, among other issues. Mahila mandals organised by Hindu reformist organisations such as
the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj encouraged women to go out of the boundaries of their
homes and interact with other members of society. Pandita Ramabai, who was considered as one
of the innovators of the feminist movement, with the help of Justice Ranade established the Arya
Mahila Samaj in 1882. She envisioned creating a support network for newly educated women
through weekly lectures and lessons at homes, where women could learn and gain confidence
through interactions.
Women's auxiliaries of general reform associations also served as a ground for women to
deliberate social issues, express opinions and share experiences. The Bharata Mahila Parishad of
the National Social Conference was the most protruding among such opportunities. Though the
National Social Conference was formed at the third meeting of the Indian National Congress in
1887, the Mahila Parishad was launched only in 1905.
These initiatives greatly influenced the social status of women. Early attempts at encouraging
women to converse outside their families and local committees thus, stemmed from the broader
social reform movement and efforts to upgrade the conditions of women.
But a major inadequacy of the movement at this juncture was that it was essentially exclusive in
character. The reforms were planned for restricted upper caste women and did not take up the
cause of the huge masses of poor and working class women. Also, male‐guided organisations
still perceived the household as the woman's first priority and did not make efforts to employ
education as an instrument to improve their contribution in society.
In the beginning of nineteenth century, there was concerted efforts towards education of women.
Schools and educational institutions promoting female public education mushroomed across the
country.
The pre‐Independence period saw women's issues related to the nationalist agenda at various
junctures. In this period, major enhancement of women was in terms of political participation of
women, calling for a redefinition of conventional gender roles. Women began openly
demonstrating their opposition to foreign control by supporting civil disobedience actions and
other forms of protest against the British. Opportunities to organise and participate in agitations
gave women the much‐needed confidence and a chance to develop their leadership skills. Cutting
across communal and religious barriers, women associated themselves with larger problems of
society and opposed sectarian issues such as communal electorates. Political awareness among
women grew, owing to a general understanding that women's issues could not be separated from
the political environment of the country. During this period, the initial women's organisations
formed within the historical background of the social reform movement and the nationalist
movement were as follows.

1. The Women's India Association (WIA).

2. National Council of Women in India (NCWI).
3. The All India Women's Conference (AIWC) in 1917, 1925 and 1927 correspondingly.
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Each of these organisations emphasised the importance of education in women's progress.

The WIA, created by Margaret Cousins in Madras, worked widely for the social and educational
emancipation of women. Associated with the Theosophical Society, it encouraged non‐sectarian
religious activity and did creditable work in promoting literacy, setting up shelters for widows
and providing relief for disaster victims.
Women in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata through networks developed during World War I
work, allied their associations together and created the NCWI in 1925. A national branch of the
International Council of Women, its most prominent member was Mehribai Tata, who
aggressively campaigned against inert charity and advised men to support female education.
The most important of the women's organisations of the time was the All India Women's
Conference. Though its initial efforts were directed towards improving female education, its
scope later extended to include a host of women's issues such as women's franchise, inheritance
rights.
Period of Post-Independence:
The Constitution of India enlisted in 1950 which permitted equal rights to men and women.
Rights such as the right to vote, right to education, right to entry into public service and political
offices brought in satisfaction among women's groups. In this period, there was limited activity
in the area of women's rights. Many women's organizations such as National Federation of
Indian Women (1954) the Samajwadi Mahila Sabha (1559) were formed to work for supporting
the cause of Indian women. Since the country was facing a social, political crisis after the British
rule, many demands of the women activists were not supported by the Government. But during
this period from 1945, the Indian women got an opportunity to participate in confrontational
politics.
In post-independent India, the women's crusade was divided, as the common opponent, foreign
rule, was no longer there. Some of the women leaders formally joined the Indian National
Congress and took powerful position as Ministers, Governors and Ambassadors. Free India's
Constitution gave universal adult franchise and by the mid-fifties India had fairly liberal laws
concerning women. Most of the demands of the women's movement had been met and there
seemed few issues left to organize around. Women's organizations now observed that there was
an issue of implementation and consequently there was a pause in the women's movement.
Women displeased with the status quo joined struggles for the rural poor and industrial working
class such as the Tebhaga movement in Bengal, the Telangana movement in Andhra Pradesh or
the Naxalite movement. Shahada, which acquired its name from the area in which it occurred, in
Dhulia district in Maharashtra, was a tribal landless labourers' movement against landlords.
Women actively participated and led demonstrations, developed and yelled militant slogans and
mobilized the masses. As women's belligerency developed, gender based issues were raised.
For the meantime in Ahmedabad the first attempt at a women's trade union was made with the
establishment of the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) at the initiative of Ela Bhat
in 1972. Major objective was to improve the condition of poor women who worked in the
unorganized sector by providing training, technical aids and collective bargaining. Based on
Gandhian ideals, SEWA has been a remarkable success.
The Nav Nirman movement, initially a student's movement in Gujarat against rising prices, black
marketing and dishonesty launched in 1974 was soon joined by huge number of middle class
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women. Their method of protest reached from mass hunger strike, mock funerals and prabhat
pheris.
The 1970s and 1980s observed the development of numerous women's groups that took up issues
such as dowry deaths, bride burning, rape, and sati and focused on violence against women.
They stressed the sexual coercion of women in a way previous reform or feminist groups had
never done. They questioned the patriarchal assumptions underlying women's role in the family
and society based on the biological sex differences implying a "natural" separation of human
activities by gender differentials, the public political sphere being the male domain and the
private familial sphere as that of the female which eventually translates into a supremacy of male
over female. Some of the earliest self-governing women's groups were the Progressive
Organization of Women (POW, Hyderabad), the Forum Against Rape (now redefined as Forum
Against Oppression of Women), Stree Sangharsh and Samata (Delhi). Among the first
campaigns that women's groups took up was the struggle against rape in 1980.
The modified law was passed in 1983 after heated debate with women's groups. Since then,
women's groups have lobbied again to have the law further changed to make it more severe and
have also fought for an implementation machinery to be set up without which the law is less
effective than it was intended to be. The POW in Hyderabad planned new and fresh
remonstrations against dowry. In the late 1970s, Delhi became the focus of the movement
against dowry and the violence imposed on women in the marital home. Groups which took up
the campaign included 'Stree Sangharsh' and 'Mahila Dakshita Samiti'. Later, a joint front called
the 'Dahej Virodhi Chetna Mandal' (organization for creating consciousness against dowry) was
made under which a large number of organizations worked.
In 1975, the Lal Nishar Party structured a joint women's conference which was well attended by
women in Pune in Maharashtra. Similarly the communist party in India in 1975 organized a
National Seminar which was attended by women in Maharashtra. The famous women's
organisations which were established during this time are the Stree Mukhti Sangkatana, the Stree
Sangharsh and Mahila Dakshata in Delhi. Vimochana in Chennai, Baijja in Maharashtra,
Pennurumai in Chennai. The Feminist Network in English and Manushi in Hindi were some of
the first women's newsletters and magazines to appear. The issues that they raise are rape, wife-
battering, divorce, maintenance and child custody along with legislative reforms. This
progressive outlook is indeed a by-product of the changing economic, social and political climate
in the country. Therefore, the women's movement in India after Independence struggle not only
struggled for liberation but also averred the need for creating a non-class socialist society where
women can be completely free from apprehension and violence. The reverberations of changes,
recurrent and sporadic at the beginning, began to be heard rather loudly from the middle of the
20th century.
Some women organizations such as the Banga Mahila Samaj, and the Ladies Theosophical
Society functioned at local levels to promote contemporary ideas for women. These
organizations deal with issues like women's education, abolition of social evils like purdah and
Child marriage, Hindu law reform, moral and material progress of women, equality of rights and
opportunities. It can be believed that, the Indian women's movement worked for two goals.

1. Uplift of women.
2. Equal rights for both men and women.
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All the major political parties, the Congress, BJP, CPI, CPI (M) have their women's wings. The new women's groups
declare themselves to be feminist. They are dispersed with no central organization but they have built informal
networks among themselves. Their political commitment is more leftist than liberal.
Currently there are many women organizations of India:

i. All India Federation of Women Lawyers

ii. All India Women's Conference
iii. Appan Samachar
iv. Association of Theologically Trained Women of India
v. Bharatiya Grameen Mahila Sangh
vi. Bharatiya Mahila Bank
vii. Confederation of Women Entrepreneurs
viii. Durga Vahini
ix. Friends of Women's World Banking
x. Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sangathan

National alliance of women: The National Alliance of Women (NAWO) is a national web of
women. It is affiliation or membership is open to all liberal minded women's groups and
institutions, non-governmental organizations, women workers, women's unions, individuals and
others who share the principles, objectives and values of NAWO, as defined in the NAWO
vision. Major objective of this organization are:

1. Strengthening and building new initiatives, networks, forums etc., for protecting women's rights
2. Monitoring the Government of India's commitments, implementing the Platform for Action with special focus
on the eight point agenda discussed at the Conference of Commitment, CEDAW, the Human Rights and
other United Nations Convention.
3. Advocacy, lobbying and campaigning on women related issues.
4. Information Dissemination and Documentation.
5. Solidarity and linkages with other regional and global forums.

Another women organization in India is Swadhina (Self-esteemed Women) which was formed in
1986. It is principally a civil society organization focused on Empowerment of women and Child
Development based on Sustainable Development and Right Lively hood. At Swadhina, it is
believed that positive social change has a direct effect on the lives of women and that change is
possible only through an equal and spontaneous participation of Women. Organization members
are active in five states across the country in remote tribal districts of Singbhums in Jharkhand,
Purulia and West Midnapur in West Bengal, Kanya Kumari in Tamil Nadu, Mayurbhanj in
Orissa and East Champaran in Bihar.
Major projects of this organization are as follows:

1. Women's Empowerment Through:

o Promoting Grass-Root level Women's Organization
o Fostering Functional Literacy, Education & Social Awareness generation
o Augmenting Participation of Women in Local Governance
o Encouraging Women's Income Generation & economic capacity building
o Strengthening Women's Participation in Agriculture & Food Security support
o Upholding Non-Violence & Social Empowerment
o Improving Family Health & Nutrition
2. Child Development Through:
o Supporting Child Education
o Promoting Sports & Games
o Advancing Environment & Eco-logical awareness
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All India Democratic Women's Association is also dominant woman organization which is an
independent left oriented women's organisation committed to achieving democracy, equality and
women's emancipation. AIDWA members are from all strata in society, regardless of class, caste
and community. It has an organizational presence in 22 states in India.
AIDWA was created in 1981 as a national level mass organisation of women. AIDWA believes
the liberation of women in India requires fundamental systemic change. It upholds secular values
and challenges and resists cultural practices demeaning to women.
To summarize, women from earlier time has significant role in shaping of civilization. Historical
data indicated that though the struggle for women's rights is long and hard, but currently, status
of women is enhanced and society recognized their importance. It was observed that after
Independence, the Indian women gained considerable importance within their country in social
and political spheres. The women's movement has a long way to go in its struggle for bringing
about new values, a new ethics and a new democratic affiliation. The objectives were to get
equality based on gender, job opportunities, improving the existing laws which gave women only
partial justice, and creating a society which did not dominate women intellectually, physically
and emotionally. Even though the efforts made by women activists and concerned organization
were slow in getting a real break-through, despite the conservative outlook of their counterparts,
they thrived in creating a focussed awareness among middle-class and upper middle-class
women at large. Currently, Indian woman is working throughout the country at high post and
virtually in all professions at different positions. She is not only visible as the top politician as
seen above in politics. Even as managers in industrial firms, director of nationwide operating
banks, top bureaucrats, active members of micro-credit groups or as independent fashion
designers. Government is going to help women in every sphere of life in society. Numerous
programs are implement to empower women in India (Tripathi, 1999).
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Population and Associated Issues

Human population are also theme to usual process of birth and death. World is facing major
challenge of rapid increase in human population since last many decades, (UNFPA, 2011). In
various parts of globe, there is unparalleled rapid demographic change and the most noticeable
example of this change is the vast expansion of human. It is expected that in near future, it will
increase rapidly and give birth to numerous issues in the least developed regions. It is
recommended that there is a desperate need to take urgent steps to control population otherwise
serious problems can arise such as environment damage and restricted availability of food
resources. Constant growth of population is major issue and therefore it is significant to
understand how policy makers can manage population growth for the benefit of society. The
influence of population on the financial system is apparently straightforward. It is about having
enough resources to meet the needs of the growing number of people. Since the same resources
are shared by all members of the society, everybody is affected by development and many are
underprivileged of their access to the same resources. The merits and drawbacks of controlling
population growth can be recognized with reference to the very tangible reality of basic
education development. It has been shown in studies that population issues are vital component
 300

of policy discussion on social and economic development. They encompass a broad sense of
concern that range from questions of design of appropriate intervention to lessen fertility,
improve the health of mother and children, encourage better birth spacing, and reduce population
growth (Sanderson, 1993).

Concept of population: Population is described as the number of people in an area based on

specific categories such as ethnicity, age, income, sex, and social economic status. Population is
continually changing due to birth and death rate and relocation among families to explore good
sources of income. Population is calculated by counting the actual number of people in a given
area and measuring birth to death ratios. Population Growth can be defined as the change in
population over time and can be quantified as the change in number of individuals in a
population as "per unit time".
Centripetal and Centrifugal forces foresees how successful the country's financial system is
going to be; many people travel in or out of the country to find suitable jobs. In every unit area,
population density is the measurement of the amount of people in a given square mile. In
metropolis region, the population is more dense because of limitation of land area and in rural
and suburban areas, people own more land and is generally used for agriculture and income.
Statistical reports indicated that China and India are nations with the huge population in the
world. Due to massive land and lack of contraception, the population is mounting at a rapid rate
within these countries. Developed countries such as the United States subcontract in China and
India because the labour cost is low-priced. Labour laws in these countries are not synchronized
which allow these countries to take shortcuts which means more products to export.
Due to the industrial revolution, the population has been growing at great pace during the past.
Developed countries are visualizing increasing trends based on the monetary development. In
these areas, the more people are able to provide for the family, the larger the family gets. Nations
where industrial development is slow, population is growing but most people struggle to survive
due to deficit in medical facilities and shortage of water and food. The industrial revolution
generated income for people and these people get funds for shelter and food. Thomas Malthus
was sensible philosopher who expected population to grow in time as long as there's food and
shelter. However, due to fast growth of the population, many serious issues emerged like
diseases and scarcity of resources.
 301

World Population Growth: Source: U.S. Census Bureau: International data base June 2011

Population explosion in developing countries such as India is a matter of concern because it

disrupts the development of the country and its society. The developing countries already face
challenge of limited resources due to fast growth of population as the resources available per
person are reduced further which results in increased poverty, malnutrition, and other large
population-related problems. The factual meaning of population is "the whole number of people
or inhabitants in a country or region" and the literal meaning of population outburst is "a
pyramiding of numbers of a biological population". As the number of people in a pyramid
increases, the issues associated with it becomes severe and worsen the situation of country. The
main factors that greatly impact the population change are the birth rate, death rate and
migration. The birth rate is the ratio between births and individuals in a specified population and
time (Miller, 253).
Population growth from the past to present is in increasing trend, and it will continue at even a
rapid rate in the next few decades. The main problem arise from fast population growth is the
lack of resources and land. When population explode, the more waste would be produced.
Academicians and researchers stressed that country must develop ways to lessen future problems
through educating developing countries and provide contraception to areas that have larger
population growth. Other ways to tackle issues of population expansion is to create sustainability
laws, monitor natural resources, and replenish what was taken out of the earth. Many experts
advocated that it is imperative to educate the general public about major issues due to
overpopulation and pollution which can help prevent future disasters. Increase wakefulness of
contraception and to become more environmentally friendly will make human life secure in near
future.
 302

India and Population: India is considered to be one of the most populous countries at global
scale. Population in this country is growing speedily due to globalisation and establishment of
many factories which consecutively create jobs for many unskilled workers. India has the second
largest population in the world and will soon exceed China. The majority of the population
growth takes place in poverty suffering areas due to lack of contraception and medical centres.
The fertility rate which is the amount of children per woman that would be birthed in her lifetime
is at 6 children per woman; while, in developed countries like U.S. the fertility rate is at 2
children per woman. The carrying capacity of India is very restricted due to exaggerate
utilization of natural resources. The shortage of clean water and over harvesting of crops proves
damaging to the environment. Sustainability is a colossal issue in India and people of India are
not well educated to utilize resources in appropriate way. Such lack of knowledge about
replenishing resources is leaving people out of options on the next step to take.
In India, most of the population lives in crowded slums because land is limited and pollution is
increasing day by day. Though, India's financial system is improved due to new business
ventures. Many persons moved from rural areas to cities for better opportunities. The probability
of children going to school in the city is more common than in rural areas. But job opportunities
are still limited and with lack of education and skills, many people are unemployed. With
population growth astounding at an alarming rate, waste is also accumulating in areas where
children and old people are exposed of toxic waste. Many parts of India are not capable of
providing proper sanitary practices such as a bathroom and toilet. Many rivers and lakes are
contaminated with organic and man-made waste. Many people bath, drink, and eat fish from the
same source. It has adverse impact on health on populace of India such as people are contracting
salmonella and other gastrointestinal illnesses due to unhygienic conditions. The poor are left to
live amongst waste that has accumulated from the explosion of the population and the wealth of
the economy. The worst condition due to increase in population is that many poor people collect
utility items through wastelands to build shelter. Unfortunately, poverty exists throughout the
world but is a growing problem in thickly populated nations such as India and China.
Government involvement is to reduce poverty in rural India. Many programs funded by the
government organized that help the poor which significantly changed many lives. It has been
observed that people are given education, welfare, and proper sanitation.
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Population growth in India from2001- 2011 (Source: Census 2011 : Provisional Population Total – INDIA)

Reports indicated that in 1 January 2015, the population of India was estimated to be 1 286 956
392 people. This is an increase of 1.34 % (16 979 590 people) compared to population of 1 269
976 802 the year before. In 2014 the natural increase was positive, as the number of births
exceeded the number of deaths by 17 131 987. Due to external migration, the population
declined by 152 397.The sex ratio of the total population was 1.068 (1 068 males per 1 000
females) which is higher than global sex ratio. During 2015 India population is estimated to be
increased by 17 206 607 people and reach 1 304 162 999 in the beginning of 2016. The natural
increase is expected to be positive, as the number of births will exceed the number of deaths by
17 361 042. If external migration will remain on the previous year level, the population will be
declined by 154 435 due to the migration reasons. It means that amount of people who leaves
India to settle permanently in another country (emigrants) will prevail over the amount of people
who moves into the country (http://countrymeters.info/en/India).

Reasons for current increase in the world population

Due to economic and political challenges in India, country faces problems of the population
explosion. According to reports, India's population hit 1 billion in May 2000, increasing the
urgency for the country to moderate its population growth. Some of the reasons for this
population explosion are poverty, better medical facilities, and immigration from the
neighbouring countries of Bangladesh and Nepal. The population density of India in 1996 was
about 287 persons per square kilometer.
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Fertility, mortality and migration are principal determinants of population expansion. The birth
rate is the ratio between births and individuals in a specified population and time (Miller, 253).
The death rate is the ratio between the number of deaths and individuals in a specified population
and time (Miller, 253). Migration is the number of people moving in (immigration) or out
(emigration) of a country, place or locality. The population change is calculated by the formula:
Population change = (Births + Immigration) – (Deaths + Emigration)
The increase in birth rates due to medical improvements increases population in world and the
decrease in death rates. To account for the differences in population size, demographers often use
the concept of crude birth and death rate. The crude birth rate is the number of births divided by
the size of the population and multiplied by 1000. Death rate: though poverty has increased and
the development of the country continues to be troubled, the enhancements in medical facilities
have been incredible. This improvement might be considered constructive, but it led to increase
in population. The crude death rate in India in 1981 was roughly 12.5, and that decreased to
approximately 8.7 in 1999. Also, the infant mortality rate in India decreased from 129 in 1981 to
approximately 72 in 1999 (Mapsindia.com, Internet). Such statistical figures indicate that due to
the improvements in the medical field, human life is secured and they live longer. Additionally,
abortion is not permitted by several religions in India. In fact, in Islam, one of the leading
religions of India, children are considered to be gifts of God, therefore there is no family
planning which ultimately results in increase in population.
Poverty is major cause of population increase in developing countries. According to ABC News,
India currently faces approximately "33 births a minute, 2,000 an hour, 48,000 a day, which
calculates to nearly 12 million a year". Unfortunately, the resources do not increase in same
manner as the population increases. Instead the resources keep decreasing, leading to making
survival for a human being more and more competitive even for the basic necessities of life like
food, clothing and shelter. India currently is griped under serious problem of population
explosion and poverty. According to Geography.com, "More than 300 million Indians earn less
than US $1 everyday and about 130 million people are jobless." Poor or illiterate people give
birth to more children because they think that more children mean more earning hands. Also, due
to poverty, the infant mortality rate among such families is higher due to the lack of facilities like
food and medical resources. Therefore, they produce more children assuming that not all of them
would be able to survive. This results in exploding population at alarming rate in India. Due to
the increase in population, the problems of scarce resources, jobs, and poverty increases.
Another cause of population explosion in India is religious beliefs, Traditions and Cultural
Norms. India's culture is very strong and prevails since historic time. Due to the increased
population, the educational facilities are very limited. As a result, most people still firmly follow
ancient values. Report of ABC News revealed that renowned Indian author, Shobha De stated,
"God said 'Go forth and produce' and we just went ahead and did exactly that." In India, people
have belief that they must have son in family instead of a daughter. Consequently, a lot of
families have more children than they actually want or can afford. This leads to increased
poverty, lack of resources, and ultimately increases number of people in country. Indian people
also believe that cultural norms are for a girl to get married at an early age. In most of the rural
areas and in some urban areas as well, families choose to get their girls married at the age of 14
or 15. Although child marriage is unlawful in India, the culture and the society surrounding the
girls in India does not allow them to resist such decisions taken by their family.
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Migration: Immigration to better developed countries due to several reasons like better job
opportunities, war, and natural causes like hurricanes, earthquakes, and so forth. In developed
countries, major cause of population growth is immigration. However, in countries like India,
immigration has little role in the population growth. Although people from neighbouring
countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal, travel to India; at the same time Indians migrate
to other countries like the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. During the 1971 war between India and
Pakistan over Bangladesh, the immigration rate increased enormously.

Trends in Fertility
Enlarged fertility rates and migration can have significant effects on the general structure of
populations. In the United States, the amalgamation has led to the Hispanic ethnic group
becoming the largest ethnic minority in the country. The speedy growth of the Hispanic
population since last many decades has in effect invigorated the aging U.S. population by adding
children and working-age adults, at the same time making it more ethnically diverse. The size of
the Latino population doubled between 1980 and 2000, and Latinos also accounted for 40% of
the country's population growth. That rapid growth has continued since 2000, accounting for
almost half the increase of the U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2006).
Effects of the rapid population growth in India: There is unfavourable impact of population
explosion in India.
Providing employment to growing population: Job creation is major issue for countries in
which population is increasing at faster rate. The main reason is that in developing economies
majority of the population is uneducated. The burden of school age population has already
revealed signs of becoming unbearable. The proportion of children in schools is increasing fast
and, huge numbers are still not covered. The total number or illiterate persons increases every
year. This is only a sign of the wastage of human resources for want of appropriate development
opportunities.
Problem of utilisation of manpower: Another issue is how to use manpower. Better educated
manpower seeks for occupations of greater status, which are opened up by the new development
efforts. Because of its capital intensive nature, the ability, of the new economy for employment
generation becomes limited. Concurrently, it renders many of the old occupations out of day and
redundant. As a result, under-employment and unemployment, including unemployment of
educated persons, increases. There is therefore surplus of even developed human capital.
Over-strained infrastructure: Due to population explosion, numerous facilities such as
housing, transportation, health care, and education become insufficient. The worst symptoms of
overcrowding in every aspect of living conditions are manifested in the urban areas. In countries
such as India, a situation of "over urbanisation" exist which puts intolerable strain on urban
services. Overloaded houses, slums and unhygienic localities, traffic jamming and crowded
hospitals have become common aspects in the developing countries.
Pressure on land and other renewable natural resources: Population overcrowding put more
pressure on land and natural resources. Common properties such as forest and water are over-
exploited. This results in deforestation and desertification with permanent damage to the
renewable resources.
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Increased cost of production: Human inventiveness and technological progression makes it

achievable to increase production of goods and services. But, due to increase in population, the
cost of production of the basic necessities of life, such as food, increases.
Inequitable distribution of income: Population growth in uneven manner can lead to
unbalanced distribution of salary. Both at the international and national levels, income inequality
increased. The increase in gross national product (GNP) is significantly reduced in per capita
terms on account of the rapidly growing population. With rapidly growing population, the major
problem of a developing country tends to be focused more on economic growth as such.
Air Pollution: The technical growth of India has lead not only to medical advancements, but
also to an increase in the number of factories. This results in air and water pollution. More
energy needs to be produced to power these factories. When fossil fuels are burnt, gases released
in the atmosphere. Many cities in India have crossed the limits of suspended particulate matter,
sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants due to vehicular and industrial emanation. Reports of the
World Bank Organization have shown that Delhi is one of the world's most contaminated cities.
As the population increases in future, more forests are cleared. The reasons for deforestation are
to make houses for increased number of people to live in, and to use wood as a fuel in the
industries. As a result, the trees that facilitate in reducing the air pollution through the process of
photosynthesis are not able to do so. Increased air pollution causes many air (polluted) borne
diseases. Some of the diseases caused by air pollution are "respiratory diseases, asthma, chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease and cancer of the lung" (World Health
Organization, Internet). Due to the tropical climate of India, air pollution also causes smog which
may result in headaches, dizziness, breathing difficulties, or even mass illness due to carbon
monoxide. The root of all the problems is population increase.
Water Pollution: Water pollution also poses threat to environment through the increasing
population. Water is considered the core of life. Nearly 10 percent of the world's population
faces constant freshwater shortage. This figure may rise if the population growth is uncontrolled.
Due to increase in population, numerous factories are set up. These factories lead to various
kinds of pollution, including water pollution. Also, India being an agrarian country, the water
pollution also comes from pesticides used for agriculture. Some of the major types of pollutants
are petroleum products required for automobiles, cooking, and other such human activities,
pesticides and herbicides used for agriculture by the Indian farmers, heavy metals from
industries, automobiles' exhausts and mines, hazardous wastes, excessive organic matter like
fertilizers and other organic matter used by farmers, sediments caused by soil erosion produced
by strip mines, agriculture and roads and thermal pollution caused by deforestation. One of the
typical examples of water pollution in India is the river Ganga. This river is considered sacred.
People take holy bath in it for spiritual renewal and drink water from it. But people do not realize
that along with washing off their sins in the river, they are also washing off their body wastes,
leading to polluting the holy water of the river. Also, cremated and partly cremated bodies are
dumped into the river. Although, dumping these bodies is a spiritual act in India among the
Hindus, but it contaminate the water. Therefore, when population increases, the number of
people dying is also increasing, and it lead to the pollution in the river Ganga. Additionally, the
nearby factories and human colonies dump sewage directly into the river. At present the river is
so contaminated that some experts believe such water should not even be exposed in nature
without being treated. It can be said that when population size is increasing, it results in
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increased pollution, which in turn is leading to a more hostile environment for human beings
themselves.

Available measures to Control Population

To control population, preventive actions are being taken at global scale. In India, government
has initiated numerous programs to curb the population and has been spending huge money on
controlling the birth rate. Some of the programs have been triumphant, and the rate of increase
has also reduced, but has still to reach the sustainable rate. It has been highlighted in reports that
the key factors that affect the population increase of India are the fast increasing birth rate and
decreasing death rates. Effective population control measures are necessary in present scenario.
It is well established that birth rate is mainly responsible for rapid population growth. Therefore
measures which can reduce the birth rate should be adopted.

Figure:

Social Measure: Population outburst is considered to be a social problem and it is intensely

rooted in the civilization. It is therefore necessary to make efforts to eliminate the social
iniquities in the country. Minimum age of Marriage: As fertility depends on the age of marriage
therefore the minimum age of marriage should be raised. In India minimum age for marriage is
21 years for men and 18 years for women fixed by law. This law should be strongly implemented
and people should also be made aware of this through promotion.
Another aspect in controlling population is to raising the Status of Women. There is still
favouritism to the women. They are restricted to house. They are still confined to rearing and
bearing of children. So women should be given opportunities to develop socially and
economically. Free education should be given to them.
Other preventive measure of population is to spread education. The spread of education changes
the views of people. The educated men take mature decisions and prefer to delay marriage and
adopt small family custom. Educated women are health mindful and avoid frequent pregnancies
and thus help in lowering birth rate.
Adoption is also effective way to curb population. Some parents do not have any child, despite
expensive medical treatment. It is recommended that they should adopt orphan children. It will
be helpful to orphan children and children to couples.
As preventive measure of population, there is a need to change in Social Outlook. Social outlook
of the people should undergo a change. It must be taught that marriage should no longer be
considered a social compulsory.
Social Security is necessary for people. It is responsibility of government to include more and
more people under-social security schemes. So that they do not depend upon others in the event
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of old age, sickness, unemployment with these facilities they will have no desire for more
children.

Economic Measures
There has to be numerous economic measures taken as a preventive measure for population
explosion. Government must devise policies for more employment opportunities. It is necessary
is to raise the employment opportunities in rural as well as urban areas. Generally in rural areas
there is disguised joblessness. Another economic measure for population control is the
development of Agriculture and Industry. If agriculture and industry are correctly developed,
huge number of people will get employment. When their income is increased they would
enhance their standard of living and accept small family norms. Good standard of living is a
deterrent to large family norm. In order to maintain their enhanced standard of living, people
prefer to have a small family.
Urbanisation process can reduce population increase. It is reported that people in urban areas
have low birth rate than those living in rural areas. Urbanisation should be encouraged.
Other Measures: Other actions to decrease population are many. First is late Marriage as this
will reduce the period of reproduction among the females and bring down the birth rate. Another
measure is self-control. Many practitioners advocated that self-control is one of the dominant
methods to control the population. It is an idyllic and healthy approach and people should be
provided to follow. It helps in reducing birth rate. The govt. can give different types of incentives
to the people to adopt birth control measures. Financial incentives and other facilities like leave
and promotion can be extended to the working class which adopts small family norms.
Employment to Woman is effective method to check the population. Women should be given
incentive to give services in different fields.
There is a need to follow strict birth control measures such as China has adopted the strategy to
decrease the birth rate. But it is not possible to reduce technological advancements to decrease
the death rate in India. In order to reduce the birth rate, several government-funded agencies like
the Family Planning Association of India spend excessive funds to promote on family planning
as a basic human right and the norm of a two-child family on a voluntary basis. It is done to
achieve a balance between the population size and resources, to get ready young people for
responsible attitudes in human sexuality, and to provide education and services to all. The family
planning methods provided by the family planning program are vasectomy, tubectomy, IUD,
conventional contraceptives (that is condoms, diaphragms, jelly/cream tubes, foam tables) and
oral pills. Additionally, induced abortion is available, free of charge, in institutions recognized
by the government to control population increase. However, the success of the family planning
program in India depends on many factors such as literacy, religion and the region where the
people live.

Problems with implementing measures to control population

As it is well documented in literature that India is a country of diverse culture and people come
from different family background therefore it is difficult to change the perception of people
toward such norms like family planning. The success of family planning mainly depends on
women and their status. Thus, it is crucial for the women to get proper education so that they can
decide on the number of children they want and be aware of the available birth control measures.
In India, it is important for the women to have equal rights to take decision about the number of
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children to be produced. Women also need to get educated about the impacts of having so many
children on their health and the impacts on their children. Additionally, the older women need to
be educated so that they can teach the correct family planning to their own daughters.
Nevertheless, in India, society does not give more importance on women education because of
the financial conditions in some families and the religious and social norms. In such a case,
educating women about family planning becomes an even more difficult task. These factors lead
to population increase and government face problem in implementing population control
strategies. Another factor that create problem in controlling population is that most of the
population in India live in the rural areas. However, family planning is not extensively advertised
in rural areas. Also, in rural areas, social and religious norms are more firmly followed. It has
been observed that family planning is considered as an offence in most of the tribal and rural
communities.
To summarize, Population escalation is a major issue around the world which has adverse impact
on numerous environmental and human health problems. Population growth continue to increase
in the world at a fast pace. As the population enlarges, many experts are concerned about its
dangerous results. The growth rate of population is a function of migration, birth rate and death
rate in a country. The change in population caused by net migration as a proportion of total
population of the country is almost insignificant and, therefore, can be easily ignored. That
leaves us with birth rate and death rate. The difference between the birth rate and the death rate
measures the growth rate of population. Over populated regions need more resources. Population
explosion causes deforestation for food production, urban overcrowding and the spread of
horrible diseases. The effectual way to stop population growth is to implement family planning
policies but the exact way to achieve that has created a great deal of disagreement. Several
feasible solutions have been proposed by the government to curb population.

Poverty and Developmental Issues

One of the sarcasm of technical developing world is the poverty which remains prevalent and
uncontrolled. Poverty is old age observable fact suffered by countries at global scale. It is a very
indistinct concept with varied implications and facades. Bhalla Surjit stated "there is a rich
history of formal definitions of poverty, going back to the mid nineteenth century. It is an
attempt to capture the bottom-half of the population, the have-nots, and the poor (2000:1).
Traditionally, poverty is defined in terms of one dimensional approach of income and food
intake capabilities. Dandekar and Rath determined the minimum acceptable income level in
terms of 'nutritional deficiency' (1971). The concept of poverty thus goes beyond income and
basic services. People who are under empowered, who are unable to participate in making the
decisions, who are deprived of elementary education, health care, nutrition, water and sanitation,
employment and wages and who pass many different inabilities and adversities like inequality of
asset, unequal distribution, ignorance, corruption, lack of political power, lack of political will,
natural calamities, inadequate governance, lack of opportunities of development, inappropriate
public policies and programmes, lack of access to entitlements and many hurdles in the
wellbeing of human beings are included in the group of poor.
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Poverty is a matter of heated debate among academicians and policy-makers. The modern
multidimensional approach is characterised with a bigger view and considers poverty as a
withdrawal of essential productive assets and opportunities to which every human being should
be entitled. According to this approach, defining poverty in terms of consumption expenditure
misses the point. Assets and its distribution are major factor. The World Health Organization has
described poverty as the greatest cause of suffering on earth. The traditional definition of poverty
concerns the inability of a person to realize certain minimum basic level of consumption. The
ability to consume, in a market economy, depends on the nominal expenditure and the
commodity prices. The level of expenditure depends on the purchasing power, which, to a large
extent depends on the income earned. Incomes are earned if jobs are held and, hence, the
relationship between employment and the incidence of poverty. According to The World Bank
(1990:26) poverty is "the inability to attain a minimal standard of living". The World Bank
website on 'Poverty Reduction and Equity' defines poverty in comprehensive manner, saying,
"Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a
doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not
having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness
brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom."
Principles of Amartya Sen offer useful alternative to understand poverty. Capability approach to
understanding poverty goes beyond income and stresses the whole range of means, available to
achieve human capabilities such as literacy, longevity and access to income. From this
viewpoint, poverty is seen as the failure of some basic capabilities to function- a person lacking
the opportunity to achieve some minimally accepted level of these functionings (Sen Amartya
and Dreze Jean, 1999). Allan Cochrane stated that " A crucial aspect of poverty is the way in
which it reduces ability of people to participate in the normal lives of their communities with
stress being placed on the deprivation which results from the lack rather than low income itself."
In bulk of theoretical literature, it is demonstrated that "Individuals, families and groups in
population can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet,
participate in the activities and how the living conditions and amenities which are customary or
approved in the societies to which they belong" (Peter Townsend, 1979) .There resources are
below those commanded by the average individual or family that they in effect excluded from
the normal living patterns, custom and activities. According to Galbraith John Kenneth (1970),
poverty may itself be a source of poverty. This is because, it denies the nation from investment,
revenues for education or purchasing power for customer product, which in turn, is an inventive
to effort. Therefore, poverty continues itself.
Components of rural and urban poverty: Poverty has multivariate nature for which a single
variant approach is insufficient. The components that constitutes vector of poverty are in terms
of satisfaction and deprivation. There are nine components of poverty that include occupation
and employment, income and asset, food, shelter, health, education, demographic features,
values, interests and activities, power and politics.
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Vector components of poverty (Source: Shiv Prakash Gupta, 1987 )

Poverty: International Concerns

Poverty is not limited to national boundaries. It is a worldwide concern for policy makers and
researchers. It is very difficult to measure and assess the world poverty. "For the purposes of
measuring poverty in the world as a whole, the World Bank's "$1 a day" measures have aimed to
apply a common standard, anchored to what "poverty" means in the world's poorest countries"
(Chen, Shaohua and Ravallion Martin:2008:2). Today, all over world, billions of people go
hungry. Everyday millions of people experience extreme forms of deprivation that inflict
suffering and reduce or terminate their future prospects of having a good life and being
productive. Early generations of human beings claim that global poverty was inevitable because
there were not enough resources nor technology to transform resources to meet the needs of all
people internationally. But presently, world has resources and advanced technology to offer basic
services like primary education, health services, finance services. Main cause of increasing
poverty at global level is that world is organized in such a way that billions of people do not have
access to these advanced technology and resources. Tough leaders and powerful people promised
that they will reduce the poverty but it still persists among populace (Hulme, 2010). In the least
developed countries such as Africa, both the income and non-income aspect poverty is prevalent
due to problem stretching from corrupt governance and mishandling, poor economic growth,
unemployment and underemployment, lack of access to social services, low level of investment,
high degree of indebtness.
South Asia also has huge population in poverty group. While the incidence of poverty as defined
by head-count ratio has shown some decline in all South Asian countries over the years, large
proportion of the population in all the countries still live in poverty. In spite of a reasonable
growth in current period, per capita GNP (with Purchasing Power Parity or PPP) of all countries
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and for the region as a whole remains low and in a small fraction of that of middle-income
countries (Poverty and Vulnerability in South Asia, The World Bank, June 2002).

Poverty in India
India is a developing country and it is apparent that poverty is widespread and is a matter of
serious concern for policy analysts and academic scholars because of its scope and intensity. The
prime objective of a country's policy and planning is to increase the standard of living and
improve the productive capabilities of its people. As population of India is exploding year by
year, this challenge is particularly intimidating for nation. When reviewing the past record of
poverty, it is said that from 1951 to 1974, India's first quarter-century of independence, the
percentage of its population living in poverty rose from 47 to 56 percent. During the next
quarter-century, that rate fell suddenly, and reached to 26 percent by 1999–2000. Between 1974
and 1999-2000, the poverty rate dropped by 53%, exceeding the millennium development goal
of a 50% reduction over a 25-year period. The number of poor people rose gradually from 171
million in 1951 to a 321 million in 1974, before falling to 260 million in 1999-2000. (Fox James
W.:2002)
Many surveys and Economic reports after 1970s demonstrated that there is continuous decline in
rural poverty from 55 percent in the early 70s to less than 35 percent by the late 80s.Various
program conducted by government such as Green revolution, poverty reduction programmes,
political will and better policy framing along with many other factors assisted in deceasing
poverty. Jayaraman and Lanjouw (1999: 1-30) stated that, despite decline in poverty rate there is
considerable movement in and out of poverty. Some of this movement can be accredited to the
year-to-year fluctuations in harvest quality, and can also be associated with momentary factors
such as illness. Reports indicated that India still is a country with huge people living in poverty
line and it has a third rank of the world's poor. World Bank report of 2015 estimates, 42% of
India's population falls below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day; having reduced from
60% in 1980. According to the principle used by the Planning Commission of India, 27.5% of
the population was living below the poverty line in 2004–2015, reduced down from 51.3% in
1977–1978, and 36% in 1993-1994. The planning commission report estimated BPL population
to 27.5% in 2004. The URP-consumption distribution data of the NSS 61st Round signified that
a poverty ratio was 28.3 percent in the rural areas, 25.7 percent in the urban areas and 27.5
percent for the country as a whole in 2004-05 (Government of India Press Information Bureau
(2007:2): Poverty Estimates for 2004-05 New Delhi). Poverty in rural India has dropped
considerably in current period.
According to Fan Shenggen, Hazell Peter, Thorat Sukhadeo ( 2000:1038 ), "the percentage of the
rural population living below the poverty line fluctuated between 50 and 65% prior to the mid-
1960s, but then declined steadily to about one-third of the rural population by the early 1990s."
The occurrence of poverty hit rural as well as urban areas. But nature, extent and conditions of
poverty in rural and urban areas are dissimilar in many ways. The urban and rural poor have
differential access to physical, financial assets and many other services as well as infrastructural
and human capabilities. Rahman, M. A. (1981:3) described the rural poverty as that section of
the rural population whose basic minimum needs for life and existence with human dignity are
unfulfilled. Such condition of poverty is considered by low income, generally related with
various forms of subjugation under social structure through which overriding social groups
dictate their terms.
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At the regional level, the marginality of central and eastern India is explained largely by adverse
agrarian relations. Poverty has persisted in these areas though there are good endowment of
natural resources and a relatively strong focus of Indian development planning on "backward
areas". It was estimated in previous reports that more than seventy per cent of India's poor
population reside in six states that include Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra,
West Bengal and Orissa Uttaranchal, Jharkhand and Chattisgarh. In four of these states, Bihar,
Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, and Assam there is high levels of poverty (Mehta
and Shah 2003).
The Planning Commission of India occasionally estimates poverty lines and poverty ratios for
each year for which Large Sample Surveys on Household Consumer Expenditure have been
conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) of the Ministry of Statistics and
Programme Implementation. According to the survey conducted in 2011-2012, the percentage of
persons below the Poverty Line in India for the year 2011-12 has been estimated as 25.7% in
rural areas, 13.7% in urban areas and 21.9% for the country as a whole. The corresponding ratios
for the rural and urban areas were 41.8% and 25.7% and 37.2% for the country as a whole in
2004-05. It was 50.1% in rural areas, 31.8% in urban areas and 45.3% for the country as a whole
in 1993-94. In the year of 2011-12, India had 270 million persons below the Tendulkar Poverty
Line as compared to 407 million in 2004-05, that is a reduction of 137 million persons over the
seven year period.
It is clear from various surveys and poverty reports that Most of the rural population in India and
in other developing countries is living in deprived way because they do not own assets like land,
they work as agricultural labourers, get insufficient and insecure employment and less salary.
Degrees of inaccessibility, development stage of the region, low level of social capital are major
correlative aspects that causes rural poverty. Though small farmers having some access to land,
but they are dependent on unpredictable natural conditions, markets and chances of income
generation. Poverty in rural India also has dimensions of caste, ethnicity and gender. Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes of India's rural areas are the poorest people that constitute about 40
to 50 percent of its population.
When assessing the urban poverty in India, it is also a major worry for policy makers and
researchers as number of poor is increasing due to fast urbanization. The Urban Poverty Report
2009 has shown that India has entered the Eleventh Plan period with an impressive record of
economic growth. However, the incidence of decline of urban poverty has not augmented with
GDP growth. In fact, urban poverty will become a major challenge for politicians in India as the
urban population is growing which leads to urban poverty. The poverty rates as estimated in, "the
MRP-consumption distribution data of the 61st Round are 21.8 percent in the rural areas, 21.7
percent in the urban areas and 21.8 percent for the country as a whole" (Poverty Estimates For
2004-05 2007:2).
There have numerous efforts been made by government to alleviate poverty. Poverty is inter-
related to other problems of underdevelopment. In rural and urban societies, the nature of
poverty can be very different. In urban areas, people often have access to health and education
but more the problems faced by people due to poverty like overcrowding, unsanitary conditions,
pollution, insecure houses. When appraising the factors lead to rural poverty, it is found that
there is often less access to education, health and many other services but people usually live in
healthier and safer environments. Since the mitigation of poverty is major aim of development
work, it is necessary to understand the way to measure poverty. Development means that there
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has been some improvement and improvements must be measurable. Government expenditure in
India is divided into non-development and development spending, and the latter is further
subdivided into spending on social and economic services. Social services include health, labour,
social welfare and other community services, while economic services include such sectors as
agriculture, industry, trade and transportation.
Effects of government spending on rural poverty

The most common ways to assess poverty is to set a monthly average on which a family can
survive. This is called the poverty line. If a family has an average income below this amount, the
household and its members are said to be living in poverty. The poverty line is an amount that
changes according to the size of the household, its age and composition. Other effective way to
measure poverty is by measuring the poverty gap. The poverty gap shows how far a household
falls below the poverty line, so in other words it shows the depth of, or degree of poverty. In
some regions, many people may be below the poverty line but they may be just a little bit below
it. In other provinces fewer people could be below the poverty line but they could be far below it.
These two types of poverty distribution in population clearly need a different reaction.
Groups that are affected by poverty: There are many groups that are greatly impacted by
poverty.
Women: Reports have shown that Women makes a greater percentage of poor people as
compared to men. The main cause for this is that women have generally found less access to
education and employment. Many women have always performed unpaid work as mothers,
housewives. Many women are employed in less salary job such as domestic and farm labour.
Even within poor household women usually earn less than men and property and possessions are
often in the name of a man. The UN has found that although women perform nearly two thirds of
the world's work, they receive only one tenth of the world's income and they own only one
hundredth of the world's property.
Children: Another group that is most affected by poverty is children. Currently, some of the
poorest households in South Africa are those headed by children where parents are either ill or
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have died from AIDS or other causes. Even in families where parents are still present, children
are very badly affected by malnutrition and it has its most severe effect on children between the
ages of six months and two years. Malnutrition also means that the children can more easily
catch diseases and either die young or have poor physical and mental development as a result.
Poverty restricts the access to children to get educational opportunities, especially in early
childhood development. Many poor children also leave school before completing elementary
education. Socio-economic circumstance conditions in childhood which result in low
qualifications in adulthood help transmit poverty across generations. A main cause of child
poverty is a lack of opportunities among parents with low skills and low qualifications. Such
parents are less likely to work, and if they do work they are more likely to have low earnings.
Youth: Young people have to suffer a lot due to poverty because they may be deprived of
education facility which in turn limits employment opportunities. In India, with high
unemployment rate, many young people do not get work which degrades their standard of living
and they are not being able to access numerous facilities. Urban youth are also very susceptible
to getting involved in crime, gangs and drug or alcohol abuse.
The elderly: Older people do not have employment and have to be taken care of by the rest of
society. In India, most poor older people survive on the monthly pensions paid by the state.
Because of high unemployment, many families share the pensions meant for the elderly and it
ends up being inadequate for their needs. Older people also often look after grandchildren and
continue to perform unpaid domestic work for their families. This especially applies to older
women.
Poverty and environmental issues:In global society, poverty is prevalent. There is a general
agreement among academicians that poverty is a major cause of environmental degradation.
Various international reports asserted that poverty leads to environmental degradation. In
theoretical literature, it was clearly shown that, poverty is main reason of environmental
problems and it is necessary to improve the conditions of poor populace and central condition of
any effective programmes addressing the environment. According to Jalal (1993), the Asian
Development Bank's chief of the environment department, "It is generally accepted that
environmental degradation, rapid population growth and stagnant production are closely linked
with the fast spread of acute poverty in many countries of Asia." In urban areas, it is awesomely
the consumption patterns of non-poor groups (especially high income groups) and the production
and distribution systems that serve them, leads to environmental degradation. The urban poor
contribute very little to environmental degradation because they use so few resources and
produce so few wastes. Since the 1970s it has been agreed at global level that poverty and
environmental degradation are inseparably linked. The World Commission on Environment and
Development (Brundtland Commission) stated that Poverty is a major cause and effect of global
environmental problems. It is therefore futile to attempt to deal with environmental problems
without a broader perspective that encompasses the factors underlying world poverty and
international inequality (1987).
Poverty and Population Explosion: Poverty remains major issues where population increases
at rapid rate. Poverty in India is common with the nation estimated to have a third of the world's
poor. Population growth rate is one of major ground of poverty in India. This has adverse effect
level of illiteracy, poor health care facilities and lack of access to financial resources. High
population growth affects the per capita income and makes per capita income even lower. It is
predictable that population in India will reach 1.5 billion by 2026. But India's economy is not
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growing at the same rate. This leads of unemployment and people may become poor. Report of a
2015 World Bank estimate that 42% of India falls below the international poverty line. There are
421 million poor living in north India states of Bihar, Chattisgarh, Jharkand, Madhya Pradesh,
Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. This number is higher than the 410 million
poor living in the 26 poorest African nations. Population and poverty are closely related to each
other and leads to malnutrition, unemployment, homelessness and several others problems.
Social Inequality: One of the engrained sources of poverty around the globe is social inequality
which originates from cultural ideas about the relative worth of different genders, races, ethnic
groups, and social classes. Recognized inequality works by placing individuals in dissimilar
social categories at birth, often based on religious, ethnic, or 'racial' characteristics. Poverty and
social inequality have direct and indirect impacts on the social, mental and physical health of an
individual. It can be said that poverty and inequality are closely related. Wilkinson (1997)
supposed that income inequality leads to psychosoecial stress, which results in deteriorating
health and higher mortality over time. However, the association between income inequality and
life expectancy is gradually disappearing and is no longer generally accepted. Those who live in
deprived societies, where there is under-investment in the social and physical infrastructure,
experience poor health, resulting in higher mortality for those of lower socio-economic class.
The effects of income inequality also tumble over into society, causing stress, frustration and
family disruption, which then increase the rates of crime, murder and violence (Wilkinson,
1996).
Poverty, inequality and growth interrelate with one another. Inequality can indirectly influence
poverty as inequality affects growth and growth in turn influences poverty.
Interrelationship between Poverty, inequality and growth

Wodon (1999) stated that Changes in income distribution have even huge effects on measures of
the depth and severity of poverty. Initial cross-country studies conducted by Birdsall et al. (1995)
have demonstrated that greater initial income inequality disrupts future growth even after
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controlling for initial levels of GDP and human capital. It is established that Poverty and
inequality are inherently linked. Poverty reduction especially for the poorest can be greatly
enhanced through distributional policies. Facts confirm that distribution is vital to reduce
poverty. Distribution objectives, particularly for assets, should be an integral part of the poverty
reduction programme.
Poverty and Space Technology development: Poverty has adverse impact on technical
development in space arena. India is a world innovator in space science. But the reach within the
local Indian community is superseded and immobile. Incorporation of the extensive
advancements of this area with the school going children is not up to the mark. Awareness must
be created in the student community. Space science is restricted to organizations like the ISRO
and so, establishing oneself in this field is very infertile.
Poverty and employment issue: It is a major issue in country like India. In the presence of
inadequate subsidies and low levels of wealth, joblessness will be correlated with high degrees of
poverty. However, employment alone may not assure a non-poor status. In India, majority of
people do not get high salary to buy the minimum consumption products. It is vital for policy
maker to comprehend that whether poverty is a result of a lack of employment opportunities, or
due to low wages. If all employed persons get sufficient wages to live above the poverty line but
not all persons are employed, the mandatory approach is one of employment generating policies.
If people are employed but have low productivity and earn low incomes, then the policy
prescription is one of increasing the productivity of labour. In India, the actual poverty
calculation is done as the consumption of the entire household is obtained and divided by the
household size. This gives the per capita consumption in the household. If this is below the given
poverty line, then the entire household is termed as poor. Poverty is a household characteristic.
Employment characteristics are surveyed for each and every member of the NSS household.
There is no employment status of the household. There is vast literature on employment issues.
Gangopadhyay and Wadhwa (1999) studied the relationship between employment and poverty in
India. They found that the poor cannot afford to be unemployed. It indicates that most of the
poor people are already employed. This is factual in both the rural and the urban sectors.
Conversely, much of the unemployment is in the non-poor households.
Gender Bias and poverty: Since poverty is a household attribute, and the NSS does not give the
individual consumption of household members, it is difficult to assess the gender bias in the
occurrence of poverty. It has been shown in Indian literature, the head of the household has
always been taken as a mere reference point. If the head is someone with income earning
responsibility, or holds decision-making powers within the household, then the gender of the
head can be used as a factor of gender bias. Gender bias can operate in two different ways. First,
women may be discriminated against in the work. Discriminating employers may favour males
to female candidates. If we see the other aspect, women may not be recruited in high salary jobs,
not because the employer discriminates against them, but because they are not found appropriate
for such jobs. This could happen if the job requires skills, and women are not competent than
males. This gets reflected in lower incomes among females. If women are less skilled than males,
then the responsibility for this kind of perception lies within the household, where the parents
train, or educate, the boy child more than the girl child. While less schooling means less of
human capital. This is another reason why females may earn less income.
Poverty and health issues: The issue of poverty and health within the nation has remained
predominant since Indian independence. The poverty dominant factor that leads to health related
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problems in both urban and rural populace. The rapid increase of the population, especially the
slum inhabitants primarily suffers from Tuberculosis, Malaria and some water borne diseases.
The major cause of these diseases is unhygienic environment. In slums area, there is lack of
water, sanitation facility that leads to the growth of deadly diseases among the dwellers. The
government has provided numerous medical facility centres for the poor people. The government
should implement some new schemes for the slum dwellers. Some cleanliness awareness
programme should be launched to generate wakefulness among poor for basic health knowledge.
Some of the diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera transmit due to unhygienic atmosphere. In
rural India, the major cause of health associated problems are poverty and lack of education.
Most of the villagers still consider in Tantra- Mantra to cure a disease. As a result, the mortality
rates have increased in some of the remote villages. Poverty also creates poor health because it
forces people to live in unhygienic environments that make them sick. The government has
already setup number of Primary Health Centres in almost every villages in India. But health
workers do not sincerely serve the rural patients. In most places, the health workers remain
absent from their duties for several days. Most of the Indian villages do not have proper
communication and transportation with the nearby towns or cities. This problem is largely
affecting the rural people who can not go to nearby towns to get better treatment. The
communication and lack of transport facilities are observed in the north eastern part of India.
There are still some distant villages in Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland which do not have any
road, connected with nearby towns. Due to these problems, more causalities occur without
getting any modern treatment. There are many disadvantages for which the government policies
are still ineffective, especially related with health issues.
To summarize, Poverty has been major issue to people because it causes the serious setback and
hinder national development. It is prevalent at global scale and threatens some economic
especially those in the Least Developing countries. Hence, the scale of poverty though varying in
different parts of the world is known to be noticeable in the LDCs. Poverty is multidimensional
Deficiency in income, illiteracy, malnutrition, mortality, morbidity, access to water and
sanitation, susceptibility to economic shocks. Income deprivation is linked in many cases to
other forms of deprivation, but do not always move together with others.
Theoretical studies and economic survey have shown that poverty has adverse impact on health
of people. Inequality, population explosion, are some major issues which leads to poverty.
Raanan Weitz (1986) stated that "While humanity shares one planet, it is a planet on which there
are two worlds, the rich and the world of the poor". These poor world countries are called the
Third World. They are characterized by low monetary growth, low per capita income, low
standards of living, and low level of technology, high illiteracy rate, and political instability.
Allan Cochrane avowed that: A crucial aspect of poverty is the way in which it reduces ability of
people to participate in the normal lives of their communities with stress being placed on the
deprivation which results from the lack rather than low income itself". Poverty can influence
policy interfere in any society and it is central to strategy debates concerning development on
safety issue.
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Urbanization, Their Problems and Their

Remedies
Urbanization is pervasive and recent phenomenon. In present global atmosphere, all nations
undergo with the challenges of environment, social, transportation, economy in their respective
cities. These issues are commonly occurred in developing countries due to the difference of
development in cities and villages (Latif Fauzi, 2007). Most of countries focus on development
of cities instead of rural areas. Consequently, the urban areas are equipped with infrastructure,
public facilities as well as provide employment opportunities compared to the rural areas.
Therefore inhabitants are more attracted to migrate in cities to avail hi tech facilities, enhance
their lifestyles and ultimately these activities raise numerous urbanization issues. Cities have
major role to enhance economic growth and prosperity. The sustainable development of cities
largely depends upon their physical, social and institutional infrastructure. An urban area is
spatial concentration of people who are working in non-agricultural activities. The essential
characteristic is that urban means non-agricultural. Urban can also be explained as a fairly
multifaceted concept. Criteria used to define urban can include population size, space, density,
and economic organization. Typically, urban is simply defined by some base line size, like 20
000 people (Long 1998).

Concept of urbanization: The term Urbanization is well explained by Nsiah-Gyabaah as the

change from a rural to an urban society which involves an augment in the number of people in
urban regions during a particular year. Likewise, Gooden argued urbanization as the immigration
of people in huge numbers from rural to urban areas and this process happen due to the
concentration of resources and facilities in towns and cities. Other theorists like, Reynolds
(1989) characterized urbanization as the development of the population and cities, so that higher
proportion of population lives in urban areas. Normally, urbanization is directly associated with
innovation, industrialization, and the sociological process of good reason. Urbanization process
had been started during the industrial revolution, when workforce moved towards manufacturing
hubs in cities to get jobs in factories as agricultural jobs became less common. Theoretical
studies have demonstrated that Urbanization is the result of social, economic and political
developments that lead to urban concentration and expansion of big cities, changes in land use
and revolution from rural to urban pattern of organization and governance. Urbanization is a
process in which an increased proportion of society lives in cities and the suburbs of the cities.
Historically, it has been strongly related with industrialization. Industrialization is processes that
widely utilize inanimate sources of energy to improve human productivity.
Global urban population is growing at rapid rate from 17% in 1951 to 20% in 2001 and expected
to increase 41% in 2020. It is observed that developing countries urbanize faster than
industrialized nations because they have more issues of urbanizations. It has been documented in
studies that Cities and towns operate as mechanisms for growth, often driving much of people's
cultural, intellectual, educational and technological accomplishment and modernization. Though,
in contemporary living style of people of new, low-density approaches to urban development
results in better consumption of energy, resources, transport and land, in this manner raising
greenhouse gas emissions and air and noise pollution to levels that often surpass the legal or
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suggested human protection limits. Overall consumption, energy use, water use and waste
generation go along with an increasing number of urban families.
Urban environmental management, is also the big business of local governments, play major role
to offer services; civil society, and promotes citizens health and its rights to provide hygienic,
liveable environment. The private sector can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of service
delivery. Currently, cities are taking on roles that expand far beyond the conventional provision
of infrastructure and services. A theoretical move may be perceived (European Environment
Agency, 1996). The most remarkable immediate change accompanying urbanization is the fast
change in the existing character of local livelihoods as agriculture or more traditional local
services and small-scale industry give way to contemporary industry and urban and related
commerce, with the city drawing on the resources of an ever-widening area for its own
nourishment and goods to be traded or processed into manufactures (Dear, 2000).
When referring to the pre-industrial city, Wheatley (Wheatley, 1971) described urbanism as "that
particular set of functionally integrated institutions which were first devised some 5,000 years
ago to mediate the transformation of relatively egalitarian, inscriptive, kin-structured groups into
socially stratified politically organized, territorially based societies". The stress on institutional
change relates the growth of cities to a major socio-political reorganization of society, which he
considers as a main constituent in the development of society. Correspondingly, Childe offers a
listing of ten characteristics of an urban civilization. These may be separated into five primary
characteristics referring to primary changes in the organization of society and five secondary
features indicative of the presence of the primary factors (Childe, 1951).
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Table: Childe's ten characteristics of an urban civilization (Source: Pacione, 2004)

Major causes of urbanization: Following are the main causes of urbanization:

1. Industrial revolution: Industrial employment catches the attention of people from rural to urban areas. In the
urban areas, people work in modern sector in the occupations that assist national economic development.
This represents that the old agricultural economics is changing to a new non-agricultural economy. This is
the trend, which will build a new modern society (Gugler 1997).
2. Emergence of large manufacturing centres.
3. Job opportunities: There are ample job opportunities in mega cities therefore village people or individuals
from town frequently migrate to these areas.
4. Availability of transportation: Due to easy transport, people prefer to stay in big cities.
5. Migration: Migration is main cause for rapid growth of mega-cities. Migration has been going on over
centuries and it is normal phenomenon. When considering urbanization rural-urban and urban-rural and
rural-rural migrations are very important. Urban-urban migration means that people move from one city to
another. People may move to the city because they are forced by poverty from rural community or they may
be pulled by the magnetism of city lives. Combination of these push and pull factors can force people to
migrate to cities (Gugler 1997).
6. . Infrastructure facilities in the urban areas: Infrastructure has vital role in the process of urbanization in the
development of countries. As agriculture becomes more fruitful, cities grow by absorbing workforce from
rural areas. Industry and services increase and generate higher value-added jobs, and this led to economic
growth. The geographic concentration of productive activities in cities creates agglomeration economies,
which further raises productivity and growth. The augments income and demand for agricultural products in
cities.
7. Growth of private sector.
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Factors lead to urbanization: There are several aspects that lead to urbanization. According to
Gooden (u.d.), the factors can be categorized into three categories that include, economic
opportunities, proper infrastructure and utilities and availability of public facilities.
Economic opportunities: It is general perception that living standard of urban area is superior as
compared to village areas. People consider that more job opportunities and more jobs are offered
in the city instead of rural area. Besides, the income also will be higher.
Proper infrastructure and utilities: In today's economy driven society, majority of nations in
the world are focusing on the development of major cities as the centre of government and
business. As such, the cities will be certainly equipped with a better infrastructure and utilities
such as roads and transportation, water, electricity and others. Apart from that, the
communication and internet coverage also are good in the cities which are believed as one of the
pulling factors of migration.
Availability of public facilities: To make smart city, metropolitan cities also offered better
public facilities which are not there in rural areas. Since a variety of public facilities such as
health and education are provided in the cities, people have more choices either to use public or
private. Additionally, the provision of leisure area, postal services as well as police station and
others are also provided to meet the needs of the urban community. In urban area, a greater
variety of entertainment such as restaurants, movie theatres and theme parks attract more people
to live in cities.
Global perspective: The urbanization progression and nature of the problems in more developed
and less developed ones are very dissimilar. While in the framework of more developed
countries, urbanization and city growth were necessary conditions for industrialization and
modernization, it has become a risk to better living in the less developed countries because of the
unpredictable growth of the cities, mainly of a few super cities. The speedy population growth in
urban areas is due to migration of people from rural to urban and small cities to large ones are
creating problems such as urban overcrowding, poor housing, and crowded transportation, lack
of basic services, ill health, low educational status and high rate of joblessness. Such problems in
the less developed countries may become heightened. It is necessary that studies should be
undertaken on the patterns of urbanization observe the process so as to lessen its unfavourable
consequences. India, the second most crowded country in the world has reached a state where
urban problems have assumed to be serious.
Urbanization Issues and Problem: Some scholars think that the process of urbanization will
bring numerous benefits for monetary growth, expansion of business activities, social and
cultural incorporation, resourceful services, as well as resources of utilization. Though, there are
some issues occur due to the urbanization. These include:
Rapid rate of urbanization: It is observed that fast rate of urbanization which is increasing
every year has needed more growth of new areas for housing, social amenities, commercial and
other urban land uses. Though, the lack of clear urban limits has led to the formation of urban
slump encroaching upon environmentally sensitive areas, major agricultural areas and areas
which are not appropriate for development (TCPD, 2006). In addition, the high demand of land
use at strategic areas also has led to land use variances. These situations led to various
urbanization issues such as environmental pollution, traffic congestion, depletion of green areas
and degradation in the quality of urban living.
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Problems due to rapid rate of urbanization

Degradation of environmental quality: Due to urbanization, there is environmental

degradation especially in the quality of water, air and noise. With the influx of more people in
cities, there is great demand of facilities such as housing. Some unlawful factories and even
houses which have a poor infrastructure, the waste from buildings are directly channelled to the
nearest river or water resources which directly pollute the water. The domestic waste, industrial
effluents and other wastes that were dumped directly to the river, degrade the water quality.
Another after effects of rapid urbanization is the air pollution which has also increased due to
emanation from motor vehicles, industrial development and use of non-environmental friendly
fuel sources. The noise pollution is produced from the various human actions which also degrade
the environment and ultimately affect the human health. The growth of population has generated
a very high quantity of solid waste and there is pressure to provide a waste disposal place in the
urban areas.
Inefficient transportation system: Urbanization created severe problem of transpiration. Due to
movement of people into metropolitan cities, the number of vehicles on the road is increasing
every year. Although various types of public transportation are provided in the cities but people
in cities still prefer to drive private vehicles. This is due to the ineffective public transportation.
The public transportation facilities are provided without referring to the need to integrate the
different modes of transportation. Consequently it is difficult for the user to change the modes of
transportation. Since the public transportation is not trustworthy, people usually travel from
private vehicles which led to the severe problem of blockage in the cities. If any traffic jam
happens, public transportation, especially bus and taxi and private vehicles are trapped together
and cannot move. It creates lot of problem for people.
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Decline in quality of living for urban dwellers: Urbanization is major concern for management
researchers because it decline in quality of living for urban inhabitants. As the metropolis
becomes a developed city, the land value will also increase. The housing provision will focus
more to fulfil the needs of the high income group. As such, there will be a problem in the
provision of housing, especially for the middle and low class people. The supply of housing for
the urban poor is still inadequate as the cost of these houses is very high to which low and
middle income group cannot afford. The lack of housing provision for the low income group has
led to the continuation of unlawful resident settlements in the city. These unlawful tenant
settlements will certainly lack in proper infrastructure that will bring about many hindrances to
the urban environment and create social problems such as child education, crime, drugs,
delinquency and others. Besides housing problem for low income group, the process of
urbanization has also increased the demand on infrastructure and utility which cannot be fulfilled
from the existing facilities. The maintenance of drains and debris collection is incompetent
which can raise other serious problems such as flash floods and poor public health. The
reappearance of flash floods is due to the drainage system being unable to contain surface water
run-off that has greatly increased with the higher intensity of urban activities.
Unsuccessful urban governance: The urban authority undergoes with multifaceted challenges
to manage a city. The fast speed of urbanization is major challenges which need every party to be
more focused in undertaking each and every responsibility in urban development. However, the
involvement of several agencies and departments in urban management made it complicated to
synchronize many actions and resultant, it affects the efficiency of those actions. Besides this,
the local authority also deals with the different goals and interests of community groups which
they need to fulfil. The local authority also needs to find solution for different social issues.
Cities are developed on two percent of the land's surface. Their inhabitant uses over three-
quarters of the world's resources and release similar amounts of wastes. Urban wastes have local
impacts but these are issues at global scale. The impacts of the cities are usually seen both locally
and globally such as air pollution, city populations, as the major users of energy, cause both
regional and worldwide pollution. These factors have adverse impact on health of the people, air
quality and biosphere (Girardet 1996).
City consumption:
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Urbanization issues in Indian context: India is known for its rural population in the world with
about 73 percent of its population living in rural villages. The growth of urban population as well
as the speed of urbanization has been usually slow as compared to most of the other Asian
countries. When evaluating urbanizing process in Indian perspective, it is observed that major
problems of urbanisation in this nation are Urban Sprawl, Overcrowding, Housing,
Unemployment, Slums and Squatter Settlements, Transport, Water, Sewerage Problems, Trash
Disposal, Urban Crimes, and Problem of Urban Pollution. While urbanisation has been a
mechanism of economic, social and political progress, it can pose serious socio-economic
problems. The absolute magnitude of the urban population, random and unplanned growth of
urban areas, and lack of infrastructure are major issues in India due to urbanization. The fast
growth of urban population both natural and through migration, has put immense pressure on
public utilities like housing, sanitation, transport, water, electricity, health, and education.
Poverty, joblessness and under employment among the rural immigrant, beggary, thefts,
dacoities, burglary and other social sins go wild. Urban slump is encroaching the valuable
agricultural land. According to the statistical reports in 2001, the urban inhabitants of India were
more than 285 million. It is estimated that by 2030, more than 50 per cent of India's population is
expected to live in urban areas. Numerous problems need to be emphasized.
Urban sprawl or real development of the cities, both in population and geographical area, of
rapidly increasing cities is the major cause of urban troubles. In most cities, the financial support
is unable to deal with the problems created by their expansion. Huge immigration from rural
areas as well as from small towns into large cities has occurred almost consistently and as a
result the size of the city is increased. Historical records signify that initial large flow of
migration from rural to urban areas was during the "depression" of late 1930s when people
moved for searching employment. Afterwards during the decade 1941-51, another a million
persons migrated to urban areas in response to period of war industrialisation and division of the
country in 1947. During 1991-2001, more than 20 million people migrated to urban areas. It is
commonly observed that such big cities attracted to majority of people to get employment
opportunities and live in modern style. Such hyper urbanisation leads to increased cities sizes
which challenge imagination. Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore are examples of
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urban slump due to huge migration of people from the nearby places.Migration consequences:

Overcrowding is a situation in which large number of people lives in too little space.
Overcrowding is a consistent result of over-population in urban areas. It is obviously expected
that cities are increasing their size due to massive movement of people from undeveloped ar-eas
but it squeezed in a small space due to overcrowding.
Housing: It is another intense problem due to urbanization in India. Overcrowding leads to a
constant problem of scarcity of houses in urban areas. This problem is particularly more severe
in those urban areas where there is large invasion of jobless or underemployed immigrants who
could not find place to live when they come in cities and towns from the nearby areas. The major
factors for housing problems are lack of building materials and financial resources, insufficient
expansion of public utilities into sub-urban areas, poverty and unemployment of urban
immigrants, strong caste and family ties and lack of enough transportation to sub-urban areas
where most of the available land for new construction is to be found.
Unemployment: The problem of joblessness is also serious as the problem of housing. Urban
unemployment in India is estimated at 15 to 25 per cent of the labour force. This percentage is
even higher among the educated people. It is approximate that about half of all knowledgeable
urban unemployed youth are living in four metropolitan cities such as in Delhi, Mumbai,
Kolkata, and Chennai. Additionally, although urban incomes are higher than the rural incomes,
they are awfully low because of high cost of living in urban areas. Major causes of urban
unemployment are the huge relocation of people from rural to urban areas.
Slums and Squatter Settlements: The natural development of unchecked, unexpected and
random growth of urban areas is the growth and spread of slums and unlawful resident
settlements which present a prominent feature in the environmental structure of Indian cities,
particularly of urban centres. The fast urbanisation in combination with industrialisation has
resulted in the enlargement of slums. The explosion of slums occurs due to many factors, such
as, the lack of developed land for housing, the high prices of land beyond the reach of urban
poor, a large influx of rural migrants to the cities in search of jobs.
Transport: Urbanization poses major challenge to transport system. With traffic blockage,
almost all cities and towns of India are suffering from severe form of transport problem.
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Transport problem increases and becomes more complex as the town grows in dimension. With
its growth, the town performs varied and complex functions and more people move to work or
shop.
Water: Water is one of the most essential elements of nature to maintain life and right from the
beginning of urban civilisation. However, supply of water started falling short of demand as the
cities grew in size and number.
Sewerage Problems: Urban centres in India are almost consistently beset with inadequate
sewage facilities. Resource crisis faced by the municipalities and illicit growth of the cities are
two major causes of this pitiable state of affairs. Most cities do not have proper arrangements for
treating the sewerage waste and it is drained into a nearly river or in sea as in Mumbai, Kolkata
and Chennai and these activities pollute the water bodies.
Trash Disposal: Urbanization pushed Indian cities to grow in number and size and as a result
people have to face the problem of trash disposal which is in alarming stage. Enormous
quantities of garbage produced by Indian cities cause a serious health problem. Most cites do not
have proper arrangements for garbage disposal and the existing landfills are full to the edge.
These landfills are breeding grounds of disease and countless poisons leaking into their environs.
Wastes putrefy in the open inviting disease carrying flies and rats and a filthy, poisonous liquid,
called leachate, which leaks out from below and contaminates ground water. People who live
near the decomposing garbage and raw sewage get victims to several diseases such as dysentery,
malaria, plague, jaundice, diarrhoea, and typhoid.
Health problem due to urbanization: Factors affecting health in slums are Economic
conditions, Social conditions, Living environment, Access and use of public health care services,
Hidden/Unlisted slums and Rapid mobility. Environmental problems can cause many other
problems such as Poor air quality that can produce asthma and allergies or contribute to physical
inactivity, an impure water supply can cause the spread of infectious diseases through the water
supply or through food such as waterborne and food borne diseases, climates changes can cause
deaths from severe heat or cold , noise can cause sleep disturbances, and hence poor performance
at work and in school, Lead poisoning leading to developmental and behaviour problems,
Second-hand smoke and exposure to carcinogens can cause cancer. In general, poor
environmental quality contributes to 25–33% of global ill health. Physical, mental, and social
health is affected by living conditions. There are numerous examples that impact on human
living such as lead exposure, noise, asbestos, mould growth, crowding, respiratory disease, and
spread of infectious diseases, accidents, and mental illness. Health impacts of inadequate housing
conditions are an intricate issue involving variety of exposures (physical, chemical, biological,
building, and social factors) and various health outcomes such as asthma and allergies,
respiratory diseases, cardiovascular effects, injuries, poisoning, mental illnesses. Issues of
overcrowding, lack of resources, poverty, unemployment, and lack of education and social
services can lead to numerous many social problems for example crime, violence, drug use, high
school drop-out rates, and mental health problems.
Urban Crimes: In developed cities of India, people get connected with different types of
individuals who do not have similarity with one another. The problem of crimes increases with
the increase in urbanisation. In fact the increasing trend in urban crimes tends to upset peace and
tranquillity of the cities and make them insecure to live in mainly for the women. The problem of
urban crime is becoming more complicated in current situation because criminals often get
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shelter from politicians, bureaucrats and leaders of the urban society. Dutt and Venugopal (1983)
stated that violent urban crimes such as rape, murder, kidnapping, dacoity, robbery are more
prominent in the northern-central parts of the nation. Even the economic crimes such as theft,
cheating, breach of trust are concentrated in the north- central region. Poverty related crimes are
prevalent in the cities of Patna, Darbhanga, Gaya and Munger. This may be due to poverty
existing in this area.
Problem of Urban Pollution: Rising urbanisation in present situation led to develop industries
and transport systems out of proportion. These developments are mainly responsible for
contamination of environment, particularly the urban surroundings. Urban pollution is mainly the
collection of impurities created by cities which would certainly shock city dwellers. It includes
Air, water, ground the entire environment. Air pollution has dangerous consequences which
emerge due to urbanization. Cities are the source of several dangerous gases, particularly
vehicles like passenger cars, Lorries, buses which generate carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon
monoxide (CO), sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrous oxides (Nox), benzene, ozone in addition to fine
particles released by diesel motors which create a serious threat to human health. Heating
installations use fossil fuels which also contaminate the air of urban centres. However, in
numerous urban agglomerations, the main source of the worsening of air quality is from
industrial facilities which emit veritable poisons into the air, which is then inhaled by riverside
dwellers. Water is also source of pollution in urban areas. Since earlier times, cities are attracting
millions of rural residents to their recognizable shores. Each of these individuals has required
water to live, and consume for other basic needs. Cities under continuous development must
increase their water resources and their water treatment capacities. In many countries, this has
created nearly insoluble problems and millions of human beings are not assured daily access to
potable water. As regards wastewater, the lack of effective collection and treatment facilities
means that wastewater is often quite simply dumped back into Nature, often into the ocean,
which creates severe and long lasting pollution problems.

Remedy to fix issues of urbanization in India

India has rapidly increasing population. According to the estimates of New McKinsey Global
Institute research, cities of India could produce 70 percent of net new jobs by 2030, may generate
around 70 percent of Indian GDP, and drive a near fourfold increase in per capita incomes across
the country. If India upgrades its urban operating model, it has the capacity to reap a
demographic dividend from the increase of around 250 million expected in the next decade in the
working-age inhabitants.
India's current Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi also came forward to resolve the issues related
to urbanization. To manage city system and fulfil the great demands of inhabitants due to the
rapid urbanization, specialists have stated that government must focus on two critical factors
which is solid waste management and waste water treatment. But the Gujarat government on its
part has taken up 50 towns in the state and took initiatives like 'Clean city, Green city' in
partnership to execute solid waste management and waste water treatment. In order to decrease
discrimination, Mr. Modi stated that there is a need to concentrate on comprehensive growth and
must recognize the most backward areas in cities and towns and provide basic amenities in place.
There is an urgent need to develop social mechanisms which will assist to reduce inequality and
make sure the basics like health, sanitation, education to reach those who have been
underprivileged of the same. Mr. Modi has realized that most of the urban actions are technical
but the employees who do these jobs are often clerical level therefore there must be focus on
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opening universities on urban planning, urban infrastructure, urban development for the
assistance of young people to learn how to meet the demands of urbanization. To lessen urban
crime, Mr Modi stresses that police staff in urban areas need a specific training to maintain
demands of the law and order situation.

Possible remedy for the urbanization issues and problems at global level:
The most effectual way to resolve issues of urbanization is to make the economy of village and
small scale fully viable. Economies must be revitalized if government undertakes huge rural
development program. It is suggested that surplus manpower must be absorbed in village in
order to migrate to urban areas. It is needed to control traffic congestion in urban region and
people must be encouraged to use public transport. India must improve the traffic control system
to avoid accidents. It is necessary to implement resilient clean-up campaign. Government must
make polices to construct low cast multi-storeyed flats in order to accommodate the slum
dwellers. Government should provide funds to encourage entrepreneurship and also find solution
for pollution in the nation. Reports of WHO stated that the health cities proposal aimed to
develop the physical, mental, environmental, and social welfare of people who live and work in
urban centres. People from different backgrounds, including community members to government
representatives, from cities were organized and encouraged to come together and work together
in order to deal with the problems that emerge in urban environments. This association of people
shared strategies, success stories, and resources to tackle the concerns of the local society. WHO
reports indicated that, "A healthy city is one that is continually creating and improving the
physical and social environments and expanding the community resources that enable people to
mutually support each other in performing all the functions of life and in developing to their
maximum potential."
To summarize, Urbanization is the substantial expansion of urban areas due to rural migration
and it is strongly related to modernization, industrialization, and the sociological process of
rationalization. Urbanization commonly occurred in developing countries because government
has keenness to accomplish a developed city status. As a result, almost all area in the city has
been developed and in the worst case scenario, even the green areas are also turned into
industrial or business area. It illustrates that speedy urbanization has many unconstructive
implications especially towards social and environmental aspects. While the process of
urbanization occurs at global scale, it is more visible in developing countries. This growth has
led to concerns about the sustainability of these urban centres. Explosive growth in the world
population and migration of people to in urban centres is causing major concern about the quality
of life in these urban centres and the life-supporting capacity of the planet ecologically and
communally.
The government should not be keen to develop a city without considering the impacts towards
the social and environmental aspect. Instead, the government should modify the urban
development process in order to accomplish a developed city and make efforts to lessen the
possibility of problems that might arise. In order to triumph over urbanization issues and
problems, Khosh-Chashm (1995) recommended that the society should work together closely
with the authorities to assist in modernizing life in urban area. The changeover from a rural to
urban wealth is very rapid in historical terms for most economic systems. The task to fulfil all the
demands for jobs, shelter, water, roads, transport and other urban infrastructure is overwhelming.
Presently, India already has numerous mega cities. Many researchers believe that urbanization is
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good for the financial growth of country but careful planning is required to develop cities and
offer basic amenities for healthy living.

Effects of Globalisation on Indian

Society
Globalization is a significant factor in competitive world that integrate and mobilize cultural
values of people at global level. In the age of rapid technical progression, many countries are
unified and transformed due to the process of globalization. Globalization has a huge impact on
cultural, social, monetary, political, and communal life of countries. Abundant theoretical studies
demonstrated that globalization intercedes in a cultural life of populace that raises numerous
critical issues (Robertson, 1992). In broad sense, the term 'globalization' means combination of
economies and societies through cross country flows of information, ideas, technologies, goods,
services, capital, finance and people. Globalization is described by theorists as the process
through which societies and economies are integrated through cross border flows of ideas,
communication, technology, capital, people, finance, goods, services and information.

Aspects of Globalisation in India

Cross country incorporation has several aspects and can be political, cultural, social and/or
economic, all which equal globalization. Nevertheless, financial integration is the most common
aspects. Economic integration involves developing a nation's economy into an international
economy. After World War I and II the early trends of globalization decreased throughout the
world due to many barriers which restricted the movement of goods and services. In fact, cultural
and social integration are even more than economic integration. Globalization increases
competitiveness at company level and national level, which leads company management and
governments to embrace strategies designed to increase labour effectiveness with reference to
productivity, quality and innovation.
Generally, globalization involves economies that are opening up to international competition and
that do not distinguish against international capital. Consequently, globalization is often
accompanied by a liberalization of the markets and the privatization of productive assets. But
globalization also leads to unemployment, increasing casual employment and weakening labour
movements. Theoretical literature denotes that Globalization has made countries to realize that
they can share their cultural values and economic exchanges to promote business and gain
competitive advantage. The fervour of globalization has even enforced Governments to be tuned
to the merits of a Global economy. Management studies have defined the process of
globalization. Fraser (2007) explained that Globalization is a word on every commentator's lips
nowadays, but is very difficult to define satisfactorily, for it arises in so many different contexts
like economic, sociological, political, cultural and environmental. Akteruzzaman.Md, 2006
stated that globalization is the interconnectedness of nations and regions in economic domain, in
particular, trade financial flows and multinational corporations.
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Concept of Globalisation
The concept of globalization means that the world is getting smaller as well as bigger.
Akteruzzaman.Md, 2006 described that globalization can contribute to develop pattern of cross
border activities of firms, involving international investment, trade and strategic alliances for
product development, production, sourcing and marketing. These international activities
companies to enter new markets, to exploit their technological and organizational advantages and
to reduce business costs and risks. Other theorists stated that globalization is a social
phenomenon that defines the geographical boundary in terms of many different issues.
According Brinkman, 2002, globalization as a triumphalism light, as the penetration of
capitalism into every corner of the world, bringing with it the possibility for all of the world's
population to participate in the fruits of the international division of labour and market economy.
ALI, 2015 explained the globalization as a process of rapid economic, cultural, and institutional
integration among countries. This association is driven by the liberalization of trade, investment
and capital flow, technological advances, and pressures for assimilation towards international
standards. Globalization has reduced barriers between countries, thus resulting in strengthening
of economic competition among nations, dissemination of advanced management practices and
newer forms of work organization, and sharing of internationally accepted labour standards.

Challenges of globalization and its effects

Many theorists asserted that change in environment has both positive and negative aspects
(Harris, 2002). These stimulate driving or resisting forces toward the change of the status quo.
This is most obvious relative to both globalization, and the resulting spread of the global
organization. There are four factors that accelerate globalization.
The market imperative: Impact on national economies of larger, transnational markets
characterized by free, convertible currencies, open access to banking, and contracts enforceable
by law.
The resource imperative: Growing interdependence of nations and their activities on one another,
fostered by the depletion of natural resources, misdistributions of arable land, mineral resources,
and wealth, as well as overpopulation. The undeveloped nations need the capital, technology,
and brainpower of the wealthier countries, while the First World economies are progressively
dependent on the natural and human resources of the developing nations.
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The IT imperative: Modernizations in glob communications, science and technology contribute

toward universalization or planarization.
The ecological imperative: Globalization does have great effect on the ecologies and
environments of nations which need to safeguards that lessen the negative effects rather than
exploiting without regard to such concerns.
India was main mover of globalization. The government of India made major modifications in its
economic policy in 1991 by which it allowed direct foreign investments in the country. As a
result of this, globalization of the Indian Industry occurred at large scale. In India, economic
expansion was observed in nineteenth century due to major crisis led by foreign exchange. The
liberalization of the domestic economy and enhanced incorporation of India with the global
economy helped to step up gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates which made good
position in global scale. Effects of globalization in Indian Industry are observed as this process
brought in large amounts of foreign investments into the industry especially in the BPO,
pharmaceutical, petroleum, and manufacturing industries. As a result, they boosted the Indian
economy quite significantly. The benefits of the effects of globalization in the Indian Industry
are that many foreign companies set up industries in India, especially in the pharmaceutical,
BPO, petroleum, manufacturing, and chemical sectors and this helped to offer great opportunities
for employment to Indian people. Also this helped to reduce the level of unemployment and
poverty in the country. It is observed that the major forces of globalization in India has been in
the development of outsourced IT and business process outsourcing services. Since last many
years, there is an increase of skilled professionals in India employed by both local and foreign
companies to service customers in the US and Europe. These countries take advantage of India's
lower cost but highly talented and English-speaking work force, and utilizes global
communications technologies such as voice-over IP (VOIP), email and the internet, international
enterprises have been able to lower their cost base by establishing outsourced knowledge-worker
operations in India. The foreign companies brought in highly advanced technology with them
and this made the Indian Industry more technologically advanced. Globalization in India has
been beneficial for companies that have ventured in the Indian market. It is recommended by
researchers that India has to focus on five important areas to enhance its economic status. The
areas include technological entrepreneurship, new business openings for small and medium
enterprises, the importance of quality management, new prospects in rural areas and privatization
of financial institutions.
In terms of export and import activities, Many Indian companies have expanded their business
and became famous at global level such as fast food, beverages, and sportswear and garment
industries. Records indicated that Agriculture exports account for about 13 to 18% of total
annual export of the country. In 2000-01, agricultural products valued at more than US$6 million
were exported from the country of which 23% was contributed to the marine products alone.
Marine products in recent years have emerged as the single largest contributor to the total
agricultural export form the country accounting for over one fifth of the total agricultural
exports. Cereals (mostly basmati rice and non-basmati rice), oil seeds, tea and coffee are the
other prominent products each of which accounts for nearly 5 to 10% of the countries' total
agricultural exports. Globalization speeded export of food items in India in the form of increased
consumption of meat, western fast food, sodas and cool drinks, which may result in public health
crisis. The rich biodiversity of India has yielded many healthy foods prepared from locally
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available entities. But the marketing by MNCs with large advertisement campaigns lead the
people to resort to their products (Mascarenhas, 2003).
Figure: Indian companies going global:

Technological and Cultural impact of globalization in India

With the process of globalization, there is an access to television grew from 20% of the urban
population (1991) to 90% of the urban population (2009). Even in the rural areas satellite
television has a grown up market. In the cities, Internet facility is everywhere and extension of
internet facilities even to rural areas. There is an increase of global food chain /restaurants in the
urban areas of India. Excessive Multiplex movie halls, big shopping malls and high rise
residential are seen in every cities. Entertainment sector in India has a global market. After
economic liberalization, Bollywood expanded its area and showed a major presence in the global
scale. The industry began to explore new ways to become more global and modern. In India,
modernity is observed with the West. Therefore, Western philosophy began to be incorporated
into Bollywood films. As these new cultural messages began to reach the Indian population,
Indian moviegoers were pushed to re-evaluate their traditional Indian cultural ideology.
Bollywood movies are also distributed and accepted at international level. Big international
companies (Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, and Columbia Pictures) are investing on this sector.
Famous International brands such as Armani, Gucci, Nike, and Omega are also making
investment in the Indian market with the changing of fashion statement of Indians.

Impact of globalization on education in India

There is immense effects observed in educational sector due to globalization such as literacy rate
become high and Foreign Universities are collaborating with different Indian Universities. The
Indian educational system faces challenges of globalization through Information technology and
it offers opportunities to evolve new paradigms shifts in developmental education. The
distinction between formal, non-formal and informal education will vanish when move from
industrial society to information society takes place. Globalization promotes new tools and
techniques such as E-learning, Flexible learning, Distance Education Programs and Overseas
training.
It is observed in current Indian society that through globalization, women have gained certain
opportunities for job options and to recognize women's rights as a part of the human rights. Their
empowerment has given considerable opportunities and possibilities of improving employment
conditions through global solidarity and co-ordination. It is found that the growth of computer
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and other technologies enabled women with better waged, flex timings, and capacity to negotiate
their role and status in home and at corporate level.
There are some negative impact of globalization such as this process made disparity between
rural and urban Indian joblessness, growth of slum capitals and threat of terrorist activities.
Globalization increased competition in the Indian market between the foreign companies and
domestic companies. With the foreign goods being better than the Indian goods, the consumer
preferred to buy the foreign goods. This reduced the amount of profit of the Indian Industry
companies. This happened mainly in the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, chemical, and steel
industries. The negative Effects of Globalization on Indian Industry are that with the coming of
technology the number of labour required are decreased and this resulted increasing
unemployment especially in the arena of the pharmaceutical, chemical, manufacturing, and
cement industries. Some section of people in India that are poor do not get benefit of
globalization. There is an increased gap between rich and poor that lead to some criminal
activities. Ethical responsibility of business has been reduced. Another major negative effect of
globalization in India is that youngsters of India leaving their studies very early and joining Call
centres to earn fast money reducing their social life after getting habituated with monotonous
work. There is an increase of every daily usable commodities. This has an adverse effect on
cultural aspect. The institution of marriage is breaking down at fast rate. There are more people
approaching divorce courts instead of maintaining marital life. Globalization has considerable
impact on the religious situation of India. Globalization has brought about raising a population
who is agnostic and atheist. People visiting places of worship are reducing with time.
Globalization has reduced nationalism and patriotism in country.
It can be said that Globalization is motivating factor in current business environment. There are
few challenges for companies due to globalization such as Migration, relocation, labour
shortages, competition, and changes in skills and technology. Globalization powerfully
influences the social partners' attitudes since traditional labour relations have to cope with
completely new and very dynamic situations. In political field, globalization helps to eradicate
poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, ill-health and fighting cross border terrorism and global
terrorism. Globalisation in context of status of women implicates the relegation of the stereotypic
pattern of duties of the women like rearing and caring the children to the back ground and taking
up the various diversified occupation and thus making their living quite vibrant and alive.
Globalisation benefits the schedule caste people in promoting cultural homogeneity in the way of
loosening of the ideas of pollution and purity and eradication of untouchability and so many
socio-cultural and economic disabilities associated with them. Globalisation of goods has
developed enthusiasm in India for western brand names. A consumerist mentality has been
carefully fostered. This leads to an adversative impact on the tendency to save or the domestic
accumulation of capital. Lastly, in Indian scenario, globalization developed a consumer credit
society. Today, people can buy goods and services even if they do not have sufficient purchasing
power and the prospect of raising a loan has become easy in the age of globalisation. Credit cards
have given boost to consumerism and pushed many households into indebtedness. At the same
time globalization has unfavourable impact on mass-media in India. Currently, realistic coverage
of events and happening doesn't receive much importance because it doesn't determine the
standing of a newspaper or TV channel. Globalisation has brought violation of journalistic ethics
in India.
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To summarize, the process of globalization has changed the industrial pattern social life of global
people and it has immense impact on Indian trade system. The globalization of the economic,
social and cultural structures happened in all ages. Previously, the pace of process was slow.
Today with the start of the information technology, new ways of communication have made the
world a very small place. With this process, there is a big market place. Globalization has
resulted in increase in the production of a range of goods. MNCs have established manufacturing
plants all over the world. It has positive effects and India will overcome many obstacles and
adopt global policies to expand business at international scale. India is gaining international
recognition and strengthening in economic and political areas.

Social empowerment, communalism,

regionalism & secularism
Social empowerment: In societal development, conception of empowerment has vital role. This
phrase is linked with gender equality. Modernization of global development will need a
reappraisal of the concept and its application to many facets of human life. The notion of
empowerment entails numerous things to many people. Concepts of choice, liberty, agency,
capacity, contribution, self-sufficiency, and increased resources are common to almost all
definitions. Most of the researchers agreed on the idea of empowerment as ways to improve
quality of life and expand the basis of human well-being. Briefly, empowerment can serve as a
tool for effecting deep and broad-based social revolution.

In social science literature, it is documented that the process of social change can be discovered
at the personal and structural levels. At one end, social change is visualized as a consequence of
the development of individuals, gained through education, training, access to material resources,
and the like. From this perspective, structural change is supposed to be an automatic result of
personal alteration. On the other end, the human being is seen as a part of society, and change is
considered impossible unless social structures related to political power are changed primarily.
Individual and structural transformation are closely associated with the individual's inner life
shapes, social environment, and that environment, in turn, exerts a deep influence on one's
mystical and psychological well-being. The symbol of the body politic, likening all of humanity
to a single social organism gives a valuable framework to discover empowerment as means to
follow the transformation of individuals and civilization. Empowerment depends on and
contributes to a system in which different actors are provided the resources needed for each to
make a unique contribution to the whole. From this conception, it can be established that
individual and collective empowerment can be considered as the extension of vision, capacity,
and choice necessary for people to act as active agents of human well-being and affluence.
The Protagonists of Social Transformation: It suggests that there are three elements critically
important such as the individual, the institutions of society, and the community. In this view
empowerment is described as the act assisting individuals to manifest constructive capacities in
creative and disciplined ways, institutions to exercise authority in a manner that leads to the
progress and upliftment of people and communities to provide an environment in which culture
is improved and individual wills and capacities combine in collective action. Ideas of "us" and
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"them" deserve particular consideration. Discourse in development spheres is often entrenched in

conceptions of the "empowered" members of society that help the "disadvantaged" or
"downgraded group." Many researchers revealed that the desire to eliminate social inequalities is
indisputably moral feeling, but us/them dichotomies only extend and reinforce existing divisions.
Careful thought needs must be given in which empowerment can be approached as a universal
and shared enterprise. It has been observed that Historical processes have developed inequalities
that must be addressed. But the development basis should be one in which every individual and
group is presumed to have scope for progression. From this viewpoint, the marginalized are not
without capacity, and the privileged are not all strong. All have capacity to develop and all have
a responsibility to advance the welfare of the whole. Lastly, though empowerment signifies
someone or something being invested with authority, the social dynamics of power seem to have
been generally overlooked in debates on development at the United Nations.
Prerequisites for Social Transformation: Scholars stated that participation in the systems and
structures of society is important prerequisite for social transformation. It is not sufficient for
people to get projects, even if they have a voice in certain decisions. They must actively involve
in decision-making processes: identify problems, formulate solutions and approaches, enjoy
benefits, and determine criteria for appraisal.
At last, the ability to recognise the root causes of inequality will be decisive to the empowerment
of populations to become agents of social transformation. Though population gets benefits of
advancement, if it is unable to discriminate the drivers of social injustice and inequity, they
cannot eliminate such practices from social structure. If empowerment is to lead to social
transformation, it must involve the ability to identify the forces that modernize one's social
reality, to recognise the opportunities and challenges offered by that reality, and to plan
initiatives for the improvement of civilization.
Communalism: Communalism is practiced in society since ancient and it is part of human life.
When appraising in Indian context, it is great faithfulness to one's own holy group.
Communalism is defined as a mechanism to energize people for or against by raising an appeal
on communal lines. It is revealed in literature that Communalism is related with religious
fundamentalism and intransigence. Studies have demonstrated that the communalisation was first
began in nineteenth century. The British historian (James) categorized ancient period as Hindu
period and medieval period as Muslim period and this ordering was further used by both the
British and Indian historians. Social literature documented that in medieval period, Muslim
people were underprivileged, they were also oppressed as then people of Hindu community and
the ruling class included both the Muslims and Hindus. Abdul Ahmed explained that
"Communalism is a social phenomenon characterized by the religion of two communities, often
leading to acrimony, tension and even rioting between them". Communalism is also described by
few other eminent theorists. According to Prabha Dixit, "Communalism is a political doctrine
which makes use of religious and cultural differences to achieve political ends". It is a dominant
force in Indian scenario. Many factors such as casteism, communalism and religious
fundamentalism pose challenge in India that are the major threats to Secular state. They
deteriorate the working and strength of democratic secular Federal state and influence against the
fundamental beliefs of national life and provide means to new individuality. 'Casteism' and
'Communalism' are destroying the Indian cultural diversity.
In academic literature, Communalism is elucidated as multi-dimensional, complex, social fact.
Numerous social, political, economic, cultural and religious factors affect the occurrence of
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communalism and communal ferocity. Communalism is sometimes aggravated by non-religious

forces. A careful inquiry of the demands which have been and are made by communal leaders
will reveal the true character and objective of communal politics under the cover of religion,
ritual and culture. It has been documented in reports that Previously, British imperialism used
communalism as a divide and rule policy. Similar kind of policies are continued by leaders after
independence using various factors. The origin of communalism is very deep and diversified.
Some of the roots lie in the structure and nature of Indian civilization which has different
religions, multi-racial, multi-lingual, multi-castes and multi-regional. A society divided on these
grounds helps the development of communal organizations. It may be emphasised that the
financial condition of the Hindu and the Muslim and other communities and their different
development also contributes to the development of communalism. It is established that the
communalism of society is a response of the communalism of another community.
Communalism has three stages. First stage include insight of people believing in a particular
religion that have similar interests such as political, financial, social and cultural interests. For
political perspective of India, Indian society is group of people from different religion, language
and regions but not as a country. For citizen of India, different people have different leaders, who
declare themselves as national/regional/religious/caste leaders. The second stage of
communalism begins when people consider that the social, monetary, cultural and political
interests of people following a particular religion are dissimilar from that of the believers of
other religions. This phase of communalism is termed as Liberal Communalism. People who
have belief in Liberal Communalism assumed that the interests of the people of India can be
amalgamated and India can be integrated as one country. The third stage of communalism is
considered when people of one religion are the opponents of the people of other religions. The
third phase of communalism is extremist communalism which has a concept of fear and
revulsion.

Characteristics of Communalism

1. Communalism is a philosophical notion.

2. It is a multifaceted process.
3. It has a wider base which incorporates social, economic and political aspects for its manifestation.
4. It causes competition, ferocity and tension among different communities.
5. Communalism is used by the upper class people and elites as advice for separation and mistreatment of the
communal identities of the poorer groups of their co-religionists.
6. Communalism is simply planned by opportunistic political and economic interest of contending groups and
factions within a political party or by political parties.
7. Communalism assaults at the roots of egalitarianism, secularism and national amalgamation.
8. The consequences of Communalism are ruinous.

Causes of Communalism
There are numerous of causes for the occurrence of communalism. First is the tendency of the
Minorities. The Muslims fail to be intermixed in the national mainstream. Some reports indicated
that majority of Muslim people do not partake in the secular nationalistic politics and insist to
sustain separate identity. Another cause of communalism is Orthodoxy and Obscurantism. The
orthodox members of minority groups feel that they have a distinct entity with their own cultural
pattern, personal laws and thought. There are strong elements of conservatism and
fundamentalism among the Muslims. Such feeling has prevented them from accepting the
concept of secularism and religious tolerance.
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Design of the Leaders is also a cause of communalism. It has grown in India because the
communalist leaders of different religious communities such as Hindu and Muslim desire to
succeed it in the interest of their communities. The demand for separate electorate and the
organization of Muslim league were the practical indicators of this belief. The British rule which
gave the divide and rule policy, separate electorate on the basis of religion, reinforced the basis
of communalism in India. Finally the partition of the country into India and Pakistan provided
further an aggressive feeling towards each other.
The cause of communalism is due to weak Economic Status. Most of Muslims in India did not
embrace the scientific and technological education and they lagged behind on educational front.
Due to poor education, they have not been represented satisfactorily in the public service,
industry and trade. This leads the feeling of withdrawal which causes communalism.
There are geographical Causes for communalism. The regional settlement of different religious
groups particularly Hindus Muslims and Christians causes more variation in the style of life,
social standards and belief system. These patterns are clashing and leads to communal tension.
Communalism also evolves from historical causes. It has been revealed in literature that the
Muslims in some of the regions are converted from Hinduism under the compulsions of Muslim
rulers. The problems of social separation, illiteracy and poverty that had set apart the low caste
people remain unresolved for them, as the foreign elite that polished never shared power with
them. Their work ended with the conversion of the Indians and the converts began by replicating
the masters in thought, speech and costume. It caused their hostility. Progressively,
communalism developed in the Muslim community.
Social Causes of communalism also emerges as there is cultural similarity in fostering
harmonious relations between any two social groups. But the social institutions, customs and
practices of Hindus and Muslims are so deviating that they think themselves to be two different
communities.
Psychological factors have vital role in increasing communal tension. The Hindus group
considers that the Muslims are crusaders and fundamentalists. They also have a feeling that
Muslims are unpatriotic. On the other hand, the Muslims believe that they are not treated as
superior group in India and their religious beliefs and practices are sub-standard. These feelings
causes communal tension.
Aggravation of rival Countries is also cause of communalism. Some overseas countries weaken
Indian nations by setting one community against the other through their representatives. They
encourage and promote communal riots in the nation.
Negative Impact of Mass Media also create communal tension. The messages related to
communal tension or riot in any part of the country spread through the mass media. This results
in further tension and riots between two rival religious groups.
Communalism has been a severe threat to national unity in India. It harmed numerous elements
of modern India, such as, secularism, democracy and world harmony. Communal ideology leads
to many cases of communal violence and riots. Gujarat violence of February -March 2002 which
terrorized the whole country was consequence of prior spread of communal ideology (Chandra,
2004).
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Ways to eradicate Communalism: Communalism can be lessen between different religious

groups through taking some measures.

1. Eradication of Communal Parties: All the political parties which prosper on religious loyalties should be
banned or abolished by the government. Even non-political cultural organizations should always be kept
under constant watch so that they cannot expound communalism.
2. Spread of the Past Heritage: Feelings of patriotism should be taught to the people by reminding them about
the wonderful moments of history in Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs who were united for the wellbeing of the
nation.
3. Public Opinion: Mass media must play imperative role to generate awareness about harmony between
different communities and make efforts to change the attitude of people towards other communities. People
must be aware of the dangerous consequences of the communalism.

Both the Government and people should create mindfulness to eradicate communal tension and
clash.
Abundant of literature have demonstrated that the practice of communalism leads to communal
politics and communal violence. It is supposed that communalism is the bequest of the past
because they use the thought of ancient and medieval times. But communalism is a modern
thought and political movement. The origin of communalism is linked to the politics of modern
times when the people are more inclined towards politics. The economic slowdown of the people
of India was primary reason for communalism.
Regionalism: In current global trade system, regionalism is spreading at great pace. The huge
spread of regionalism is encouraged by the explosion of regional institutions that give rise to
substantial academic interest in both their sources and consequences. In bulk of academic
literature, Regions are described as groups of countries situated in the same geographic space but
it is not clear where one region ends and the next begins. According to Russett (1967), a region is
based on geographic closeness, social and cultural similarity, shared political attitudes and
political institutions, and financial interdependence. Deutsch et al. (1957) stated that high levels
of interdependence across multiple dimensions that include economic transactions,
communications, and political values as determining whether a group of countries constitutes a
region. Thompson (1973) debated that regions comprises of states that are geographically close
to each other, interact extensively, and share numerous facts, behaviours and culture.
Regionalism is an arguable concept among scholars, sociologists and theorists. Regionalism is a
national phenomenon and took shape of organized agitations and campaigns. Regionalism has
widely spread in Indian politics since the independence of India. It has the major basis of various
regional political parties. In Indian scenario, regionalism has increased in close identification
with the regions. After independence, it is a great force of conflicts as well as collaboration,
which depends on the manner of accommodation. Regionalism is elaborated as situations in
which different religious or ethnic groups with idiosyncratic identities exist within the same state
borders, often concentrated within a particular region and share strong feelings of shared
individuality.
Regionalism is basically an intense feeling of a particular region or an area in preference to the
nation or any other region. It often involves ethnic groups whose major objective is to get
freedom from a national state and the development of their own political influence. In Indian
perspective, regionalism denotes to proclamation of different ethnic, linguistic or economic
interests by various groups within the nation. It has been well documented that the roots of
regionalism lie in linguistic, ethnic, economic and cultural identities of the people who stay in
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particular geographical area. Political scholars have elaborated various types of regionalism
which include economic regionalism, linguistic regionalism, political regionalism and even sub-
regional movements. Various political scientists have contested that regionalism is a political
process discernible by cooperation and policy harmonization, whereas regionalization is viewed
as an economic process in which trade and investment within the region develop more fast than
the region's trade and investment in other part of world (Haggard 1993). Pempel (2015)
described regionalism in different manner. According to him, regionalism involves the process of
institution creation and is the deliberate product of interstate collaboration. Regionalism is a
topic of debate among theorists. Katzenstein (2006, p. 1) described regionalism as
institutionalized practices and regionalization as "a process that engages actors". According to
Fawcett (2004), regionalism is as a policy or a project. Regionalism is basically associated with
ideas, identities, and ideologies to a regional project. Munakata (2006) stated that regionalism
comprises of institutions established by governments to support regional economic integration
but emphasizes the changeable degrees of promise by members. Extensive research has been
conducted on regionalism that focused on preferential trading arrangements (PTAs), institutions
that offer each member state with better access to the other participants' markets. Such
arrangements involve states in close geographic closeness, for example the European Union or
Mercosur.
In Indian context, regionalism is extremely engrossed in its diversity of languages, cultures,
tribes, religions, communities. It instigates from the sense of regional awareness, which is often
powered by a sense of regional withdrawal. In India, there is huge population of different castes,
creeds, customs and cultures and its broad regions are dissimilar from one another. For example,
southern India, the home of Dravidian cultures, itself a region of many regions is very different
from the north.

Major Characteristics of Regionalism

1. Regionalism is accustomed by economic, social, political and cultural inequalities.

2. Regionalism sometimes is a psychic phenomenon.
3. Regionalism is developed as an expression of group identity as well as devotion to particular region.
4. Regionalism assumes the concept of development of one's own region without considering the interest of
other regions.
5. Regionalism proscribes people from other regions to be benefited by a particular region.

Causes of Regionalism
There are many reasons for the eruption of regionalism in Indian setting. First is the efforts of the
national government to execute a particular ideology, language or cultural pattern on all people
and groups. People are forced to cultivate the regionalism movements. With these policies of
regional groups, the states of the South began to fight the imposition of Hindi as an official
languages they feared this may make north more powerful. Second major cause for the
development of regionalism is constant negligence of an area or region by the ruling parties and
focus of administrative and political power has given rise to demand for decentralization of
authority and divide of unilingual states. Thirdly, there is a wish of the various units of the Indian
federal system to maintain their sub cultural regions and self-government has promoted
regionalism and given rise to demand for greater independence. Fourth reason for the rise of
regionalism is the desire of regional leaders to gain power. In Southern state, political parties like
DMK, AIADMK, Akali Dal, Telugu Desam, Asom Gana Parishad have encouraged regionalism
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to dominate these regions. Other reason for huge growth of regionalism is the interaction
between the forces of modernisation and mass contribution in India. Feeling of regionalism is
developed among the people of backward areas as they are being discriminated from other
powerful groups. The local political leaders exploited this issue and stimulate people against
Central Government for deliberately trying to maintain regional imbalances by neglecting social
and economic development of some regions.
Types of Regionalism in India: Regionalism in India is of various types that include demand of
the people of certain areas for separate statehood, demand of people of certain Union Territories
for full-fledged statehood, demand of certain people for favourable settlement of inter-state
disputes, and the demand of the people of certain areas for secession from the Indian Union.

1. Supra-state regionalism is a manifestation of group identity of numerous states. In this form of regionalism,
the group of states unites to make common views on the issue of mutual interest vis-à-vis another group of
states or at times against the union. The group identity forged is negative in character and based on specific
issue. But it is not permanent unification of state identities in the collective identity. Even at times of inter-
group rivalries, tensions and conflicts may tend to continue, concurrently along with their cooperation. North-
eastern states in India have the supra-state regionalism.
2. Inter-state regionalism is coterminous with local territories and involves contrasting of the identities of one or
more states against another. This form of regionalism is issue specific. For example disagreements between
Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over the distribution of Kaveri water may be interpreted as inter-state
regionalism.
3. Intra-state regionalism is a type of regionalism that signify that wherein a part of the state strives for self-
identity and self-development and therefore, it is taken in a positive sense. In negative terms, it affects
against the collective interest of the state as well as the nation. For instance there is a feeling of coastal
region and western region in Odisha, coastal region and Telangana region in Andhra Pradesh.

Process of combating regionalism: Regionalism is considered as significant facet of Indian

political system. Sometimes, it poses threat to the harmony of the nation. Therefore, it is
imperative to take immediate steps to curb such feeling among Indian populace. Social scholars
have recommended numerous measures to reduce the propensity of regionalism. First major step
is to promote uniform development of the hitherto abandoned areas so that people feel a part of
the national mainstream. Secondly, the central government must not interfere in the matters of
the State unless it is unescapable for national interest. Another remedy for reducing regionalism
is to resolve Problems of people in a peaceful and constitutional manner. Politicians must not be
allowed to misappropriate the issue of regional demands. The states must be given authority to
resolve their issues except the major issues that are related to national interest. Some necessary
changes must be done in the Central-State relations in favour of the states, and to introduce a
system of national education that would assist people to overawed regional feelings and develop
patriotic sense towards the country.
It is established in political studies that regionalism has unfavourable impacts which lead to a
reduction of world welfare as compared to free trade. A clash between regionalism and global
free trade occurs, but these negative effects are lessened by the continuing globalisation process
and the efforts for multilateral liberalisation. Regional parties have dominant role for spreading
regionalism and generating awareness for regional issues among inhabitants. Since these parties
have their political reality in regional support, they give rise to regionalism for their interest and
to gain power. It is a recognised strategy of the regional leadership to propagate their agenda
against the Centre, such as blaming the opposition party for discriminating against the state with
political motives. Alongside, the regional press, which is mainly language-oriented, immensely
play lead role in developing the feeling of regionalism.
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Secularism: Secularism is contrasting phenomenon of communalism. It was adopted by Indian

Constitution, which signifies respect for all religions and broad-mindedness of all faiths, no State
religion and support or favour to any religion by the State. Secularism is a form of government
process that enhance democracy and commitment to financial development.
When appraising historical records, it is documented that Indian secularism started with the
protest movements in the 5th century B.C. Tehre are three main a secularist and materialistic
philosophical movement, Buddhism, and Jainism. All three secularism movements discarded the
authority of the Vedas and prominence of belief in a divinity. In the 18th century, when the
British East India Company had dominance over India, secularism have more impact on the
Indian populace. Secular India has undergone several tremors in many decades. Many
professionals relate these convulsions to the nature of Indian civilization, to which they attribute
centrality to religion in both personal and public matters. The Indian concept of secularism is
based on respect for all religions by the state and separation of religion from public institutional
practices. The obsession with the European experience supervises the historicity of the Indian
phenomenon.
The process of secularisation is not alike in all societies. With technical progression, human
culture has undergone the process of secularisation. In India, secularism is huge political and
constitutional struggle and disagreement. The perception was promoted by Mahatma Gandhi and
it has been the central model of secularism after Independence of India. Indian secularism is
based on a more functional approach to the belief of equal respect and acceptance of all
religions, which has allowed for the defence of religious minority rights principally through
temporary special measures, which is similar to the positive action in the United States. But, the
Hindu Right has progressively been trying to cast itself as main successors of India's secular
practise, that is, as promoters of new secularism. There is a good understanding of secularism in
India and the Hindu Right visualized secularism based on a formal approach to impartiality. In
their views, secularism entails that all religious communities must be treated equally. Any
protection of the rights of religious minorities is cast as appeasement, and a violation of the
principles of secularism. In secularism, religious minorities are to be treated the same as the
majority groups.
Secularism is essential for India because it enables people of different religions to live in
politeness with respect for all faiths. It is a part of democratic system, which grants equal rights.
It protects democracy by limiting the powers of the majority and it protects the equal rights of
minorities to populace. Secularism also regulates the relation between the State and various
religious groups on the belief of equality that the State shall not differentiate against any religion.
When evaluating the history, it has been demonstrated that in the period of freedom struggle,
Mahatma Gandhi made great efforts to unite various communities. He explored many beliefs and
dogmas to connect people of different conviction. This principle had to assure the marginal
groups that they would not be differentiated against and to caution the majority groups that the
majority rule is inequitable since democracy supports freedom and egalitarianism for all factions.
Mr. Gandhi became understood this theory in the principle of 'sarva dhharma samadbhava' which
entails that all religions should be treated uniformly. It was not a political belief meant to
integrate people. It was a normative that everyone must identify the value of religion in people's
lives. Indian society has vast religious diversity therefore it is imperative to respect all religious
feelings. People have right to religion and culture. The fight against the British was not only a
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struggle for independence but also a struggle to maintain impartiality and democratic system in
the nation. This was Gandhi's contribution to the decree of religious conflict in India.
Jawahar Lal Nehru also contributed for the development of secularism and raised the concept of
'Dharma Nirapekshata'. This principle signified that the State would not be impacted by religious
considerations to devise its strategies. Later on, Pt. Nehru realized that policy making could not
be detached from the realm of religion and that religion could not be exiled from the political and
public area. During independence, the violence happened and followed the partition of the
country which proved that religion had become an inherent part of political area. Nehru asserted
that secularism did not signify a state where religion is discouraged, instead it denotes freedom
for all religion, including the freedom for those who have no religion. Pt.Nehru stated that the
secular was not opposed to religion. It is a state which respects all faiths uniformly and it does
not permit any religion to presuppose the status of the State religion.
Copious studies have revealed that secularism is the main tool to develop a modern society. It
was anticipated that in a secular democratic establishment, government and people would get
involve in monetary development collectively, thus they can build modern Indian society. There
is no theology in the secular character of the State. Principles of secularism is not against Deity.
It treats similarly the devout, the agnostic and the atheist. The main aim of secular approach is to
eradicate religious feeling from the matters of the State and guarantees that people should not be
victim of discrimination against the ground of religion. According to scholars, secularism is a
system of social ethics which is based upon a policy that ethical standards and conduct should be
determined exclusively with reference to the present life and social security without considering
religious factor.
Heterogeneity is basis of Indian culture and religious tolerance is the core factor of Indian
secularism. Secularism belief states that all religions are equally good and effective to attain the
God. It is evident in the constitutional scheme that secularism ensures impartiality on religious
ground to all individuals and groups regardless of their faith emphasizing that there is no religion
of the State itself. The Introduction of the Constitution read with Arts 25 to 28 highlights that this
aspect of the concept of secularism represented in the constitutional scheme. The notion of
secularism basically ascribes the right to equality intertwined in the scheme of the Indian
Constitution. The term "secular" has not been explained in the Constitution of India, "because it
is very flexible terms that do not have exact meaning. It is considered that secularism is one of
the basic structures of the Indian Constitution which can neither be condensed nor be spoiled.
The indispensable principle of secularism is to explore human improvement by material means
alone. In brief, secularism permits people to live in standard of politeness. It forces people to
admire on other religious believes. Secularism is a part of democratic state which grants to
citizens equal rights. It guards democracy by restricting the power of the majority. Secularism is
therefore advantageous for a plural culture in India.
In the Indian framework, secularism and communalism are considered to be two contrasting
facts. Secularism is a symbol of modernity, plurality, co-existence, rationalism and developing
with a fast growing multicultural society. The raucous attack on religious minorities is
representative of a deep crisis troubling secularism in India. Communalism has come to acquire
the disparaging meaning of an attitude that is narrow, based on prejudices about the 'other' and
almost based on abhorrence and violence. In India, communal politics as religion is the main
factor and also act against the interests of the others.
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Salient features of world's physical

geography
(GS Paper- 1 Indian Heritage and Culture, History and Geography of the World and
Society)
Earth is splendid terrestrial haven. It is imperative to know physical geography through its
display of environmental diversity. In scientific studies, it is established that Geography is a
word that originated from two Greek roots. Geo-denotes to "Earth," and graphy stands for
"picture or writing." Geography is the study of earth as the home of present day human being
(Sagmit, 1998).The main objective of geography is the assessment, and explanation of Earth, its
variability from place to place, the way places and features transform over time, and the
processes responsible for these variations and changes. Geography is termed as the spatial
science because it incorporates recognizing, analysing, and explaining the variations, similarities,
or differences in phenomena situated on the surface of Earth. Geography is unique among the
sciences by virtue of its characterization and central purpose. It describes the values and attitudes
towards environment and sharpen intellectual and practice skill.

Earth's structure is divided into three zones that include crust, Mantle and core. Crust is the solid
outer layer of the Earth, and its depth is usually never more than 1 per cent of the Earth's radius,
or averaging 40–50 km, but this varies significantly around the sphere. These are two different
types: oceanic and continental. Mantle is the region within the Earth's interior that range from 25
to 70 km below the surface, to a depth of ~2,900 km. It is composed mainly of silicate rocks, rich
in iron and magnesium. At the base of the mantle, temperatures may reach up to 5,000°C. These
high temperatures may help to generate convection currents which drive plate tectonics. Core is
the very centre of the Earth and is composed of iron and nickel. It consists of an outer core
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(semi-molten) and inner core (solid). The temperature at the very centre of the Earth (~6,300 km
below surface) may reach 5,500°C.

Structure of earth

Geography is inherently encompassing discipline. It brings together facts from other sciences
such as physical biological and social. Physical geography is related to the physical science.
Physical geography includes the processes and attributes that constitute Earth which incorporate
human activities where they interface with the atmosphere. Different branches of Physical
geography are climatology, Meteorology, Geomorphology and pedageography (Sagmit, 1998).
Scientific studies have revealed that physical geographers are more interested in comprehending
all aspects of Earth and can be considered generalists because they are qualified to scrutinize a
natural environment in its entirety, and how it functions as a unit. In physical geography,
researchers study about lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. Due to interaction
of these elements, numerous changes occur on earth surface. Most physical geographers
concentrate on advanced study in one or two specialties. For instance, meteorologists and
climatologists believe how the interaction of atmospheric components influences weather and
climate. Meteorologists focus their studies learning the atmospheric processes that affect daily
weather, and they use current data to predict weather conditions. Climatologists are interested in
the averages and extremes of long-term weather data, regional classification of climates,
monitoring and understanding climatic change and climatic hazard, and the long term impact of
atmospheric conditions on human actions and the surroundings.
The study of the nature, development, and modification of landforms is a field of
geomorphology, a major sub field of physical geography. Geomorphologists are excited to
know and elucidate variation in landforms, the processes that produce physical landscapes, and
the nature and geometry of Earth's surface features. The factors involved in landform
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development are as varied as the environments on Earth, and include gravity, running water,
stresses in the Earth's crust, flowing ice in glaciers, volcanic activity, and the erosion or
deposition of Earth's surface materials. Biogeographers scrutinize natural and human-modified
environments and the ecological processes that influence their characteristics and distributions,
including vegetation change over time. They also research and explain the ranges and patterns of
vegetation and animal species, seeking to find out the environmental factors that limit or
facilitate their distributions. Several soil scientists are geographers, who are concerned in
mapping and analysing soil types, determining the aptness of soils for certain uses, such as
agriculture, and working to conserve soil as a natural resource. Geographers are broadly
concerned to study water bodies and their processes, movements, impact, quality, and other
features. They may serve as hydrologists, oceanographers, or glaciologists. Many geographers
involved with water studies also function as water resource managers, who work to ensure that
lakes, watersheds, springs, and groundwater sources are suitable to meet human or
environmental needs, provide an adequate water supply, and are as free of pollution as possible.
Hydrology is merging science. It helps to understand the processes in which water plays an
important role in nature through oceans, rivers and glaciers in sustaining life forms of earth
surface.

Main perspective of physical geography

Geographic knowledge and studies often start with locational information. The location of a
feature usually uses one of two methods: such as absolute location, which is articulated by a
coordinate system (or address), or relative location, which recognizes where a feature exists in
relation to something else, usually a fairly well-known location.
Physical geographers are more concerned in exploring the environmental features and processes
that merge to make a place unique, and they are also involved in the shared characteristics
between places. Another feature of the characteristics of places is analysing the environmental
benefits and challenges that exist in a place. When there is a need to know how features are
arranged in space, geographers are generally engrossed in two spatial factors. Spatial distribution
means the extent of the area or areas where a feature exists. Spatial pattern denotes to the
arrangement of features in space that are regular or random, clustered together or broadly spaced.
It is well established that Earth's features and landscapes are constantly changing in a spatial
context. Weather maps demonstrate where and how weather elements change from day to day,
over the seasons, and from year to year. Storms, earthquakes, landslides, and stream processes
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change the scenery. Coastlines may change position because of storm waves, tsunamis, or
changes in sea level. Areas that were once forested have been clear-cut, changing the nature of
the environment there.
The main interest of Geographers is to comprehend the physical and human characteristics of
places, seeking to identify and explain characteristics that two or more locations may have in
common as well as why places vary in their geographic attributes. Geographers collect,
systematize, and analyse different types of geographic data and information, yet a unifying factor
among them is a focus on explaining spatial locations, distributions, and relationships. They use
array of skills, techniques, and tools to respond geographic questions. Geographers also study
processes that influenced Earth's landscapes in the past, how they continue to affect them today,
how a landscape may change in the future, and the significance or impact of these change.
When appraising the geography of world, it is recognized that there are seven continents on
Earth which include Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South
America. Each has its own unique intermingle of physical features such as mountains, deserts,
plains, valleys, forests, and bodies of water. In all over world, Latitude, landforms, and nearness
to bodies of water greatly affect climate. Landforms, soil, and climate significantly influence the
plants and animals that can be found in each place.
North America is ranked as third largest continent in area in the world. It is situated in the
Western Hemisphere, it extends from near the North Pole southwards almost to the equator. It
covers the territory between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from east to west. Central America,
North America is surrounded by the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. South of Mexico, the
land narrows into Central America. Central America links North America to South America.
Although Central America contains far less than 1% of the Earth's surface, it has 7% of the
world's biodiversity that include various plants and animals. West Indies is in Northeast of
Central America composed of a huge number of islands in the Caribbean Sea. Physical Features
of this region of the world include mountains, water bodies, and rain forests. Major mountain
ranges found in North America include the Rocky Mountains to the west and the Appalachian
Mountains to the east. The Rocky Mountains expand northward into Canada and southward into
Mexico. Main feature of Bodies of Water is the St. Lawrence River which separates parts of the
United States from eastern Canada. The Mississippi River flows in much of the United States.
 348

The Great Lakes include Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake
Ontario form the biggest system of fresh water on Earth. The Rio Grande detaches the United
States from Mexico. The Panama Canal, located in Central America, connects the Atlantic and
the Pacific Oceans. Areas of Plains include west of the Mississippi River, a region known as the
Great Plains, containing some of the world's most productive farmland, Rainforests. Much of
Central America and the islands of the West Indies have warm, humid climates and rainforests.
Another important region of world is South America which is sited in the Western Hemisphere
south of Central America. South America is considered as the fourth major continent in area. It
extends over 7,000 miles in length, it lies between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Physical
Features of this region include Mountains, Grasslands and Plains and others. The Andes
Mountains are among the uppermost in the world. They lengthen over 4,500 miles in the western
part of South America. The Andes were once the foundation of the Inca Empire. Grass lands and
Plains are also important part of this region. Mountains and poor soils are unproductive in South
America. One exception is the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay. The pampas give large areas
of productive soil to grow crops and grazing cattle. Another physical feature of South America is
Rainforests. Rainforests are situated on the east coast of Central America and the northern part of
South America. Climatic conditions in this area are warm and humid. The vegetation closely
reflects the climatic conditions in this continent. There are numerous vegetation as the major
types of climate. The six Amazon Rainforests are the world's biggest tropical rainforest in Brazil.
Thousands of different varieties of trees are found here. Tropical grasslands are found in
Venezuela, Guianas and South Brazil. Tropical grasslands are called Savannas. The prevailing
vegetation consists of coarse grass varying heights. There is Mediterranean vegetation. The
summer droughts and winter rains in central Chile produce a drought resisting vegetation having
thick leaves and long roots.
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Physical features of South America (Source: J.K. Bhatnagar' 2006 )

Every year, there is deforestation to provide land for ranches and farms. Bodies of Water in
South America include The Amazon River which is the second longest river in the world.
Furthermore, South America has the Orinoco River and the Rio de la Plata. Main population of
South America lives on or near these river systems. Climate of South America is warm because
it lies near the equator. Nevertheless, this region is surrounded by its mountains and ocean winds,
majority of places in South America have comfy temperatures. Some of the greatest
concentrations of people can be found in higher elevations where temperatures are cooler. The
basic temperament of the South American landscape is driven by tectonic forcing, which has
given the continent its site and general structural design and provided it with its major relief
features and mineral resources. While tectonism is a mostly slow process on human timescales, it
involves pulses that are frequent reminders of underlying forces. Earthquakes along the active
Pacific Rim are a primary expression of these forces, and great earthquakes (Magnitude [M] > 8)
happen somewhere along the continent's western margin every few years.
Africa is important and the second largest continent in area. It is three times bigger in the size of
United States. To the north, Africa is separated from Europe by the Mediterranean Sea. To the
east, it stretches out the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. On the west, Africa is encircled by the
Atlantic Ocean. Physical Features of Africa include Deserts, water bodies and mountains. When
describing physical geography, The Sahara Desert, which covers most of North Africa, is the
world's major desert. It separates Africans north and south because of dry, sandy area and it is
difficult to cross. Since ancient time, the Sahara isolated sub-Saharan Africa (Africa south of the
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Sahara) from the other part of the world. Beyond south, Africa's land also covers the Kalahari
Desert. Savannas; Africa's region covers savanna land where tall, uncultivated grasses grow with
some trees. Savannas are the paramount areas in Africa to cultivate crops and raising livestock.
Most populace of Africa live in the savanna area or along the coasts. It is the most tropical of all
continents. Climate and vegetation range from equatorial rainforests, tropical deserts and
savanna grassland to Mediterranean. The Sahara Desert, the largest of its kind anywhere in the
world, is over 10.4 million km2. North to south is approx. 1800 kms and east-west is 5600km.
Tropical Rainforests in Central and West Africa are hot and humid which get 60 to 100 inches of
rainfall a year. This climate creates thick forest and jungle an area in which travelling is very
difficult. Rainforests are the home to more plant and animal species than anywhere else on the
globe. Africa has many mountains and Valleys. The Atlas Mountains are found on the northwest
edge of Africa. The Great Rift Valley runs through the highlands of Ethiopia and Kenya, to the
east. Bodies of Water; Africa has numerous major rivers such as the Nile, Congo, Zambezi, and
Niger. The Nile, the world's longest river, flows 4,150 miles from Central Africa through Egypt
into the Mediterranean. The banks of the Nile River give some of Africa's richest farmland.
Important lakes in Africa are Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika, and Lake Nyasa. Climate of
Africa is warm, with hot summers and mild winters. The amount of rainfall varies greatly.
Deserts receive too little water for farming, while some other areas get excessive rainwater.
Although Africa comprises of one landmass, it has a numerous islands, which are structurally not
different from the main land. Major Islands are Madagascar, Zanzibar and Pemba; the Comoros;
Mauritius; Reunion, Seychelles (all in the Indian Ocean); Cape Verde, Fernando Po, Principe,
Sao Tome and Annobon.

Climate and topography of South Africa

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Europe is ranked as the second smallest continent in land area of the world. Europe and Asia
actually both share the same land mass. This land mass is so big that geographers have divided it
into two continents. Great Britain, Ireland and Iceland are island nations in the Atlantic Ocean
that are considered part of Europe. According to Geographers, this area is known as Europe a
"peninsula of peninsulas". Salient physical features of this region include mountains, Bodies of
Water .There are several mountain ranges in Europe. They include the Alps, Pyrenees,
Apennines, and Balkans. These mountains shield borders between areas. Europe has many major
bodies of water. In the north are the Baltic and North Seas. In the south, there are the
Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. Europe also has many major rivers, including the Danube,
Rhine, Loire, Rhone, Elbe, Vistula, and Volga. Wind has great impact the climate of Europe. The
climate and vegetation in this continent vary from the cold, barren, tundra and sub-arctic starches
of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, to the warm shrub covered Mediterranean coasts of Italy,
Spain and Greece.

Asia is known as biggest continent in area wise in world. Presently, it is domicile to two-thirds
of the world's inhabitants. Because of its huge size and the multiplicity of its cultures,
geographers consider the region of Asia as being composed of numerous distinct regions. The
Middle East lies at the junction of three continents, connecting Africa, Asia and Europe. It has
most important waterways of the world, the Suez Canal, which cut downs the travelling distance
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between Europe and Asia. Physical geography of Asia includes desserts, mountains and water
bodies. In the region of the Middle East, major area is covered by desert. Most of the Arabian
Peninsula is occupied by 900,000 square miles of the Arabian Desert. The other major desert in
the Middle East is the Syrian Desert. There are several important rivers in the Middle East such
as Jordan, Tigris, and Euphrates Rivers. In this region, it is found that there is mild climate and
fertile soil along these rivers made them centres of some of the world's most primitive culture.
Other main bodies of water adjoining the Middle East include the Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea,
Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. In regard to climate and resource, most of the Middle East is
located near the equator. The area has warm winters and hot, dry summers but there is scarcity of
adequate water supplies. The Middle East has about half of the world's famous oil reserves.
Northern Asia is covered by Russia, which extends from Eastern Europe to the Pacific. Russia is
the world's biggest country in area. Although the majority of its inhabitants are located in
Europe, most of Russia's land area is in Asia. Central Asia composed of a huge passageway to
south of Russia, made up of mountains, deserts and steppes (treeless grasslands). The steppes
supply good grazing land. Siberia, in north-eastern Russia, is a cold area with forests.
Northernmost Russia is tundra, where the land is ice-covered most of the time in the year.
Afghanistan, a dry mountainous country in Central Asia, separates Iran and Russia from
Pakistan. Its physical geography include mountains and Bodies of Water. The Arctic Ocean,
north of Russia, is frozen for most of the time. Major rivers in Asian Russia are the Ob and Lena.
The Ural Mountains separate European and Asian Russia, while the Pamir Mountains separate
Russia from China. In major part of Russia, there is long, cold winters and short mild summers.
East Asia consists of three important countries namely China, Korea, and Japan. China is the
third largest country in the world area wise. Korea is a neck of land extending from the north-
eastern coast of China. Japan consists of four main islands and a number of smaller islands,
separated from the Asian mainland by the Sea of Japan. Physical geographical features in these
three areas include Bodies of Water, Mountains. Important rivers are the Hwang Ho (Yellow
River) and the Yangtze in China. These river valleys were the origin of early civilizations.
China's southern and western borders are ringed by the Himalayan, Kunlun, and Tianjin
Mountains. To the west is the mountainous plateau of Tibet. In Japan and Korea, most of the area
is covered by mountains. About 85% of Japan is covered by mountains and hills. Mount Fuji, an
extinct volcano, is the highest and most famous mountain in Japan. The Gobi Desert is situated
to the north of China in Mongolia. Since earlier times, mountains, deserts, and surrounding seas
served to separate East Asia from the rest of the world.
Majority of South Asia is a subcontinent. It has various natural resources. The Indian
'subcontinent, approximately the size of the United States, appears a large triangle extending out
of Asia into the Indian Ocean. Southeast Asia consists of a peninsula (land surrounded by water
on three sides) and a series of islands on the southeast comer of the Asian mainland. These are
enclosed by the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which is the shortest water route between these two
oceans. As with other continents, South Asia has numerous mountains, bodies of water. The
Himalayas, located at the north of India, are the topmost mountains in the world. They separate
the Indian subcontinent from the rest of Asia. Mountains also cut off Southeast Asia from the
rest of the continent. The main rivers of the Indian subcontinent are the Indus and Ganges. The
Mekong, Salween, and Irrawaddy Rivers are main rivers in Southeast Asia. Both South and
Southeast Asia have warm winters and hot summers. The most important climatic aspect is the
monsoons. These vicious winds blow over the region and bring heavy rains in the summer.
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Monsoon rains give water for crops and support life, but also cause flooding, landslides, property
damage, and even death.

Physical feature of south Asia

Australia, bordered by the Indian and Pacific Oceans, is cut off from Asia by the Arafura and
Timor Seas. It is the smallest continent of the world. It is also the lowest, the flattest and the
driest. The highest point on the Australian mainland is Mount Kosciuszko, New South Wales, at
2228 metres above sea level. The lowest point is the dry bed of Lake Eyre, South Australia,
which is 15 metres below sea level. The mainland and Tasmania are enclosed by thousands of
small islands and many larger ones. The mainland continents are divided into western plateau,
eastern highlands and central lowlands. The areas have no boundaries. Much of the western
plateau is relatively flat. There are many rugged areas near the coastal boundaries of the plateau
including the Kimberley region and Hamersley ranges in Western Australia. The central lowland
*stretches from the Gulf of Carpenteria through the great artesian basin to the Murray darling
plains. Most of these areas are flat and low lying. The eastern highlands extending along most of
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the length of the east coast are characterized over much of their length by steep escarpment on
the coastal side, a series of high plateaus and then most gentle sloping towards the inlands (Year
Book Australia 1982).
Elevation of Australia continent (Source: Australian surveying and land information group, 1996).

Nearly 40 per cent of the total coastline length comprises island coastlines. As an island nation,
coastlines play a vital role in defining national, state and territory boundaries. Almost 20 per cent
of Australia's land mass is desert. As well as having a low average annual rainfall, rainfall across
Australia is also variable. The rainfall pattern is concentric around the extensive arid core of the
continent, with rainfall intensity high in the tropics and some coastal areas. Climatic zones range
from tropical rainforests, deserts and cool temperature forests to snow covered mountains.
Within this climate, plants and animals have evolved on a geographically remote continent,
through a time of a slowly drying climate, combined with continuing high variability. The central
regions of Australia are mostly deserts. The world's biggest coral reef, the Great Barrier Reef, is
located in Australia. Many unique animals are found in this continent.
Mean temperatures and rainfall (Source: Australian bureau of meteorology).

Period (b) Temperature deviation °C Rainfall  mm

10- YEAR PERIODS --ANNUAL AVERAGE
1900 .. 9 n.a. 425
 355

1910 .. 19 -0.33 449

1920 .. 29 -0.40 430
1930 .. 39 -0.28 418
1940 .. 49 -0.41 436
1950 .. 59 -0.27 468
1960 .. 69 -0.22 431
1970 .. 79 -0.12 527
1980 .. 89 0.23 463
1990 .. 99 0.39 485
YEARS

1990 0.50 418

1991 0.68 469

1992 0.15 452

1993 0.30 499

1994 0.25 341

1995 0.18 523

1996 0.60 470

1997 0.23 527

1998 0.84 565

1999 0.21 584

2000 -0.21 727

2001 -0.10 559

2002 0.63 341

2003 0.62 487

2004 0.45 512

2015     1.06 406

Droughts can occur in all parts of Australia and they are most economically damaging in south
eastern Australia, an area encompassing about 75% of Australian populace and much of its
agriculture. Thunderstorms are more frequent over northern Australia. During most years, snow
covers much of the Australian Alps over 1500 metres for varying periods from late autumn to
early spring. In terms of water vapour content, Australia is dry continent (Year Book Australia
1982).
Antarctica is the world's southernmost continent and wraps the South Pole. It is encircled by the
Southern, Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Since 2000, most geographers call this the
Southern Ocean. Antarctica is the coldest, driest, and windiest continent, and has the highest
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average elevation of all the continents. About 98% of this continent is enclosed by ice, averaging
one mile in thickness. Only plants and animals adjust to the severe cold and survive in this
region.
Physical feature of Antarctica represented that it is surrounded by water ( Source: Evan-Moor Educational
Publishers).

In Antarctica, The landmass is made up of 98% ice sheet with the remaining 2%, barren rock.
The standard height of Antarctica is between 2000 and 4000 m with resident mountain ranges up
to 5000 m in elevation. Roughly half of the coastal areas are ice free. Ice shelves form along the
coast and in the areas where seawater comes in contact with the ice shelf, these chunks of ice
break free in the form of icebergs. Temperatures in Antarctica remain around the freezing mark
around the coastal areas in the summer, which occurs from December to February. In the winter,
temperatures range from -10°C to -30°C in the coastal regions. The higher plateaus have a much
colder weather. Because of their higher elevation and the distance from the ocean, summer
temperatures range anywhere from -20°C to -60°C, in the winter.
To summarize, Physical geography is imperative for understanding various things about
countries and regions of the world. It is the branch of science that deals with processes and
patterns in the natural environment such as hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere and geosphere.
Physical geography is a scientific discipline that addresses the distribution of natural features and
processes within a spatial, or geographical, reference frame.

Natural Resources in India & World

Distribution of key natural resources across the world (including South
Asia and the Indian subcontinent)
Natural resources are highly valued because human beings are dependent on them to fulfil their
fundamental needs that changes with time. While natural resources are distributed in all through
the world, specific resources often require particular conditions and so not all natural resources
are spread equally. Consequently, nations trade their natural resources to make certain that their
needs can be fulfilled.

Definition of Natural Resources

In simple term, natural resources are material and constituent formed within environment or any
matter or energy that are resulting from environment, used by living things that humans use for
food, fuel, clothing, and shelter. These comprise of water, soil, minerals, vegetation, animals, air,
and sunlight. People require resources to survive and succeed. Everything which happens
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naturally on earth are natural resources that is minerals, land, water, soil, wind that can be used
in many ways by human being. It can be explained by several environmentalist scholars that a
natural resources is any kind of substance in its natural form which is needed by humans.

Classification Of Natural Resources

The general classifications of natural resources are minerals for example as gold and tin and
energy resources such as coal and oil. The air, forests and oceans can also be categorised as
natural resources. Theoretical studies have documented that Land and water are the natural
resources, which include Biological resources, such as flower, trees, birds, wild animals, fish
etc., Mineral resources, such as metals, oil, coal, building stones and sand, and other resources,
like air, sunshine and climate (UNEP, 1987). Natural Resources are used to make food fuel and
raw materials for the production of finished goods (Adriaanse, 1993). Natural resources change
in value over time, depending on what a society most needs or considers most valuable.
Resource distribution is defined as the geographic occurrence or spatial arrangement of resources
on earth. In other words, where resources are located. Any one place may be rich in the resources
for people desire and poor in other. The availability of natural resources is based on two
functions that include the physical characteristics of the resources themselves and human
economic and technological conditions. The physical processes that govern the formation,
distribution, and occurrence of natural resources are determined by physical laws over which
people have no direct control. We take what nature gives us. To be considered a resource,
however, a given substance must be understood to be a resource. This is cultural, not purely a
physical circumstance.

Types of natural resources

The various types of natural resources are often categorizes as renewable and non-renewable
resources.

Renewable resources
Renewable can be described by scientists as a resource that can be replenished or reformed either
naturally or by systemic recycling of used resources. Renewable is resource or source of energy
that is replaced naturally or controlled carefully and can therefore be used without the risk of
finishing it all (Oxford dictionary). Another way to define is a resource that is able to be renewed
and be capable of being begun or done again. Renewable resources are usually living resources
such as plants and animals and they also include air and water. These resources are termed as
'renewable' because they can usually reproduce or restock themselves. Renewable resources are
significant aspect of sustainability. Renewable resources are valuable because they provide green
energy. Renewable natural resources include those resources beneficial to human economies that
demonstrate growth, maintenance, and recovery from exploitation over an economic planning
horizon. The natural environment, with soil, water, forests, plants and animals are all renewable
resource. In the case of air and water, they are renewable elements because they exist as part of a
cycle which allows them to be reused. Renewable resources can only exist as long as they are not
being used at a greater rate than they can replenish themselves (David Waugh, 2002).

Non-renewable resources
Non-renewable resources cannot be re-produced or re-grown and are, therefore, they are
available in limited supply. Scholars affirmed that Non-renewable resource is a natural resource
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that does not renew itself at a sufficient rate for sustainable economic extraction in meaningful
human timeframes. Non-renewable resources are resources for which there is a limited supply.
The supply comes from the Earth itself and, as it typically takes millions of years to develop, is
finite. Non-renewable resources can generally be separated into two main categories; it includes
Fossil fuels, nuclear fuels. Coal is considered a non-renewable resource because even though it is
continually being formed, it is incapable to refill its stock at a rate which is sustainable (David
Waugh, 2002). A non-renewable resource cannot maintain the demands for current human needs
while still preserving the ecosystem for future generations.
Types of natural resources: (Source: David Waugh, 2002)

How are natural resources distributed throughout the world?

Distribution of resources is varied. Since the formation of earth, it has experienced numerous physical processes
which have resulted in great variations between different areas. Since natural resources often need specific
conditions in which to form, they are not distributed evenly across the world. For instance, Coal is usually found in
areas which were originally swampland during the greatest coal-forming era in history, the Carboniferous Period. It
has been observed that as the distribution of natural resources is varied, it is not unusual for some nations to have
one type of natural resource in plentiful quantity and for other countries to have many different types but with only a
small supply. This indicates that the nations which are rich in some kind of natural resources do not necessarily use
them all themselves. As an alternative, countries often export the natural resources that they have plenty of and
import those which they require.

It has been observed that generally populace tend to settle and cluster in places that have the
resources they need to survive and prosper. The geographic factors that most influence where
humans settle are water, soil, vegetation, climate, and landscape. Because South America,
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Africa, and Australia have fewer of these geographic benefits, there is less population as
compared to North America, Europe, and Asia.
Due to uneven resource distribution, human beings migrate to other regions where plenty of
resources are available. Majority of people often migrate to a place that has the resources they
need or want and migrate away from a place that lacks the resources they need. Lively examples
in historical migrations are The Trail of Tears, Westward Movement, and the Gold Rush related
to the desire for land and mineral resources. Economic activities in a region relate to the
resources in that region. Economic activities that are directly associated with resources include
farming, fishing, ranching, timber processing, oil and gas production, mining, and tourism. Many
business scholars have affirmed that nations may not have the resources that are important to
them, but business movement enables them to acquire those resources from places that have. For
example, Japan has very limited natural resources but it is one of the wealthiest in Asia. Sony,
Nintendo, Canon, Toyota, Honda, Sharp, Sanyo, Nissan are prosperous Japanese corporations
that make products that are highly-desired in other countries. As a result of trade, Japan has
enough wealth to buy the resources it needs.

Distribution of Key Natural Resources in the World

It has been seen that most of the countries in the world are having natural resources. Some have
less amount while other countries are rich in particular natural resource. Economists stated that
natural resources add wealth to nations.
When it is evaluated for resource distribution around the world, Australia has many natural
resources. These resources include mineral resources, such as copper, gold and diamonds, energy
resources, such as coal, oil, and uranium, and land resources that are used for farming and
logging. These resources are financially important to Australia. Many people consider that the
monetary system of Australia is resource dependent, which means that if these resources were to
be depleted, Australia's economy would suffer. Australia has more coal than is needed and so
exports it to countries like Japan which are lacking in it. Australia does not, however, produce
enough oil to meet the demands of consumption and it is forced to import it. Some countries,
especially developing nations, have the availability of natural resources but they do not use them
fully. Sometimes countries do not have a great demand for the resource or simply lack the
technology to develop or extract it. Rich transnational corporations (TNCs) often pay a fee to do
the mining or extraction of the natural resources and then export them to developed countries.
Mineral resources: Australia is major producer of minerals at global scale. The most important
mineral resources in Australia are bauxite, gold and iron ore. Other mineral deposits in Australia
include copper, lead, zinc, diamonds and mineral sands. A majority of Australia's minerals are
excavated in Western Australia and Queensland. The minerals mined in Australia are exported,
or shipped abroad.
Energy resources: Australia has huge deposits of coal. Coal is generally found in the eastern
part of the country in the Sydney and Bowen basins. Majority of Australian coal is exported to
nations like Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Western Europe. The rest of the coal mines in Australia
are burned for electricity within Australia.
Natural gas is also plentiful in Australia. Natural gas is used to heat homes and power certain
types of vehicles. Natural gas reserves in Australia are mostly found in Western Australia and
central Australia. Since most of these reserves are far away from metropolitan centres, gas
 360

pipelines have been built to transport natural gas to cities such as Sydney and Melbourne. Some
of this natural gas is exported from where it is collected. Natural gas collected in Western
Australia is exported directly to Japan in liquid form.
Australia is also rich in uranium and supply at global level. Uranium is used to produce nuclear
power. Nuclear power and uranium mining are both highly contentious, as people are concerned
for their environmental impact, because uranium can produce toxic energy.
Lastly, Australia has many land resources. Australian soil is used to grow food in the form of
crops and to produce food for raising livestock, such as cattle. Australian forests are used as a
source of wood for building and making paper.
When discussing about natural resources in Africa, It is revealed in reports that Africa is rich in
natural resources including diamonds, salt, gold, iron, cobalt, uranium, copper, bauxite, silver,
petroleum and cocoa beans, but also woods and tropical fruits. Russia is excessively capable of
natural resources, but industrial development was hindered until the twentieth century by their
Siberian inaccessibility. Russia now produces 20 per cent of the world's natural gas, and oil is
also a valuable commodity. Russia is self-sufficient in all major industrial raw materials, and
contains reserves of less essential, but significant natural resources, including diamonds and
gold.
Industrialized nations have benefit over poor countries because if they do not have the quantity
or type of natural resources which they require, they can afford to import them. Developed
countries need to import natural resources because they depend on them for the development of
their economy. Their use of natural resources is considered as a well-planned and constructive
industry. It has been recommended that developed nations use more of the natural resources of
world as compared to other developing nations. Reports have signified that while developed
countries account for 25 percent of the world's population, they use 75 percent of the world's
natural resources.
Geographical Distribution of Oil and Natural Gas Deposits: It was documented in reports that
about 70 % of global conventional oil and natural gas reserves are concentrated inside a so called
Strategic Ellipseî stretching from Middle East to the North of West Siberia. Main consuming
regions in 2004 were North America, Austral-Asia, and Europe, for natural gas North America,
CIS and Europe.
Development of primary energy consumption worldwide and projections of IEA until 2030
(Sources: BP and IEA, 2015)
 361

When appraising the distribution of natural gas, it is found in reports that about 41 % of global
reserves are in the Middle East, about 32 % in the CIS countries and about 8 % in Africa.
Regarding iron core resource in the world, USA is rich in this resource. Ore is mined in the red
mountains and Birmingham Valley. Northern New Jersey, the states of Utah, Nevada and
California also are rich in iron core. In Canada, there are three main areas where iron core is
mined that include Ontario, Quebec and new found land. In Europe, Germany, France, Sweden
and UK are large producer of Iron ore. Ukraine has the sixth position in the world in producing
iron ore and it produced 4.32 per cent of the world production in 2006. Krivoi Rog of Ukraine
possesses best iron ore having 68.5 per cent metallic percentage. It contributes 75 per cent
production of Ukraine. The estimated reserves of the region are more than 200 million tons.
Other regions of Ukraine are Zaporozhe, Zdanow, Lipetsk and Kerch Peninsula.
South Africa is also major iron ore producing country of the African continent and ranks 8th in
the world iron ore production. In South Africa Transvaal is the main iron ore-producing centre.
Transvaal is having high-grade ore with 60 to 65 per cent iron content. The total reserves have
been estimated at 10 billion tons in South Africa. The average annual production of South Africa
is 4 million metric tons.
Distribution of key natural resources in South Asia:
When appraising the regions of South Asia, it has been found that these provinces have
enormous natural resource and ecological and biological diversity. Many researchers have
recognized that The Southeast Asian states today are rich in natural resources and are major
world producers of rubber, tin, copra, palm oil, petroleum and timber (Chia 1999). However
population growth and economic development are intimidating the region's rich heritage through
the expansion and intensification of agriculture, the unrestrained growth of industrialization, the
destruction of natural homes and urban extension. Southeast Asia has lavish source of
hydrocarbon resources natural gas and petroleum.
Natural resources (Source: http://www.newsecuritybeat.org)
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Traditional government accounting systems do not consider the significance of these natural
resources. The South Asia's nation governments have recognised several areas for growth that
include nature-based tourism, mining, ecosystem, biodiversity and agriculture which will
concurrently help diversity the economic and decrease poverty. In order to fulfil all development
goals, the governments need to optimize use of natural resources. The main concentration of
South Asia is to understand the value of natural resources that leads to better decisions for
development. Valuing the environment and incorporating natural resources into national
accounts, it can support better to nation's economy.

Distribution of Natural Resources in India

India is gifted with various types of natural Resources such as fertile soil, forests, minerals and
water. These resources are unevenly distributed. The Indian continent covers a multitude of
biotic and abiotic resource. As India has rapid population growth therefore there is
overconsumption of resources, such as uncontrolled logging or overfishing and many valuable
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natural resources are rapidly being exhausted. India has huge watered fertile lands. In the
sedimentary soil of the Northern Great Plains of the Sutlej-Ganga plains and Brahmaputra Valley
wheat, rice, maize, sugarcane, jute, cotton, rapeseed, mustard, sesame, linseed, are grown in
plentiful. India's land area includes regions with high rainfall to dry deserts, Coast line to Alpine
regions.
India also has a variety of natural vegetation since the country has a varied relief and climate.
These forests are narrowed to the plateaus and hilly mountainous areas. India has a great variety
of wildlife. There are many national parks and hundreds of wild life sanctuaries. Around 21
percent of the total geographical area include Forests. Because India's whether conditions are
changing frequently and differences in altitude, different types of Forest are present in India
including Tropical, Swamps, Mangrove and Alpine. Variety of forest vegetation is large. Forests
are the main source of Fire woods, Paper, Spices, Drugs, Herbs, Gums and more. Forests has
great contribution to nation's GDP.
India has more marine and inland water resources. Reports signify that India has an 8129 km
long coastline. Inland fishery is performed in Rivers, Reservoirs and Lakes. Reports of EIA
estimate for 2009 indicated that in Indian rivers more than 400 species of fish are found and
many species are economically important.
Table: Marine fishery resources of India ( Source: K. Rama Mohana Rao, 2000)

India had about 125 Million metric tonne of proven oil reserves as on April 2010 or 5.62 billion
barrels. Most of India's crude oil reserves are located in the western coast (Mumbai High) and in
the north-eastern parts of the country, although considerable undeveloped reserves are also found
in the offshore Bay of Bengal and in the state of Rajasthan.
Statistical data have revealed that India has 1,437 billion cubic metres (50.7×1012 cu ft) of
confirmed natural gas reserves as of April 2010. An enormous mass of India's natural gas
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production comes from the western offshore regions, particularly the Mumbai High complex.
The onshore fields in Assam, Andhra Pradesh, and Gujarat states are also main producers of
natural gas. Reports of EIA revealed that India produced 996 billion cubic feet of natural gas in
2004. India imports small amounts of natural gas.
Mineral Resource in India are also in large amount such as iron, coal, mineral oil, manganese,
bauxite, chromite, copper, tungsten, gypsum, limestone, mica. When evaluating the Livestock
Resource, it is found that Hills, mountains and less fertile lands are put under pasture. Scientific
methods are followed in rearing cattle. India maintains rich domestic animal diversity. India has
large number of animals like goat, sheep, poultry, cattle, and buffalo. Indian livestock has
imperative role in improving the socio-economic status of the rural masses. In the area of
Horticulture, India has various agro-climatic conditions which facilitates cultivation of a large
number of horticulture crops such as vegetables, fruits, flower, medicinal and aromatic plant,
mushroom, etc. and plantation corps like tea, coffee and rubber.
Non-renewable resources are also plentiful in different parts of India: Coal is the mainly used
energy in India and occupies the leading position. In India, coal is obtained mostly from Andra
Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Meghalaya,
Jammu and Kashmir. Natural gas in India is available in Tripura State, Krishna Godavari field
and gas associates in petroleum products. Petroleum product has become a vital source of energy
in India. In India, Petroleum products can be obtained from Digbol, Assam, around the Gulf of
Khambat in Gujarat, off shore in Arabian Sea, spread out from Mumbai up to 100miles.
India has fourth rank in producing iron ore in the world. On an average, India produces about 7
per cent of the world production. It has about 2.6 per cent iron ore reserves of the world. Main
states that produce iron ore are Chhattisgarh (Arindogi, Raoghat and Bailadia (Bastar), Dhalli,
Rajbara (Durg), Odisha ( Keonjbar, Mayurbhanj and Diringburi districts), Karnataka ( Babudan
hill, Hospet, Chitradurg, Tumkur, Sandur and Bellary districts). Jharkhand ( Noamundi,
Notaburu, Pansiraburu, Budaburu, Guo, Barajamada, Meghahataburu in Singhblim district ),
Andhra Pradesh (Anantpur, Kurmool, Adilabed, Karimnegct), Goa ( Bicholim, Sirigao, Mapusa,
Netarlim ), Maharashtra (Pipalagoon, Asola, Lohara in Chandrapura district).
Recently, in has been observed that The Indian mining industry is passing through a perilous
phase, witnessing negative growth.
Indian Natural Resources (Source: www.mapsofindia.com/india-natural-resources)
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Distribution of Natural Resources in China

China has a cosmic territory, with plentiful natural resources and diverse types of land resources.
China's land resources are large in absolute terms but small on a per-capita basis. There are more
mountains than plains, with sophisticated land and forests constituting small proportions.
Numerous land resources are haphazardly distributed among different regions. The cultivated
land is mostly in plains and basins in the monsoon regions of east China, while forests are mostly
found in the remote mountainous areas in the northeast and the southwest. Grasslands are chiefly
distributed on inland plateaus and in mountains. The Agricultural Census in 1996 have shown
that China has 130.04 million hectares of cultivated land and 35.35 million hectares of land
suitable for agricultural uses. The cultivated land is mainly distributed in the Northeast China,
North China and Middle-Lower Yangtze plains, the Pearl River Delta and the Sichuan Basin. It
is established in research studies that China's total forest area was 175 million hectares, and its
forest coverage rate was 18.21 percent. The total standing stock volume of China was 13.62
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billion cubic meters (The sixth national enumeration of forest resources, 1999-2003). The stock
volume of its forests stood at 12.46 billion cubic meters.
Natural forests are concentrated focused in the northeast and the southwest, but uncommon in the
densely populated and economically developed eastern plains and the vast north-western district.
When considering regional distribution, China's forests are found mainly in the Northeast China
Forest Zone, the Southwest China Forest Zone and the Southeast China Forest Zone. Grassland
in China is extensive. China has 400 million hectares of grassland. It is found in statistical report
that China is one of the countries with the largest area of grassland in the world. Natural
grassland is mainly distributed in areas west and north of the Greater Hinggan Mountains, the
Yinshan Mountain and the eastern foot of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, while artificial grassland is
concentrated in southeast China where it lies amid cultivated land and forests.
Mineral Resource in China are plenteous. A total of 171 kinds of minerals have so far been
discovered, of which 158 have proven reserves. These include 10 kinds of energy mineral
resources such as petroleum, natural gas, coal and uranium; 54 kinds of metallic mineral
resources such as iron, manganese, copper, aluminium, lead and zinc; 91 kinds of non-metallic
mineral resources such as graphite, phosphorus, sulphur and sylvine; and three kinds of water
and gas mineral resources such as underground water and mineral water. Presently, the supply of
over 92 percent of China's primary energy, 80 percent of its industrial raw materials and more
than 70 percent of its agricultural means of production come from mineral resources.
Energy Mineral Resources in China are also in huge quantity but the structure of these types of
resources is not perfect, with coal making up a large proportion while petroleum and natural gas
constituting comparatively small proportions. Coal resources has huge reserves and complete
varieties but uneven distribution among different grades, with small reserves of high-quality
coking coal and anthracite coal; wide distribution but a great difference in wealth for different
deposit locations, with large reserves in western and northern regions and small reserves in
eastern and southern regions; a small number of surface coalmines, most of which are lignite
mines; and great varieties of associated minerals existing in coal seams.
There are large oil reserves in China and it ranks as one of the 10 countries in the world with
more than 15 billion tons of exploitable oil reserves; low proven rate, with verified onshore
reserves accounting for only one fifth of the total and the proven rate for offshore reserves being
even lower; and concentrated distribution, with 73 percent of the total oil resources distributed in
14 basins each covering an area of 100,000 square km and more than 50 percent of the nation's
total natural gas resources distributed in central and western regions.
China is lavish in metallic mineral resources. It has proven reserves, more or less, of all kinds of
metallic mineral resources that have so far been discovered at international level. Among these
resources, the proven reserves of tungsten, tin, antimony, rare earth, tantalum and titanium rank
first in the world; those of vanadium, molybdenum, niobium, beryllium and lithium rank second;
those of zinc rank fourth; and those of iron, lead, gold and silver rank fifth.
China's metallic minerals such as tungsten, tin, molybdenum, antimony and rare earth have large
reserves, and are of superior quality and competitive in world markets. However, many
important metallic minerals such as iron, manganese, aluminium and copper are of poor quality,
with ores lean and difficult to smelt. Most of the metallic mineral deposits are small or medium-
sized, whereas large and super-large deposits account for a small proportion.
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China has full range of non-metallic mineral resources and it is one of the few countries in the
world that have a relatively non-metallic mineral resources. Currently, there are more than
5,000 non-metallic mineral ore production bases with proven reserves in China.
Regarding water and Gas Mineral Resources, there are proven natural underground water
resources in China amount to 870 billion cubic meters per year, of which 290 billion cubic
meters are exploitable. The natural underground salty water resources in China stand at 20
billion cubic meters per year. Though, China's underground water resources are not equally
distributed, with the southern region rich, and northern and western regions poor. Underground
water aquifer types vary from region to region. North China has a widespread distribution of
underground water resources through pore aquifers, while its south-western region has wide
distribution of Karst water resources. Marine resources in China are in huge quantity and
scattered in the offshore waters which are sedimentation basins, with a total area of nearly
700,000 square km, estimated to contain about 24 billion tons of oil reserves and 14 trillion cubic
meters of natural gas.

Distribution of Natural Resources in Bangladesh

India's neighbouring country, Bangladesh has lavishly natural gas as natural resource and ranked 7th position in the
Asia. Among the natural resources of Bangladesh are its arable land, timber, coal and natural gas. The most lucrative
of these resources is the fertile sedimentary soil in the delta region largely moulded by the country's physical
geography. Bangladesh also receives heavy rainfall throughout the year.

To summarize, Natural resources such as different materials, water, energy and fertile land, are
the basis for humans on Earth. Besides resources such as water, air, sunlight, forest area or
agricultural land, which exist as separate entities, other resources like metals, ores and primary
energy resources have to be extracted from the soil to make them usable. Their value is mainly
determined by the relative shortage of the resource in combination with its exploitability for
industrial use.

Factors Responsible for the Location of

Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Sector
Industries in Various Parts of the World
(Including India)
FILED UNDER: ECONOMICS NOTES, GEOGRAPHY NOTES

Factors Responsible for the location of primary, secondary, and tertiary sector industries in
various parts of the world (including India) is a topic mentioned in General Studies Paper
1(GS1) for UPSC Mains. Basic concepts related to Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary
Sectors are covered in our post on Sectors of Economy: Primary, Secondary, Tertiary,
Quaternary, and Quinary. In this section, we shall see an outline of factors. In coming posts,
we shall see some specific examples of certain industries in UPSC exam perspective. We
have used NCERT texts for geography as the starting material, taking extra inputs from
online and offline sources.
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Factors responsible for location of Industries

Industrial locations are complex in nature. These are influenced by the availability of many
factors. Some of them are: raw material, land, water, labor, capital, power, transport, and
market.

For ease of convenience, we can classify the location factors into two: geographical factors
and non-geographical factors.

Geographical Factors

1. Raw material: Availability of natural resource that can be used as raw material.
2. Technology: To turn the resource into an asset with value.
3. Power: To utilize the technology.
4. Labour: Human resource in the area who can function as labor to run the processes.
5. Transport : Road/rail connectivity.
6. Storage and warehousing.
7. Marketing feasibility.
8. Characteristics of land and soil.
9. Climate.
10. Precipitation and water resources.
11. Vulnerability to natural resources.

Explanation:

 Raw materials are one of the important factors in an industrial location. The mere
location of industries itself may be determined by the availability or location of the raw
materials.
 Power – conventional (coal, mineral oil or hydro-electricity) or on- conventional in
nature is a necessity for any industrial establishment.
 Availability of labor or skilled workforce is the success mantra for the growth of all
industries.
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 Availability of easy transportation always influences the location of the industry. So the
junction points of waterways, roadways and railways become humming centers of
industrial activity.
 The finished goods should reach the market at the end of the process of
manufacturing. Thus nearness to the market is an add-on quality in the process of
selecting a location for industry.
 Availability of water is another factor that influences the industrial location. Many
industries are established near rivers, canals, and lakes, because of this reason. Iron
and steel industry, textile industries and chemical industries require large quantities of
water, for their proper functioning.
 The site that is selected for the establishment of an industry must be flat and well
served by adequate transport facilities.
 The climate of the area selected for the industry is important, very harsh climate are
not suitable for the successful industrial growth.

Non-geographical Factors

1. Capital investment.
2. Availability of loans.
3. Investment climate.
4. Government policies/regulations.
5. Influence of pressure groups.

Explanation:

 Capital or huge investment is needed for the establishment of industries.

 Government policies are another factor that influences industrial location. The
government sets certain restriction in the allocation of land for industries in order to
reduce regional disparities, to control excessive pollution and to avoid the excessive
clustering of industries in big cities.
 Industrial inertia is the predisposition of industries or companies to avoid relocating
facilities even in the face of changing economic circumstances that would otherwise
induce them to leave. Often the costs associated with relocating fixed capital assets
and labor far outweigh the costs of adapting to the changing conditions of an existing
location.
 Efficient and enterprising organization and management are essential for running
modem industry successfully.
 The location that has better banking facilities and Insurance are best suited for the
establishment of industries.

It is rarely possible to find all these factors available at one place.

Consequently, manufacturing activity tends to locate at the most appropriate place where all
the factors of industrial location are either available or can be arranged at lower cost. In
general, it should also be noted that both lower production cost and lower distribution cost
are the two major factors while considering the location of an industry. Sometimes, the
government provides incentives like subsidized power, lower transport cost, and other
infrastructure so that industries may be located in backward areas.
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Industrial System
An industrial system consists of inputs, processes, and outputs. The inputs are the raw
materials, labor, and costs of land, transport, power and other infrastructure. The processes
include a wide range of activities that convert the raw material into finished products.
The outputs are the end product and the income earned from it. In the case of the textile
industry, the inputs may be cotton, human labor, factory and transport cost. The processes
include ginning, spinning, weaving, dyeing, and printing. The output is the shirt you wear.

Connection between Industrialization and Urbanization

After an industrial activity starts, urbanization follows. Sometimes, industries are located in
or near the cities. Thus, industrialization and urbanization go hand in hand. Cities provide
markets and also provide services such as banking, insurance, transport, labor, consultants
and financial advice, etc. to the industry.

Agglomeration Economies
Many industries tend to come together to make use of the advantages offered by the urban
centers known as agglomeration economies. Gradually, a large industrial agglomeration
takes place.

Industries in pre-Independence period

In the pre-Independence period, most manufacturing units were located in places from the
point of view of overseas trade such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, etc. Consequently, there
emerged certain pockets of industrially developed urban centers surrounded by a
huge agricultural rural hinterland.

Important Geophysical phenomena such

as earthquakes, Tsunami, Volcanic
activity, cyclone
Geophysics is associated with thorough study of the physics of the Earth and its environment in
space. It also deals with the Earth using quantitative physical methods. The notion of geophysics
ascribes to the geological applications such as Earth's shape, its gravitational and magnetic fields,
its internal structure and composition; its dynamics and their surface expression in plate
tectonics, the generation of magmas, volcanism and rock formation. Contemporary geophysics
organizations describe the geophysics as the hydrological cycle including snow and ice; fluid
dynamics of the oceans and the atmosphere; electricity and magnetism in the ionosphere and
magnetosphere and solar-terrestrial relations; and analogous problems associated with the Moon
 371

and other planets. Geophysical phenomena and society interact in both directions. It has been
observed that strong and sudden Geophysical forces greatly affect society. Basically,
Geophysical phenomena include earthquakes, Tsunami, Volcanic activity, cyclone, geographical
features and their location, changes in critical geographical features (including water bodies and
ice-caps) and in flora and fauna and the effects of such changes. Societies sometimes do not
manage well its proximity and relation to geophysical risk. At the same time, there is a poor and
declining monitoring and forecasting capabilities and inadequate warning systems.

In broadly unified world, any single geophysical danger can have appalling consequences far
beyond the range of immediate physical effects. In environment, Global geophysical events are
naturally occurring observable facts, but these happen in huge intensity. Except within the
circumstances of scale and extent, the processes and mechanisms that support them, and their
physical effects and consequences, are no dissimilar from the geophysical events whether
windstorm, flood, volcanic outbreak, earthquake or tsunami that causes natural disasters every
year. Global geophysical events are low frequency high consequence geophysical phenomena
which can have harmful implication for the environment and civilization. Global geophysical
events have detrimental consequences for the world's environment, market and civilization.
These events may occur due to a global physical effect, such as an incident of severe terrestrial
cooling in response to a volcanic 'super-eruption' or large comet or asteroid impact, as a
consequence of subsidiary outcome for the global market and social fabric of a catastrophic
regional event, such as an Atlantic- or Pacific-wide 'mega-tsunami', or a more spatially confined
event at a deliberately sensitive location, such as the expected major Tokyo volcanic activity.
In current environmental situation around the globe, Geophysical phenomena cause worldwide
problems which may have had comparatively minor consequences in the narrow, detached,
subsistence societies for centuries. However, observations, records and accounts, some more
reasonable than others, do exist in support of disastrous geophysical events occurring in the last
several millennia that have capability to disrupt the societal activates. These provide us with
some restraint on return periods of those GGEs that are more recurrent. Such as, serious climate-
perturbing volcanic eruptions occurred in both 1783 (Grattan et al. 2003) while comparable
events occurred at Baitoushan volcano (North Korea–China border) in AD 1030 and at unknown
locations in AD 450 and 1259 (Oppenheimer 2003a,b).
In our natural environment, various forms of disasters occur in severe intensity. All disasters
threaten the humans or societies and had their impact from one decade to another.
Disasters can be categorized as

1. Natural Disasters such as Volcano, Tsunami, Earthquake; landslides

2. Human Made Disasters
3. Human Induced Disaster

Natural Disasters

Earthquake
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Earthquake is a vicious tremor, rolling or hasty shock on surface of earth's crust, sending out a
sequence of shock waves in all directions from its place of source which is known as epicentre.
Earthquake is considered as most dangerous natural disasters causing massive destruction and
causality to human life and debilitating impact on societies. Reports signify that an earthquake is
caused by the sudden discharge of gradually accumulating strain energy along a fault within the
earth's crust. Areas of surface or underground fracturing that can results in earthquakes are
known as earthquake fault zones. Environmental reports indicated that approximately fifteen
percent of the world's earthquakes happen in Latin America, focused in the western cordillera.
An earthquake's power is measured on the Richter scale using an instrument called a
'seismometer'. A seismometer detects the vibrations caused by an earthquake. It plots these
vibrations on a seismograph. The strength, or magnitude, of an earthquake is measured using the
Richter scale. The Richter scale is numbered 0-10.
Table: Richter magnitude and its effects

Relati
onship between earthquake and triggering hazards by earthquake (Shield, 2004)

Causes of Earthquake
There are numerous causes that can result in devastating natural disaster such as earthquake.
Earthquakes are mainly due to sudden release of energy in rocks. It is well studied that An
Earthquake is a sequence of underground shock waves and movements on the earth's surface
 373

caused by natural processes within the earth's crust. By appraising the seismograms from many
earthquakes, scientists have revealed that three main levels or shells exist within the Earth. Crust
is the outmost surface of Earth. The crust is comparatively light and fragile. Most earthquakes
occur within the crust. Scientists consider that underneath the lithosphere is a relatively narrow,
mobile zone in the mantle called the asthenosphere. Mantle is the area just below the crust.
Core is beneath the mantle in Earth. The Earth's core consists of a fluid outer core and a solid
inner core.
Internal layer of earth ( Source: Tom Garrison, 2012 ) no change

Tectonic plates which are present in the form of rocks move very slowly. It is frequently caused
when underground rocks rapidly breaks down or crush and particle against each other along fault
line. This lead to the creation of seismic waves or called as earthquake waves, leads to the
quivering of earth surface. The points at which earthquake originates called as FOCUS or
HYPOCENTRE, point on earth surface above this is called as EPICENTRE.
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Diagram of earth quake

Plate tectonic theory: Huge theoretical framework describes the causes of earthquake, but the
most dominant theory is plate tectonics theory which deals with the factors causing earthquake.
The outer surface of earth is composed of tectonic plates which are about hundred km thick and
are continually moving like an objects sometime moving towards, away from each other. Earth
liberates its inner heat by convective mechanism. Hot asthenospheric mantle increases to the
surface and extend laterally, transporting oceans and continents as on slow conveyor belt and
speed of this movement is very slow. Earthquake explodes only in outer, fragile portions of these
plates, where temperature of rocks is very low. Deep in earth centre convections of rocks caused
by temperature differences in earth induces stresses that results in movement of overlying plates.
This stress from convection discharge enormous amount of heat which stress can collapse the
brittle portions of overlying plates. If accumulating stress surpass the strength of rocks
comprising these brittles zones, the rocks can break rapidly releasing the stored stretchy energy
in the form of an earthquake.
There are three types of plate boundaries which are called Spreading, Convergent, or Transform,
depending on whether the plates move away from, toward, or laterally past one another
respectively. Subduction happens when one plates touches toward another, move beneath it and
plunges as much as several hundred kilometres into earth interior.
Death associated with major coastal earthquakes (Source: Nott, 2006)
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Hazards of Earthquake
It is said that Earth creates direct hazard to human life. Depending on its size and location, an
earthquake can cause the physical phenomena of ground shaking, surface fault burst, and ground
breakdown. Several research reports have shown that earthquake hurt economic, population and
environmental in very different way such as destruction of buildings, lifeline, triggering fires,
releasing of toxins, radioactive and genetically active material and cause other natural disasters
such as floods, avalanches, Tsunami, landslides. Earthquakes also have dangerous consequences
in socio economic and political arena, disruption of vital services such as supply, medical, law
enforcement, drop of production, unemployment, economic deceleration (Robert, 2010).
The major danger of earthquake is consequence of ground shaking. Buildings can be damaged by
shaking itself or by ground under them settling to a different level than it was before earthquake.
It may lead to the ground displacement along fault, which can badly damage that buildings.
Flooding may happen due to break of dams or levees along river. Water from river would flood
the area, damage the buildings. Surface faulting is the counterbalance or tearing of the ground
surface by differential movement along a fault during an earthquake. This effect is usually
related with Richter magnitudes of 5.5 or greater and is limited to particularly earthquake-prone
areas. Displacements range from a few millimetres to several meters, and the damage usually
increases with growing dislocation. Considerable devastation is usually restricted to a narrow
zone ranging up to 300 meters wide along the fault, although subsidiary ruptures may occur three
to four kilometres from the main fault.
Earthquake-Induced Ground Failure: Landslides occur in various forms. Not only can
earthquakes trigger landslides, they can also cause the soil to liquefy in certain areas. These
forms of ground failure are potentially disastrous.
Earthquake-Induced Landslides: Earthquake-induced landslides happen under different
conditions such as in sharply sloping to nearly flat land; in bedrock, unconsolidated sediments,
fill, and mine dumps; under dry and very wet conditions. The major criteria to categorise
landslides are types of movement and types of material. The types of landslide movement that
can occur are falls, slides, spreads, flows, and combinations of these. Materials are grouped as
bedrock and engineering soils, with the latter subdivided into debris (mixed particle size) and
earth (fine particle size) (Campbell, 1984).
Some earthquake-induced landslides can take place only under very wet conditions. Some types
of flow failures, grouped as liquefaction phenomena, occur in unconsolidated materials with
almost no clay content. Other slide and flow failures are caused by slipping on a wet layer or by
interstitial clay serving as a lubricant. In addition to earthquake shaking, generate mechanisms
can include volcanic eruptions, heavy rainstorms, quick snowmelt, rising groundwater,
undercutting due to erosion or excavation, human-induced vibrations in the earth, overloading
due to construction, and certain chemical phenomena in unconsolidated sediments. Rock
avalanches, rock falls, mudflows, and rapid earth flows can cause huge deaths due to earthquake-
induced landslides. Rock avalanches begin on over-steepened slopes in weak rocks. They are
unusual but can be disastrous when they occur. It was reported that The Huascaran, Peru,
avalanche which originated as a rock and ice fall caused by the 1970 earthquake was responsible
for the death of approximately 20,000 people. Rock falls happen most commonly in closely
jointed or weakly cemented materials on slopes steeper than 40 degrees. While individual rock
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falls cause comparatively few deaths and limited damage but they are considered as a major
earthquake-induced hazard because they are so recurrent.

Earthquake Hazard Prediction, Assessment, and Mitigation:

Scientists make great efforts to minimize the natural disaster through prediction. In order to
lessen the impact or to avoid the risks from earthquakes, it is necessary to predict their
occurrence. While scientists cannot regularly predict earthquakes, but it is appealing area of
study and may be major factor in reducing risks in the future. Another way to lessen the impact
of disaster is seismic risk assessment, which enables planners to recognize areas at risk of
earthquakes and/or their effects. This information is used to tackle the third area of earthquake
risk reduction-mitigation measures. Currently scientific studies demonstrate that major
earthquakes do not happen again in the same place along faults until sufficient time has elapsed
for stress to build up, usually a matter of several decades. In the main seismic regions, these
'quiet' zones present the greatest danger of future earthquakes. According to the seismic gap
theory, several gaps that had been recognized near the coasts of Alaska, Mexico, and South
America affected by huge earthquakes during the past decade. In some regions, earthquakes
occur at the same place, but decades apart, and have nearly indistinguishable characteristics.
Monitoring this seismic gap is an important constituent to know about earthquakes, predicting
them, and preparing for future ones. According to the seismic gap theory, the U.S. Geological
Survey has developed maps of the coast of Chile and parts of Peru for the U.S. Agency for
International Development's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID/OFDA (Nishenko,
1985). These maps provide possibility estimates and rank earthquake risk for the time period
1986 to 2006. It can be established that Earthquake prediction involves checking several aspects
of the earth, including slight shifts in the ground, changes in water levels, and emission of gases
from the earth, among other things. A seismic risk assessment is basically the appraisal of
potential economic losses, loss of function, loss of confidence, fatalities, and injuries from
earthquake hazards.
Hazard Prediction Probabilistic ground motion maps outline earthquake ground motions that
have a common probability of being exceeded in a certain period of time. They are based on
historical earthquake locations and geological information on the reappearance rate of fault
ruptures, and assume that the historical trends can be projected into the future.
Geomorphology as a guide to fault activity Dip-slip faults (that is normal and thrust faults) are
related with vertical motions and create topographic fault scarps. In perfect earth, the most
recently active faults would have the highest, steepest fault scarps, allowing prediction of
earthquake hazards. Unfortunately, very active, hazardous faults may have no discernible fault
scarps if they cut through soft unconsolidated sediments and if they have only recently become
active. Strike-slip faults are associated with lateral movement and often have no topographic
expression. Instead, lateral offset of rivers or linear geological features can confirm where these
faults are. Oblique-slip faults have both lateral offsets and topography. Some major earthquakes
are indicated by the occurrence of foreshocks which can be identified by dense local monitoring
networks. However, if a small seismic event is recorded, it is very hard to tell whether it is just a
single, low-magnitude earthquake or a foreshock to a major, high-magnitude earthquake.
Other indicators: In the periods between earthquakes, strain amasses gradually in the general
region surrounding a fault as the deep, spongy parts of the plates slip past each other
continuously. This inter-earthquake deformation should cause micro-cracks to form, which
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should modify physical properties of the rocks. In various seismically active parts of the world,
electrical and magnetic properties and changes in seismic speed are continually monitored to
better understand the inter-earthquake deformation process. Such monitoring systems cannot yet
forecast earthquakes but it is anticipated that it will work in future.
The knowledge of seismic phenomena is very little to modify the hazard by controlling tectonic
processes, but there are many ways to control the risk or exposure to seismic hazards. There are
four steps involved in conducting a seismic risk assessment. An evaluation of earthquake hazards
and prepare hazard zonation maps; an inventory of elements at risk, for example structures and
population; and a vulnerability assessment; and determination of levels of acceptable risk.
Evaluating Earthquake Hazards and Hazard Zonation Maps: In an earthquake-prone zone,
information will certainly exist on past earthquakes and associated seismic hazards. This can be
added with existing geologic and geophysical information and field observation. Depending on
geologic circumstances, some combination of ground shaking, surface faulting, landslides,
liquefaction, and flooding may be the most severe potential earthquake-related hazards in an
area. Maps must be drawn to demonstrate zones of these hazards according to their comparative
severity. These maps give the schemer with data on such considerations as the spatial application
of building codes and the need for local landslide and flood safeguard.
Assessing Ground Shaking Potential: Albeit ground shaking may cause devastating earthquake,
it is one of the most difficult seismic hazards to forecast and quantify. This is due to the
intensification of the shaking effects by the unconsolidated material overlying the bedrock at a
location and to the differential resistance of structures. Subsequently, best way to communicate
ground shaking is in terms of the probable response of particular types of buildings. These are
grouped according to whether they are wood frame, single-story masonry, low-rise, moderate-
rise, or high-rise.
Different approaches can be used for planning purposes to foresee where ground shaking would
be most stern. The groundwork of intensity maps based on devastation from past earthquakes
rated according to the tailored Mercalli Index, the use of a design earthquake to compute
intensity and in the absence of data for such approaches, the use of information on the causal
fault, distance from the fault, and depth of soil overlying bedrock to estimate possible
destruction.
Assessing Surface Faulting Potential: This is comparatively easy to perform because surface
faulting is linked with fault zones. Three factors are vital to assess appropriate mitigation
measures that include probability and extent of movement during a given time period, the type of
movement (normal, reverse, or slip faulting), and the distance from the fault trace in which
damage is expected to take place.
Assessing Ground Failure Potential: This process is appropriate for earthquake-induced
landslides. Liquefaction potential is determined in four steps that include a map of recent
sediments is prepared, distinguishing areas that are probable to be subject to liquefaction from
those that are unlikely; a map representing depth to groundwater is prepared; these two maps are
combined to produce a liquefaction susceptibility map and a "liquefaction opportunity" is
prepared by combining the vulnerability map with seismic data to demonstrate the allocation of
probability that liquefaction will take place in a given time period.
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Safety measures from Earthquake

Natural disaster cannot be controlled but planners can develop indicators to get warning of such
disturbing geophysical events. There are numerous of mechanisms that can be used as safety
measure to lessen the impact of such hazards such as land-use zoning; engineering approaches
such as building codes, support of existing structures, stabilizing unbalanced ground,
redevelopment; the establishment of warning systems and the distribution of losses. In
earthquake prone areas, buildings can be resistant and builder can make such designs that
prevent likelihood of crumple during an earthquake. The inhabitants can be knowledgeable to get
ready in event of earthquake and rescue plans can be drawn up in advance to reduce the turmoil
when earthquake occur.
Ground Shaking Mitigation Measures: Once the potential severity and effects of ground shaking
are established, numerous types of seismic zoning measures can be applied. These include:

1. Relating general ground shaking potential to allowable density of building habitation.

2. Relating building design and construction standards to the degree of ground shaking risk.
3. Implementing rules that require geologic and seismic place examination before development proposals can
be accepted.
4. In developed area, adopting a hazardous building abatement ordinance and an ordinance to require removal
of dangerous parapets.

Surface Faulting Mitigation Measures: Since fault zones are somewhat easy to demarcate, they
lend themselves to effectual land-use planning. Where evaluation of the consequences of surface
rupture indicates an inadequately high possibility of damage, several substitute alleviation
measures are available. These are:

1. Restricting permitted uses to those compatible with the hazard, that is open space and recreation areas,
freeways, parking lots, cemeteries, solid-waste disposal sites.
2. Establishing an easement that requires a hindrance distance from active fault traces.
3. Prohibiting all uses except utility or transportation facilities in areas of tremendously high hazard, and setting
tight design and construction standards for utility systems navigating active fault zones.

Ground Failure Mitigation Measures: Land-use safety procedures to lessen possible destructions
due to landslides or liquefaction are analogous to those taken for other geologic hazards. Land
uses can be limited. Geologic investigations must be done before development is allowed, and
grading and foundation design can be synchronized. Stability categories can be established and
land uses proportionate with these categories can be recommended or ordained. Land-use zoning
may not be suitable in some areas because of the potential for substantial difference within each
mapped unit.
General Land-Use Measures: In developed areas who are prone to earthquake hazards, measures
can be accepted to recognize dangerous structures and order their removal, starting with those
that imperil the greatest number of lives. Tax incentives can be established for the elimination of
hazardous buildings, and urban regeneration policies should restrict reconstruction in unsafe
areas after earthquake demolition.
In brief, it can be said that earthquakes are most dangerous and destructive natural phenomenon
because every year huge amount of people rendered homeless, displaced, injured or dead.
Growing population and global urbanization is increasing the threat to earthquake. Spiral
distribution of earthquake shows that some regions are more prone to this natural disaster than
others. The Indian sub-continent is very prone to several natural disasters such as earthquakes
 379

which is destructive natural hazards with the potentiality of causing huge loss to human lives and
assets. Earthquakes pose major threat to India. It is estimated that 59% of its geographical area is
vulnerable to seismic disturbance of varying intensities including the capital city of the nation.
Almost the entire Northeast region, Northern Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and
some parts of Kutch are in seismic zone V, while the whole Gangetic plain and some parts of
Rajasthan are in seismic zone IV.

Tsunami
Tsunami is devastating natural disaster and immensely affects the economic and living
conditions of region where it hits. Tsunami is a Japanese phrase which means tsu means harbour
and nami means wave. This geophysical phenomenon is associated with earthquake or volcanic
eruption or landslides or adjacent to oceans and results in unexpected movement of water column
(Bryant, 2008). The channel of tsunami involves the movement of water from surface to seafloor
which indicates it is directly linked to depth of water bodies that is deeper the ocean, higher is
the movement of water. Consequently, as wave approaches land and reaches increasingly
shallow water, it gets slow down. However, the water column still in deeper water is moving
slightly faster and catches upward, resulting into wave gathering up and becoming much higher.
Tsunami is a succession of waves and first may not necessarily be biggest. Tsunami is a cruel
turbulence deep below the ocean surface that results due to under water earthquake and
subduction zones (Irasema Alcántara-Ayal, 2010).
Reports indicated that before 1990, public perceived Tsunami as originating from large distant,
underwater earthquakes. The fear of Tsunami was allayed by the knowledge that an early
warning system existed to prevent loss of life. In the 1990s, 14 major Tsunami events struck the
world's coastline from which scientists aware that these events are pervasive (Bryant, 2008).
Tsunami belongs to the category of long period oceanic waves generated by underwater
earthquake, submarine or sub-aerial landslides or volcanic eruption. The Tsunami fact includes
three overlapping physical stages. First is the generation of waves by any external force that
disturb water column, second is propagation of that wave at high speed in Open Ocean and third
is propagation of Tsunami waves through shallow coastal water and inundation of dry land by
run up. Moistly Tsunami occurs in pacific regions but there is record of Tsunami disaster in
Atlantic and Indian oceans (Tom Beer, 2010). Often Tsunami waves warns of its appearance
with roaring and rumbling from ocean but sometime, it is observed that water level rise without
any noise. The flowering and crowded sea coast may be transformed into destructive ruins with
in few minutes. The waves propagate from source with the velocity long gravity water waves
according to the below equation:
CG = (g H )1/2

In this equation, G is acceleration due to gravity, H is depth of the basin

 380

Table: Major Tsunami ranked by number of deaths (Source: NOAA, 2008)

Accounts for Tsunami extend back almost 4000 years in China, 2000 years in Mediterranean
where the first Tsunami was described in 479 BC and about 1300 years in Japan. Mediterranean
Sea is one of the longest records of Tsunami. The Caribbean is also prone tsunami.
Percentage distribution of tsunami in the world's Ocean and seas (Source: Bryant, 2015)

Causes of Tsunami
The major cause of Tsunami is seismic activity. Over the past two millennia, earthquakes have
produced approximately, 83% of all Tsunami in pacific oceans (Edward Bryant, 2014). When an
oceanic plates strikes the continental plate, these plates press together and build the pressure.
Finally the heavier oceanic plate slips under the lighter continental plate and causes earthquake
which elevates the level of ocean and drops other parts down, this event on ocean floor is
reflected on surface of water above. The gravity acts fast to even out of water surface. The
seismic energy generated that giant wave and it does not just disappear. Tsunami extends
thousands of feet deep into ocean which carries lot of water and energy so they can travel very
far.
Most trans-oceanic tsunamis are produced by major (Mw≥9.0) earthquakes. These happen
several times a century and recently happened in countries like 1960 (Chile), 1964 (Alaska) and
2004 (Sumatra). The Chile event generated tsunamis that were 3–4 m high when they struck
 381

Japan, while run-up heights of 4 m were also recorded on the East African coast following the
December 2004 Sumatra earthquake. 'Mega-tsunami', is basically a media-driven descriptor.
These waves are in excess of 100 m in height at source, and which remain destructive at oceanic
distances. The great (Mw∼9) Cascadia (western North America) earthquake of 1700 generated
Pacific-wide tsunamis, but these appear to have been of the order of 3 m high at shore in Japan
(Satake et al. 1996).
Tsunamis related with massive collapses at oceanic-island volcanoes can, however, have run-up
heights at least an order of magnitude greater. Giant waves caused by ancient collapses in the
Hawaiian Islands may have been of Pacific-wide extent. Young & Bryant (1992) stated signs of
catastrophic wave erosion up to 15 m above current sea level along the New South Wales coast
of Australia, 14 000 km distant, in terms of impact by tsunamis associated with a major collapse
in the Hawaiian archipelago around 1.05×105 years BP. These phenomena have been appraised
as a tsunami generated by a marine impact. Putative giant-tsunami deposits have been observed
at increasing numbers of locations.
A landslide generated Tsunami has local temperament, in case of huge landslide, that involve the
bottom sediments of continental shelf or at the fall of marine glacier, the Tsunami source may
reach the size of several kilometres. These waves have huge heights and attacks aggressively to
coastal populace. Landslide motion process is caused by long-term accumulation of segments at
some ocean bottom areas, submarine slants of basins into the river deltas. These accumulation
segments are subjected to streams, storms, wind waves, tides, hurricanes, tectonic process and
after this, landslide body comes into non-equilibrium. In this situation, any weak perturbation
action has vital role for failure of unstable slide body.
When the landslide moves at a speed equal to the velocity of the long gravity wave in the basin,
the harmonization happens. This particular conditions cause a resonance for transmission of
energy from the landslide to the surface of water wave and height of the wave crest increases
accordingly.
Tsunami generated by landslide motion

Destruction of Tsunami results from inundation by salt water, impact dynamism and erosion.
Considerable damage is also caused by flooding debris that enhances the destructive force of
flooding. Flotation and drag force can destroy frame buildings, overturn railroad cars and move
large ship far inland. Average height of Tsunami caused by earthquake with magnitude of 7.5-
8.00 is between 3 and 10 m along 100- 300 Km to the coastline closest to the epicentre (Tom
Beer, 2010).
Hazards of tsunami: Tsunami is highly disturbing natural disaster that cause huge amount of
the loss of humans and infrastructure. The risk potential of tsunamis is main interest for
scientists. The Asian tsunami caused approximately 250 000 deaths, huge economic losses and
 382

long-term harm to development programmes in the affected countries, brought home to the world
the realities of the hazard. The Asian tsunami was a really global disaster which affected in many
countries in the region as well as tourists from the industrial world in Southeast Asia. The
probable consequences of severe events consist of global economic crises, many millions of
deaths, calamitous and irrecoverable destruction of super cities and possibly whole countries,
global disturbance of food supplies, transport and communications, severe climate states and
environmental pollution on a global scale. These effects may results in food shortage, disease,
political trouble, disintegrate social order, failure of international and national organizations and
perhaps the occurrence of wars and fall down of development.

Reducing the threat of Tsunamis

It is important that scientists must explore the ways to reduce the hazards of Tsunami which
strike many shorelines. Numerous nations monitor the generation and movement of Tsunamis.
The seismic sea wave warning system was established and became operational after the major
Tsunami strike in 1946 in Hilo, Hawaii and parts of Japan and other coastline around the pacific.
This system generally operate by monitoring seismograms to detect potentially seismogenic
earthquake, then monitor tide gauges to determine if a Tsunami has been generated.
Great progress has been made in predicting Tsunami both in long term and short-term following
Tsunamogenic earthquake. These progresses reflect recognition of the association of Tsunamis
with plate tectonic boundaries, particularly convergent margins. USGS and other civil defence
agencies have identified many areas that are prone to Tsunamis. Tsunami warning signals are in
place and people are given guidelines to follow if the alarms are sounded (Timothy M. Kusky,
2008)
To summarize, Tsunami natural disaster has 5th ranking among devastating natural events in the
world in terms of huge loss of life. Tsunami is a series of long water waves, propagating with
high speed from source in the Ocean to coastline. When these waves encounter shallow water,
they may form huge breaking waves with walls of water tens of 100 feet tall that slam ashore.
Every few years these waves rise suddenly out of the ocean and sweep over coastal communities
results in huge causalities and massive destruction. Triggering mechanisms for Tsunamis include
earthquake related displacements of sea floor, submarine slumps and landslides that displace sea
water, submarine volcanism, explosive release of methane gas from deep ocean sediments and
asteroid impacts.

Volcano
A volcano is type of vent or smokestack which transmits molten rocks called as Magma from
depth to earth surface. Magma outbreak from volcano recognized as lava, it is a material which
builds up the cone. Volcanoes are mountains built by the accumulation of their own eruptive
products such as lava, bombs. The explosive nature of volcano eruptions depend on flow of
magma and amount gas trapped within magma. Huge amount of water and carbon dioxides are
dissolved in magma. As magma quickly rises through earth crust gas bubbles form and expands
up to 1000 times of their original size. In the twentieth century, volcanic explosions have
dangerous impact on substantial economic and societal arena. Perilous volcanic activity will
continue to occur in countries like U.S., and, because of increase in populations, development
 383

pressures, and expanding national and international air traffic over volcanic regions, there is a
great risk of life and property through exposure to volcano hazards.
In volcano eruption, heat concentrated in the Earth's upper mantle raises temperatures adequately
to melt the rock locally by fusing the materials with the lowest melting temperatures that results
in small, isolated blobs of magma. After that, these blobs collect, rise through conduits and
fractures, and some ultimately may re-collect in larger pockets or reservoirs a few miles under
the Earth's surface. Increasing pressure within the basin may drive the magma further growing
through structurally weak zones to explode as lava at the surface. In a continental environment,
magmas are generated in the Earth's crust as well as at varying depths in the upper mantle. The
variety of molten rocks in the crust, plus the possibility of mixing with molten materials from the
underlying mantle, leads to the creation of magmas with broadly different chemical
compositions.
a volcano in an oceanic environment (left) and in a continental environment

There are different types of volcano:

1. Shield Volcano
2. Composite Volcano
3. Caldera Volcano.

The form of volcano is determined by types and sizes of its explosions which is controlled by
characteristics and composition of magma.
Volcanic incidents influence the world's ambience far more recurrently than asteroid or comet
impacts. In particular, major volatile eruptions are capable of altering the Earth's climate through
the discharge of large quantities of sulphur gases capable of mixing with atmospheric water to
form stratospheric aerosol clouds. The level of solar radiation reaching the troposphere and the
Earth's surface is considerably reduced by volcanic aerosol clouds. In the last century, two
eruptions, at El Chichon (Mexico) in 1982 and Pinatubo (Philippines) in 1991, have had a
considerable cooling effect around the globe. Reviewing the historical events, eruptions at Laki
(Iceland) in 1783 and Tambora (Indonesia) in 1815 had major, damaging impacts on the regional
and global climate. The Tambora outbreak was the biggest identified historic eruption
(Oppenheimer 2003a). Though, this may be regarded as a minor volcanic event in comparison
with the 7.35×104 years BP 'super-eruption' of Toba (Chesner et al. 1991).
 384

major volcanic eruption of past 250 years (Source: Robock and Free, 1995)

The Hazard of volcano eruptive events are Pyroclastic explosions, Hot ash releases, Lava flows,
Gas emissions, Glowing avalanches (gas and ash releases). Secondary events include melting
ice, snow and rain accompanying eruptions are likely to provoke floods and hot mudflows (or
lahars), hot ash releases can start fires.

Classification of geophysical hazards

Tectonic Plates And Volcano

The earth crust is their thinnest layer which is broken down into various pieces termed as plates.
These plates are above the hot liquid magma.

1. Each plate consists of some continental crust and some oceanic crust.
2. Huge currents of molten rocks move deep in mantle and cause plates to move about very slowly on earth
surface.
3. Many of world volcano happen along boundaries of boundaries of plates.
4. Plate boundaries are among most active geologically active place on earth. Here new rocks have been
formed and destroyed. In these areas, most important volcanic activity occurs.

Hazards of Volcanic Eruption

Volcanoes have perilous impact on the species of earth. Major hazards includes explosions, lava
flows, bombs, mudflows, landslides, earthquakes, ground deformation, tsunami, air shocks,
lightning, poisonous gas, glacial outbreak flooding. Each volcanic eruption has dissimilar
outcomes.
 385

Volcano Hazards Program (VHP) under the Disaster Relief Act (P.L. 93-288) is to augment
public protection and lessen losses from disastrous volcanic events through effectual forecasts
and warnings of volcanic hazards based on the best possible scientific information. The Volcano
Hazards Program conducts four major science activities to decrease volcanic jeopardy in the
Nation that include monitoring volcano unrest and eruption, preparing volcano hazard
assessments, conducting research on volcanic processes, and providing reliable forecasts,
warnings, and volcano-hazard information.
Measurement of volcano: Volcano event is measured through simple descriptive index called as
volcano explosively index which ranges from zero to eight. This index includes volume of
material ejected with height of an eruption column and duration of eruptions.
To summarize, Volcanic explosion can flash storms of lightning that are as strong as the biggest
super storms. Fundamentally, a volcano is a landform formed by magma from the earth's interior
which penetrates through weaknesses in the Earth's surface. Most volcanoes are created at plate
boundaries. Volcanic eruptions produce hazardous conditions, which sternly affect people and
human infrastructure, near the volcano, in downstream valleys, and thousands of miles away.

Cyclones
A Cyclone is described as geophysical phenomenon on the surface of planet and atmospheric
system of low barometric pressure accompanied by strong winds that revolve counter-clockwise
in northern hemisphere and clockwise direction in southern hemisphere. The phrase "Cyclone" is
originated from the Greek, word "Cyclos" which means the coils of a snake. Henri Peddington
stated that the tropical storms in the Bay of Bengal and in the Arabian Sea appeared like the
coiled serpents of the sea and he named these storms as "Cyclones". It is also identified as
hurricanes in western Atlantic and Eastern Pacific, typhoons in western Pacific, cyclone in
Indian Ocean and Southern Pacific Ocean. Wind speed of cyclone can exceed 90m/s, rainfall rate
approach 100mm/hr, and ocean waves are churned up to 35m. At land fall death and destruction
spread across wide areas without respect for geopolitical boundaries. Coastal buildings are
flooded by ocean surge, inland water waves overflow their banks and claim homes and
businesses, tornadoes chart narrow but unpredictable path in outer bands and eyewall and both
coastal and inland structures are damaged after prolong mauling by wind and wind driven
projectiles (Barrett, 2007). It has been documented in environmental studies that Cyclones have
considerably affected populations in Southeast Asia, the Western Pacific, and the Americas since
last century. In future, susceptibility to cyclones will augment due to population growth,
urbanization, increasing coastal settlement, and global warming.
 386

The Meteorological Department of India categorize the low pressure systems in the Bay of Bengal and in the

Arabian Sea:

Causes of Cyclones
C or above. However, existing cyclones often persist as they move over cooler water. The
expansion of tropical cyclones also realises on positive broad scale regions and can continue for
several days with many following quite erratic paths. They lose their source of energy when they
move over land surface or colder oceans causing them to disperse. Deteriorating may also occur
if cyclone moves into an adverse wind regions which disturb the structure of wind system.
Sometimes a decomposing tropical cyclone may interact with weather system in higher latitudes
to cause impact far from tropics.Major source of energy for humid cyclones is the warm ocean
in tropical regions. To instigate a tropical cyclone the sea surface temperature must be around 26

Formation of Cyclone

1. Cyclone can form only in warm ocean waters near equator.

2. To form a cyclone, warm, moist air over ocean rises upward from near the surface. As this air moves up and
away from ocean surface, it leaves it less air near the surface.
3. Air from adjacent region with higher air pressure shoves into low pressure area, then this new cool air
become warm and moist and increases to give birth to cyclones.
4. As warmed moist air rises and cool the water in air forms clouds. The whole system of clouds and winds
rotates and move, fed by ocean heat and water dispersed from ocean surface.
5. As storm system spins faster and faster, an eye form in centre, which is cool and clear with very low
pressure. Higher pressure air from above flows down into the eye.

Impact of Cyclone
Tropical cyclones can unfavourably affect, and sometimes positively impact on society and
environment. The most widespread impact is heavy rainfall and strong winds that can cause
flooding. In some parts of world, Australia tornados have been reported during cyclones. Storm
flow or coastal flood by sea water, is also seen during cyclones. Cyclones are linked with high-
pressure gradients and resulting strong winds. These, consecutively, produce storm surges. A
storm flow is an unusual rise of sea level near the coast caused by a severe tropical cyclone; as a
result, sea water floods low lying areas of coastal regions drowning human beings and livestock,
corroding beaches and banks, destroying plant life and dropping soil fertility. Very strong winds
may damage installations, dwellings, communication systems, trees resulting in loss of life and
possessions. Heavy and long-lasting rains due to cyclones may cause river floods and
submergence of low lying areas by rain causing huge loss of life and assets. Floods and coastal
inundation due to storm surges contaminate drinking water sources that results in outburst of
diseases.
 387

Major tropical cyclone ranked by number of deaths (Source: Langshore, 2008)

Safety Measures for Cyclone

1. Keep observing weather and listen to radio, TV, newspapers.

2. Get to know nearest cyclone protection or secured house and safest route to reach their.
3. Do not believe in rumours.
4. Check the roof and cover it with net or bamboo.
5. Thoroughly check the walls, pillars doors and windows to see if they are secure.

In India, the Government have made stronger the Meteorological Department, through offering
Cyclone Surveillance Radars at Calcutta, Paradeep, Visakhapatnam, Machilipatnam, Madras and
Karaikal in the east coast and at Cochin, Goa, Bombay and Bhuj in the west coast to cyclone
forecast and advance warning. For safety of Indian population, Satellite picture receiving
equipment's at Delhi, Bombay, Pune, Madras, Visakhapatnam, Calcutta and Guwahati are
receive satellite pictures of the cyclones from the polar-orbiting Satellites of the U.S.A. and
U.S.S.R.
Disaster Prevention and Preparedness for cyclone: At National level, The Government of
India recommended in 1969, to the governments of the maritime states to establish "Cyclone
Distress Mitigation Committee" in the own states to prevent human loss and reduce damage to
properties. CDMC planed the communication systems in the state for fast distribution of
Meteorological warnings and prevention measures. Prevention process include development of
storm shelters, connecting roads for migration of people, construction of wind breaks, dykes,
bunds, flood storage reservoirs, afforestation along the coastal belts and development of drainage
facilities. An advance warning will not be successful unless the public is progressive about the
critical features and the actions to be taken by them to avoid affliction.
At International level, The World Meteorological Organisation has established in 1972, a
Tropical Cyclone Project with the aim to help the member countries to boost their capabilities to
identify and predict the approach and landfall of the tropical cyclones, appraise and forecast, the
storm surges, forecast the flooding arising from the cyclones and to develop system to organise
and implement disaster prevention and preparedness measures. One of the effective plans that is
in operation to help the countries adjoining the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea is the panel
on the tropical cyclones of World Meteorological Organisation and the Economic and Social
Council for Asia and Pacific. The WMO/ESCAP panel has a technical support unit.
 388

In contemporary global environment, there is revolutionary change due to advent of technology.

But most geologic events cannot be prohibited or even predict with accuracy. Landslides are an
exception. They can often be prevented. Areas prone to such events can be recognized as
earthquake fault zones, active volcanoes, and coastal areas susceptible to tsunamis. However,
not all earthquake faults have been identified. Estimates of an incidence of a given hazardous
event are probabilistic, based on consideration of the magnitude of an event and its occurrence in
time and space. Nevertheless, appropriate alleviation measures can extremely reduce the damage
caused by geologic cyclone hazards.
To summarize, Geologic hazards like cyclone are accountable for huge human and asset loss of
life and annihilation of property. In the twentieth century, more than a million causalities
occurred due to natural disaster. 'Cyclone' is globally used to cover tropical weather systems in
which winds equal or surpass 'gale force' (minimum of 34 knot, i.e., 62 kmph). These are strong
low pressure areas of the earth atmosphere coupled system and are extreme weather events of the
tropics. Enormous studies have shown that Tropical cyclones are characterised by destructive
winds, storm surges and heavy rainfall which adversely impact on human and farm animals, and
their activities.

Geographical feature
 Read in another language
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Geographical features are naturally-created features of the Earth. Natural geographical features consist
of landforms and ecosystems. For example, terrain types, (physical factors of the environment) are natural
geographical features. Conversely, human settlements or other engineered forms are considered types of artificial
geographical features.
Contents
Natural geographical featuresEdit
EcosystemsEdit
Main article: Ecosystem

There are two different terms to describe habitats: ecosystem and biome. An ecosystem is a community of
organisms.[1] In contrast, biomes occupy large areas of the globe and often encompass many different kinds of
geographical features, including mountain ranges.[2]
Biotic diversity within an ecosystem is the variability among living organisms from all sources, including inter alia,
terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems.[3] Living organisms are continually engaged in a set of relationships
with every other element constituting the environment in which they exist, and ecosystem describes any situation
where there is relationship between organisms and their environment.
Biomes represent large areas of ecologically similar communities of plants, animals, and soil organisms.[4] Biomes
are defined based on factors such as plant structures (such as trees, shrubs, and grasses), leaf types (such as
broadleaf and needleleaf), plant spacing (forest, woodland, savanna), and climate. Unlike ecozones, biomes are not
defined by genetic, taxonomic, or historical similarities. Biomes are often identified with particular patterns
of ecological succession and climax vegetation.
LandformsEdit
Main article: Landform

A landform comprises a geomorphological unit and is largely defined by its surface form and location in the
landscape, as part of the terrain, and as such is typically an element of topography. Landforms are categorized by
features such as elevation, slope, orientation, stratification, rock exposure, and soil type. They include berms,
 389

mounds, hills, cliffs, valleys, rivers, and numerous other elements. Oceans and continents are the highest-order

landforms.
A body of water is any significant accumulation of water, usually covering the Earth. The term "body of water"
most often refers to oceans, seas, and lakes, but it may also include smaller pools of water such
as ponds, creeks or wetlands. Rivers, streams, canals, and other geographical features where water moves from one
place to another are not always considered bodies of water, but they are included as geographical formations
featuring water.
Artificial geographical featuresEdit
SettlementEdit
Main article: Human settlement

A settlement is a permanent or temporary community in which people live. Settlements range in components from a
small number of dwellings grouped together to the largest of cities with surrounding urbanized areas. Other
landscape features such as roads, enclosures, field systems, boundary banks and ditches, ponds, parks and woods,
mills, manor houses, moats, and churches may be considered part of a settlement. [5]
Engineered constructsEdit
Main articles: Construction engineering, Building, and Nonbuilding structure

See also: Infrastructure

Engineered geographic features include highways, bridges, airports, railroads, buildings, dams, and reservoirs, and

are part of the anthroposphere because they are man-made geographic features.
Cartographic featuresEdit
Main articles: Cartography and Map

Cartographic features are types of abstract geographical features, which appear on maps but not on the planet itself,
even though they are located on the planet. For example, latitudes, longitudes, the Equator, and the Prime
Meridian are shown on maps of the Earth, but it do not physically exist. It is a theoretical line used for reference,
navigation, and measurement.
See alsoEdit
 Geography
 Human geography
 Landscape
 Physical geography

ReferenceEdit
1. ^ Odum, Eugene P.; Odum, Howard T. (1971). Fundamentals of Ecology (3rd ed.). Saunders.
2. ^ Botkin, Daniel B.; Keller, Edward A. (1995). Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet. John Wiley &
Sons, Inc. Canada.
3. ^ "Convention Text — Article 2. Use of Terms". www.CBD.int. Convention on Biological Diversity. Retrieved 13
September2015.
4. ^ Basak, Anindita (2009). Environmental Studies. Dorling Kindersley. p. 288. ISBN 978-81-317-2118-6.
Retrieved 13 September 2015.
5. ^ "MSRG Policy Statement". Medieval-Settlement.com. Medieval Settlement Research Group. 2014-05-11.
Retrieved 13 September 2015.

 
 390

Changes in critical geographical features (including water-bodiesand ice-

caps) and the effects of such changes
"Water is essential to life and is central to society's welfare and to sustainable economic
growth.Plants, animals, natural and managed ecosystems, and human settlements are
sensitive to variationsin the storage, fluxes, and quality of water at the land surface
 – 
 notably storage in soil moisture andgroundwater, snow, and surface water in lakes,
wetlands, and reservoirs, and precipitation, runoff,and evaporative fluxes to and from
the land surface, respectively. These, in turn, are sensitive toclimate change."
Source: U.S. Climate Change Science Program, 2008
Human efforts to alter the hydrological cycle date back to ancient times. Prayer, dances,
human andanimal sacrifices, and other rituals have been tried to bring rain. Cloud
seeding is a more scientific,but still uncertain, attempt to induce precipitation. Although
it is questionable whether any of theseintentional efforts have significantly altered
precipitation patterns, the balance of evidence nowsuggests that humans are influencing
the global climate and, thereby, altering the hydrological cycle,however
inadvertently. The most recent scientific assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on 
Climate Change (IPCC)concludes that, since the late 19th century, anthropogenically
induced emissions of gases such ascarbon dioxide (CO
2
 ) that trap heat in the atmosphere in the manner of a greenhouse havecontributed to an
increase in global mean surface air temperatures of about 0.3 to 0.6
o
C. Moreover,
based on the IPCC’s
 mid-range scenario of future greenhouse gas emissions and aerosols and theirbest
estimate of climate sensitivity, a further increase of 2
o
C is expected by the year
2100. The vast majority of the Earth's water resources are salt water, with only 2.5% bei
ng fresh water. Approximately 70% of the fresh water available on the planet is frozen in
the icecaps of Antarcticaand Greenland leaving the remaining 30% (equal to only 0.7%
of total water resources worldwide)available for consumption. From this remaining
0.7%, roughly 87% is allocated to agriculturalpurposes (IPCC 2007). These statistics
are particularly illustrative of the drastic problem of water scarcity facing
the world. Water scarcity is defined as per capita supplies less than 1700 m
3
/year (IPCC 2007).
 
 There are four main factors aggravating water scarcity according to the IPCC:

 
Population growth: in the last century, world population has tripled. Water use has
beengrowing at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century, and,
althoughthere is no global water scarcity as such, an increasing number of regions are
chronically shortof water.

 391

 
Increased urbanization will focus on the demand for water among a more
concentratedpopulation.

 
High level of consumption: as the world becomes more developed, the amount of
domestic water used by each person is expected to rise significantly.

 
Climate change will shrink the resources of freshwater.

 
 The Hydrological Cycle
 The hydrological cycle begins with evaporation from the surface of the
ocean or land, continues asthe atmosphere redistributes the water vapor to locations
where it forms clouds, and then returns tothe surface as precipitation. The cycle ends
when the precipitation is either absorbed into the groundor runs off to the ocean,
beginning the process over again.Key changes to the hydrological cycle (associated with
an increased concentration of greenhousegases in the atmosphere and the resulting
changes in climate) include:

 
Changes in the seasonal distribution and amount of precipitation.

 
 An increase in precipitation intensity under most situations.

 
Changes in the balance between snow and rain.

 
Increased evapotranspiration and a reduction in soil moisture.

 
Changes in vegetation cover resulting from changes in temperature and precipitation.

 
Consequent changes in management of land resources.

 
 Accelerated melting glacial ice.

 
Increases in fire risk in many areas.

 
 392

Increased coastal inundation and wetland loss from sea level rise.
393
394
 395

 

 
Effects of CO2 on plant physiology, leading to reduced transpiration and increased
wateruse efficiency.
Climate Change Impact on Water Resources Water Availability
1.1 Surface Water
Climate change has the potential to substantially alter river flow regimes and thereby
surface wateravailability. Globally there has been a discernible and contrasting change
in the pattern of runoff: theregions lying in the higher latitudes have been experiencing
an increase, while parts of west Africa,southern Europe, and southern Latin America
have had a decrease.
1.2 Groundwater
Groundwater is an important source of water in many parts of the world, and for
centuries it hasbeen considered a reliable source of water supply for the human society.
However, theoverexploitation of this resource has cast serious aspersions on its
sustainable use especially becausea majority of the groundwater resources are non-
renewable on meaningful time scales. Climatechange effects- reduced precipitation and
increased evapotranspiration- will reduce recharge andpossibly increase groundwater
withdrawal rates. More importantly because of variations in
 396

the volume of snowmelt and distribution of rainfall, the timing of recharge will be affect
ed: typically with a shift in seasonal mean and annual groundwater levels. The FAO (201
1) describes someobvious climate-related impacts in general terms, listed hereafter:

 
If flooding increases, aquifer recharge will increase, except in continental outcrop areas.

 
If drought frequency, duration and severity increase, the cycle time will lengthen
andabstraction will require better balance, with less in sequences of wet years and more
in dryyears.

 
If snowmelt increases, aquifer recharge rates should increase, but this is dependent
onpermafrost behavior and recharge patterns, which largely remains unknown.
2. Sea-Level Rise
Increase in sea-level has serious implications for both human security (increased flood-
risks,degraded groundwater quality, etc.) and ecosystems (impact on mangrove forests
and coral reefs,etc.), especially so in coastal regions. Coastal cities in developing regions
are particularly vulnerableto sea-level rise because of high population densities and
often inadequate urban planning and theadded burden due to urban
migration. There has always been a steady increase in the global sea-level, but because o
f accelerated glaciermelting in Greenland and the Antarctic, the rise has been quite rapid
in the last decade and isprojected to rise at a greater rate in the twenty-first century.

Effect of global warming on climate change, flora and fauna:

Abstract :
Everything on planet Earth is interconnected, and when one thing is changed, it alters everything
else. This is known as the butterfly effect, and it is seen everyday. How does global warming set
off a chain reaction effects plants and animals around the world? Like humans, plants and
animals need certain conditions to be comfortable and productive. If the thermostat at office is
set too low, than a person gets cold and cannot work as well. The same thing happens with plants
and animals. If it is too warm or too cold, they cannot reproduce at the same rate. When plants
slow down there growth, they are not replenished rapidly enough to support all the animals
which usually feed on them. Fewer plants means that area can support fewer plant eating
animals. Less plant eaters leads to a decrease in the number of predatory animals. If the growth
of the trees are affected than the entire food chain is thrown off balance. Humans are a part of the
food chain as well, and when we kill off plants and animals through the changes in the climate
 397

we have brought about, we ultimately shorten our own life spans. Key Words :
Global warming, Climate change, Flora, Fauna.

Introduction:
Global warming is the increase in the average temperature  of  Earth  near-  surface  air  and
oceans  since  the  mid-20th  century  and  its projected continuation. According to the 2007a,b
Fourth  Assessment  Report  by  the Intergovernmental  Panel  on  Climate  Change (IPCC), 
global surface temperature  increased by  0.74 ± 0.18 °C  (1.33 ± 0.32 °F)  during  the
20th century. Most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the  20th  century
has been caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, which result from human
activities such as the burning of fossil fuel and deforestation. Climate model  projections 
summarized  in the latest  IPCC  report  indicate  that  the  global surface  temperature  is  likely 
to  rise  a  further 1.1  to  6.4 °C  (2.0  to  11.5 °F)  during  the  21st century. This 
change appears to be small but this will  change the  climate to  a great  extent. Effect of global
warming on climate change, flora and fauna Anju Agrawal Department of Zoology
SN Sen BVPG College, CSJM University, Kanpur Abstract : Everything on planet Earth is
interconnected, and when one thing is changed, it alters everything else. This is known as the
butterfly effect, and it is seen everyday. How does global warming set off a chain reaction effects
plants and animals around the world? Like humans, plants and animals need certain conditions to
be comfortable and productive. If the thermostat at office is set too low, than a person gets cold
and cannot work as well. The same thing happens with plants and animals. If it is too warm or
too cold, they cannot reproduce at the same rate. When plants slow down there growth, they are
not replenished rapidly enough to support all the animals which usually feed on them. Fewer
plants means that area can support fewer plant eating animals. Less plant eaters leads to a
decrease in the number of predatory animals. If the growth of the trees are affected than the
entire food chain is thrown off balance. Humans are a part of the food chain as well, and when
we kill off plants and animals through the changes in the climate we have brought about, we
ultimately shorten our own life spans. Key Words :
Global warming, Climate change, Flora, Fauna. There  will  be  increase  in  hot  days  and many
scientists  believe  that  an  increase  in temperatures  may  lead  to  precipitation  and change  in 
weather  patterns. Warmer  ocean waters may result in more intense and frequent
tropical storms and hurricanes. The uncertainty in this estimate arises from the use of models
with  differing  sensitivity  to  greenhouse  gas concentrations  and  the  use  of  differing
estimates of future greenhouse gas emissions. An increase in global temperature will cause sea
levels to rise and will change the amount and pattern  of  precipitation,  probably  including
expansion  of  subtropical  deserts. Warming  is expected to be strongest in the Arctic and would
be associated with continuing retreat of glaciers, permafrost  and  sea  ice.  Other  likely  effects
include  more  frequent  and  intense  extreme weather  events,  species  extinctions,  and
changes  in  agricultural  yields.  Warming  and related changes will vary from region to region
around the  globe, though the  nature  of these regional  changes  is  uncertain. As  a  result  of J.
Ecophysiol. Occup. Hlth. 11 (2011) 161-174 ©2011 The Academy of Environmental Biology,
India E-Mail: anjuagrawal2@gmail.com Anju Agrawal 162
contemporary increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, the oceans have become more acidic,
a result that is predicted to continue. The scientific consensus is that anthropogenic global 
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warming  is  occurring.  Nevertheless, skepticism amongst the wider public remains. The  Kyoto 

Protocol  is  aimed  at  stabilizing greenhouse  gas  concentration  to  prevent  a
“dangerous anthropogenic interference”. As of November  2009,  187  states  had  signed  and
ratified  the  protocol.  Proposed  responses  to global  warming  include  mitigation  to  reduce
emissions,  adaptation to the  effects  of  global warming,  and  geoengineering  to  remove
greenhouse  gases  from  the  atmosphere. Scientists have looked at evidence about past changes 
in  atmospheric  CO2  concentrations and atmospheric temperatures. They have also
developed sophisticated  mathematical models of  the  earth’s  climate  system  and  made
projections about possible future changes. As a result of these studies and models, most climate 
scientists  have  come  to  an  important conclusion. They believe that increased inputs of  CO2  
and  other  greenhouse  gases  into  the atmosphere from human activities will enhance
the earth’s natural greenhouse effect and raise the  average  global  temperature  of  the
atmosphere  near  the  earth’s  surface.  This enhanced greenhouse effect is global warming.
Climate change Climate  is  a  region’s  general  pattern  of
atmospheric or weather conditions over a long period. Average temperature and precipitation are 
two  main  factors  determining  a  regions climate and its effect on people.
Small amounts of certain gases play a key role in determining the average temperature and its
climate.  These  gases  include  water  vapour (H2O),  carbon  dioxide  (CO2)  and  synthetic
chlorofluorocarbon  (CFCs).Together  these gases are known as greenhouse gases, which
allow mostly visible light and some infrared and ultraviolet  radiation  from  the  sun  to  pass
through  the  troposphere.  The  earth’s  surface absorbs  much  of  the  solar  energy.  This
transforms  it  to  longer  wavelength  infrared radiation  (heat)  which  then  rises  into  the
troposphere.  Some  of  the  heat  escapes  into space, and some is absorbed by molecules of
greenhouse  gases  and  emitted  into  the troposphere  as  even  longer  wave  infrared radiation, 
which  warms  the  air.  This  natural warming  effect  of  troposphere  is  called  the
greenhouse effect. Human activities such as burning fossil fuels, clearing  forests  and  growing 
crops  release carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide into
the atmosphere. It is of great concern that large input of these gases into the troposphere can
enhance the  earth’s natural greenhouse effect and lead to global warming.
The ozone layer also creates warm layers of the air  that  prevent  churning  gases  in  the
troposphere  from  entering  the  stratosphere. This thermal cap is important in determining the
average  temperature  of  the  troposphere  and thus  the  earth’s  current  climates.  Various
topographic  features  of  the  earth’s  surface create  local  climatic  conditions,  or
microclimates that differ from the climate of a region.  For  example,  mountains  interrupt  the
flow of prevailing surface winds and movement of storms. When moist air blowing inland from
an ocean reaches a mountain range, it cools as it is forced to rise and expands. This causes the
air  to  loose  most  of  its  moisture  as  rain  and snow  on  windward  slopes. As  the  drier  air
mass flows down the leeward slopes, it draws moisture out of the plants and soil over which it 
passes.  The  lower  precipitation  and  the resulting  semiarid  or  arid  conditions  on  the
leeward side of high mountains are called rain shadow effect. Cities  also  create  distinct 
microclimates. Effect  of  global  warming  on  climate  change 163 Bricks,  concrete,  asphalt 
and  other  building materials  absorb  and  hold  heat,  and  building
blocks wind flow. Motor vehicles and the climate control  systems  of  buildings  release  large
quantities  of  heat  and  pollutants. As  a  result, cities tend to have more haze and smog, higher
temperatures and lower wind speeds than the surrounding  countryside.  Land  oceans
interactions affect the local climates  of coastal areas by creating ocean to land breezes during
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the day and land to ocean breezes at night. According to the  latest  instalment  of  a  report

published  by the  Intergovernmental Panel  on Climate change (IPCC), climate change is very
likely to have an impact on our planet and its life. The future problems caused by rising seas,
growing deserts and more frequent droughts all look set to affect the developing world more than
rich countries. Climate  change  is  a  global  phenomenon;  its
negative effect are more severely felt by poor people  in  developing  countries  who  depend
heavily  on  natural  resources  base  for  their livelihoods.  Rural  poor  communities  depend
greatly  for  their  survival  on  agriculture  and livestock as they are the most climate sensitive
economic  sectors.  W ith  increase  of temperature approximatey 20 to 30 per cent of
plant and animal species are expected to be at a risk of extinction with severe consequences
for food security in developing countries. Factors of Global Warming Greenhouse Gases
A greenhouse gas  is a gas in an atmosphere that  absorbs  and  emits  radiation  within  the
thermal  infrared  range.  This  process  is  the fundamental  cause  of  the  greenhouse  effect.
The primary greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere are water vapour, carbon dioxide,
methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. In the Solar System, the atmospheres of Venus, Mars, and
Titan also contain gases that cause greenhouse effects.  Greenhouse  gases  greatly  affect  the
temperature of the Earth; without them, Earth’s surface  would  be  on  average  about  33 °C
(59 °F)  colder  than  at  present.  Since  the beginning of the Industrial revolution, the burning
of fossil fuels  has  contributed to the  increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from 280
ppm to 390 ppm. Unlike other pollutants, carbon dioxide emissions do not result from inefficient
combustion:  CO2  is  a  product  of  ideal, stoichiometric  combustion  of  carbon.  The
emissions of carbon are directly proportional to energy consumption. Human  activities  increase 
greenhouse  gases which  is  one of the  cause of  global warming. These  greenhouse  gases 
reabsorb  heat reflected from the Earth’s surface, thus trapping
the heat in our atmosphere. Humans have been increasing  the  concentration  of  the  gases
namely carbon dioxide and methane. The United Nations Intergovernmental Pannel on Climate
change has been studying global warming for years.  They  state  that  global  increases  in
carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily due to fossil fuel use and land use change, while
those of methane and nitrous oxide are primarily due to agriculture. Solar Impact
Initially the magnitude of influence of the sun on Earth’s climate was not well understood . Since
the early 1990’s extensive research was put in determining  what  role  the  sun  had  in  global
warming or climate change. Human Impacts on Climate The  Earth’s  climate  is  more  clearly 
out  of balance and is warming. Many components of the climate system –
including the temperature of the atmosphere, land and ocean, the extend
of sea, ice and mountain glaciers, the sea level, the distribution of precipitation and the length of
seasons  are  now  enormously  changing  and they  are  best  explained  by  the  increased
Anju Agrawal 164 abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols
generated by humans in the twentieth century (Fig. 1; Table 1). During  recent  millennia  of 
relatively  stable climate after civilization became established and population  increased.  An 
additional  global warming of even 10 C above the last decade is far  beyond  the  range  of 
climate  variability experienced during the past thousand year also
poses global problems in planning for adapting to it. The warming of the earth above 20 C above
19th century levels is projected to be disruptive,
reducing global agricultural productivity, causing loss  of  biodiversity  and  if  sustained  over
centuries  melting  much  of  the  Greenland  ice sheet with ensuring rise in sea level of several
meters. In order to avoid this 20 C of  warming our  net  annual  emissions  of  CO2  must  be
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reduced  by  more  than  50  percent  within  this century.

The cause of disruptive climate change unlike, ozone depletion, is tied to energy rise and runs
through  modern  society.  Mitigation  strategies and  adaptation  responses  will  call  for
collaboration  across  science  technology, industry and government. As part of the duty the
scientific  community  should  collectively  have special  responsibilities  to  pursue  research
needed to understand it, to educate the public on  the  causes,  risks  and  hazards  and  to
communicate clearly and objectively with those who  can  implement  policies  to  shape  future
climate. Impact of global warming on polar flora and fauna In  agreement  with  different 
climate  models developed by the researchers and confirmed by
IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change), the poles are the regions of the world
where the  climate change is more  rapid. This Fig
1. The factors contributing to the greenhouse gases Effect  of  global  warming  on  climate 
change 165 development  is  not  without  impact  on  the organisms  living  in  those    regions, 
some  of which are increasing concerns to the biologists. The trends towards Arctic 
regions warming is generalized,  and  in  some  regions  the temperature has risen by 30
C over the past 50 years. This is ten times faster than the rest of the  planet,  where  the  average 
increase  was 0.60 C over the past century. On  the Antartica
peninsula only two flowering plants were seen on exceptional  occasion in the past. But over the 
past  thirty  years,  antartica  grass  and pearlwort have been developing in the south, as
are several species of moss. Other effects seen in the marine environment is  due  to  spread  of 
park  ice.  This  ice  is necessary to ensure the inter development of
juvenile krill (a small crustacean which looks like a shrimp and upon which an impressive range
of  predators  are  dependent)  and  there  has been reduction in the frequency of successful
breeding years. Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) has
made it clear that the effects of global warming on flora and fauna are even more pronounced
in the Arctic. Due to warming there is melting of permafrost (permanently frozen ground) with
the  disappearance  of  hundreds  of  pools  and lakes and flora and fauna which inhabit them.
There is also spread of forest coverage to the north, to the detriment of tundra, where millions
of migrating  birds  have their  breeding. At the same time, there is increase in number of fires
and massive swarms  of  insect pests. The situation is no better in the Arctic ocean, the average 
surface  area  of  packed  ice  has shrunken in thirty years by practically a million square 
kilometres.  This  gradual  shrinkage  is causing  increasing  problems  for  the  species
associated  with  sea  ice,  whether  these  are Table 1.  Atmospheric  Greenhouse  Gases 
(except  water  vapour)  adjusted  for  heat  retention characteristics,  relative to CO2 Table 2.
Benefits of adopting sustainable farming practices Comparison of greenhouse gases equally with
respect to CO2. Preindustrial baseline (new) Natural additions (new) Manmade additions (new)
Tot. Relative Contribution Percent of Total (new) Carbon Dioxide (CO2) 288,000 68,520 11,880
368,400 72.369% Methane (CH4) 17,808 12,117 6,720 36,645 7.199% Nitrous Oxide (N2O)
88,350 3,599 4,771 96,720 19.000% CFC's (and other misc. gases) 2,500 0 4,791 7,291 1.432%
Total 396,658 84,236 28,162 509,056 100.000% Benefit Percent of farmers
Less chemicals in the environment 84% Healthier lifestyle 80 More wholesome food 78
More profits 74 Better working conditions 70 More local foods 67 More farmers on the land 62
None 1 Other 1 Anju Agrawal 166 single  cell  algae,  the  copepod  crustaceans which  gauze 
on  them,  the  fish  which  hide  in them  and  so  on  up  the  chain  to  that  most
emblematic animal of the North pole, the polar bear. The  shrinkage  of  packed  ice  has  caused 
a reduction in number of ringed seals as well as
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their accessibility for polar bears, for whom  they
are principal prey. It is practically crucial for the female  bears  as  they  build  up  fat  reserves
before fasting for several months in winter and give birth to the young. Researches have shown
that in Hudson Bay, each week the spring thaw advances represents a 10kg loss of weight for
female bears by the time they enter the snow den where their young will be born. In addition
warming also increases the frequency of winter rains and the collapses of these dens.
On the other hand of the globe, the formidable mass of the Antartica ice sheet may protect the
Antartica ocean from global warming. But the rising temperature of the peninsula is a reason of 
concern.  Research  on  several  marine invertebrate  species  has  shown  that  oxygen supply 
necessary  for  several  vital  functions, such as reproduction, is easily disturbed by rise
of water temperature. Infact a 40 C rise would be sufficient  to  condemn  several  populations, 
or even some species with a limited distribution to extinction. Climate Change Health and
Environmental Effects Mammals which occupy diverse areas with the notable  exceptions  of 
whales  of  Earth  and dolphins,  are  primarily terrestrial  animals that
inhabit diverse areas of the Earth. Mammalian responses are changing due to diverse climate
changes. Many  small animals are  coming out of hibernation and breeding earlier in the year
than they did several decades ago, while others are expanding their ranges to higher altitudes.
Reproductive  success  in  polar  bears  has declined due to melting Arctic  sea ice  (IPCC,
2002). In 2004 the Arctic Climate Assessment (ACIA)  summarized  some  of  the  effects  of
warming  temperatures  on  animals  such  as polar bears, seals, migratory birds, caribou and
reindeer are all experiencing changes that could have  dramatic  changes  on  their  species  and
ecosystem they inhabit (ACIA, 2004). In 2004 the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) 
summarized  some  of  the  effects  of warming  temperatures  on  animals  and  their
habitats in polar  regions. All the animals of polar regions such as polar bears, seals , migratory
birds,  Caribou  and  reindeer  are  experiencing changes  that  could  have  dramatic  effects  on
their species and ecosystems (ACIA, 2004). For example polar bears are dependent on sea ice to 
hunt  seals  and  to  move  from  one  area  to another. Polar bears are unlikely to survive as a 
species  if  there  is  almost  complete  loss  of summer  sea  ice  cover.  The  seals  and  polar
bears hunt are unlikely to be able to adapt to an absence of summer sea ice, because they give
birth to and nurse their pups  on the ice  and use it as a place of resting. According  to 
the AICA,  caribou  and  reindeer population  could  decline  because  of  their
dependence on tundra for vegetation. As tundra vegetation zones continue northward with the
changing climate the caribou and reindeer could have a more  difficult time  in finding food  and
raising their calves. Invertebrates and Insects Invertebrates represent 97 per cent of all animal
species . Though most of the invertebrates are small,  their  influence  on  the  surrounding  is
enormous. Bees, ants, moths and other insects for example perform a critical role in life of seed
plants by transferring pollen as insect pollination
is particularly important for production of certain fruits and vegetables.
Both positive and negative impacts of  climate change  occur  on  invertebrates  and  insects.
Recent working  in Alaska  has  caused  spruce Effect  of  global  warming  on  climate  change
167 budworms to reproduce further north. In addition a  range  shift  towards  the  pole 
(northward  in Northern Hemisphere) or to  higher  elevations has  occurred  among 
invertebrates  that  are considered  pests  or  disease  organisms.
Butterflies habitat ranges in North America have shifted  northward  and  in  elevation  as
temperature  increased,  the  Editor’s Checkerspot  butterfly  local  populations  have
become extinct in the Southern portion of their range.  Balance Climate  change will alter the
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distribution of many species in different taxa and poiklothermic  animals,  whose  distribution  is

ultimately determined by climatic factors. It has been recognized that global warming affects the
individual species and communities in a range of  shifts  and  extinctions. As  a  result  of  this
temperature  increase  the  range  of  species could expand pole ward and in the mountainous
areas upward in elevation because the number of insect species is inversely related to latitude
and  elevation  from  sea  level  (Hickling  et al., 2006). The climate change may indirectly affect
the  forest  ecosystem  through  the  activity  of phytophagous insects. The climate change has
been claimed to be responsible of the range of expansion  northward  and  upward  of  several
insect species of northern temperate forests as well as of changes in the seasonal phenology.
Increase  in  levels  of  CO2  in  the  atmosphere involve an increase of the C/N balance of plant
tissues,  which  in  turn  results  in  lower  food quality  for  many  defoliating  insects.  Some
insects respond by increasing the level of leaf consumption and consequently damage of the
tree. The level of plant chemical defenses may also  be  affected  by  a  change  of  CO2.  The
temperature  is  affecting  either  the  survival  of insects which are active during the cold period
or the synchronization mechanism between the host and herbivores. An increase of temperature
may alter the mechanism by which the insects adjust their cycles to local climate (diapause),
resulting  in  faster  development  and  higher feeding rate. Environmental  factors  influenced 
by  global climate  change  determine  the  distribution ranges  of  organisms.  Especially  the
ectothermic animals are expected to shift their distribution  ranges  northwards  in  the  next
hundred years or so on. The future distribution ranges  of  two Central European  serious  pest
species: the nun moth, Lymantria monachal L. and  gypsy  moth  L.dispar  (Lepidoptera  :
Lymantriidae). Three different climate warning scenarios  were  considered  i.e.  temperature
increase  of  1.4,  3.6  and  5.80C.The  climate warning  scenarios  shifted  the  northern
boundary  of  the  distribution for  both  of  these species north by 500-700km. Also the Southern
edge  of  the  ranges  retracted  northwards  by 100-900  km  (Vanhanen  et al.  2007).
Temperature and humidity influence the density of two  stored  grain  pests Tribolium confusum
(Herbst)  and  Callosobrunchus chinensis  (L). T.confusum and C.chinensis show qualitatively
different  responses  to the exogenous forcing of  temperature  and  humidity  respectively.
Stimulations predict a change in the equilibrium density of T.confusum from  10 to  14%  under
the  B2  scenario  and  12  to  22%  under  the extreme A2 scenario to the period 2071-2100.
Both results imply a severe change in the pest status of the species in southern region (Estay et
al. 2008). Birds Birds play an important role in seed dispersal, pollination  and  as  both 
predator  and  prey. Scientists have observed that birds are breeding
and laying their eggs earlier and that migratory species  have  altered  their  wintering  and/or
critical stopover habitats. For example, warmer springs  have  led  to  earlier  nesting  for  28
migrating  species in east  coast  of  US  (IPCC, 2007a,b). The Arctic  Climate 
Impact Assessment  has stated  that  the  timing  of  bird  arrival  may  no
longer coincide with the availability of their insect food  sources  (ACIA,  2004).  As  trees  shift
Anju Agrawal 168 northward the important breeding and nesting
areas are projected to decrease sharply. As sea level is rising there are more tundra areas and
thus more  habitat for  birds and their  prey will disappear.  This  ultimately  would  affect  the
success  or  failure  of  the  breeding  of  several hundred million birds that migrate to the Arctic
each summer. This in turn would  lead to  less population sizes of birds at lower latitudes.
As the changing climate could impair the extent to which a bird’s life cycle is synchronized with
its  food  supply,  in  the  same  way  rise  in temperature  could  affect  other  ecological
processes  that  are  vital  to  the  ecosystem health.  The  three  factors  that  is,  pollination, seed 
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dispersal  and  pest  control  by  birds  are dependent  on  careful  timing  of  birds  arrival,
atmospheric  temperature  and  other  climate related  factors,  and  therefore  could  be
distributed  as  the  climate  changes.  (IPCC 2007a,b).Wetlands  in  coastal  areas  have
decreased  due  to  rising  sea  level  where waterfowl spend their winter months. Sea level is 
rising  along  most  of  the  US  coast,  and around the world, and is projected to continue
throughout this century. In  some areas where the  wetlands  cannot  move  inland  due  to
topography  or  human  development,  these important  habitats  may  be  lost  and  the
ecosystem  in  which  they  live  may  change forever. Fish According  to  IPCC  certain  fish 
species  are becoming  less  abundant  worldwide.  Fish populations  and  other  aquatic 
resources  are likely  to  be  affected  by  warmer  water temperatures,  changes  in  seasonal 
flow regimes,  total  flows,  lake  levels  and  water
quality. These all inturn would affect the health of  aquatic  ecosystems,  with  impact  on
productivity,  species  diversity  and  species distribution (IPCC, 2007a,b). The Northern pike,
which  spawn  in  flooded  meadows  in  early spring  and  whose  young  remain  in meadows
for  about  20  days  after  hatching  would  be affected by the low  spring water level. Higher
winter  temperatures  have  been  observed  to decrease the survival rates of yellow perch. On
he other hand, the same temperature increase in  summer  caused  negative  effects  (IPCC,
2007a,b). Climate  change  can  compound the  impact  of
natural variation and fishing activity and make marine  life  management  more  complex.  For
example scientists have observed that elevated temperature have increased mortality of winter
flounder  eggs  and  larvae  and  later  lead  to spawning  mig rations.  Climate  change
represents a threat to sustainability to capture fisheries  and  aquaculture  development.  The
consequences of gradual warming on a global scale  and  associated  physical  changes  will
become increasingly evident, as will be the more frequent  extreme  weather  conditions.  The
effects  of  increased  pressure  on  fisheries, environmental  pollution,  environmental
degradation. A small increase in water temperature among sensitive fish 
like the South American  pejerry can result in a population that is 98% males. Positive and
negative impact of climate change on fisheries Positive impact : The projected climate change
will generally be positive for aquaculture, which is often limited by cold weather. Since many of
the  changes  will  entail  warmer  nights  and winters  ,  there  should  be  longer  periods  of
growth  and  growth  should  be  enhanced.  The cost of making  structures  ice-resistant and of
heating water to optimum temperatures should also  be  lowered.  By  developing  appropriate
technologies,  farmers  can  use  flooded  and saline  areas  no  longer  suitable  for  crops  to
cultivate fish. Farmers  can also  recycle water used  for  fish  culture  to  moderate  swings
between drought and flood. Effect  of  global  warming  on  climate  change 169 Negative
impacts : Climate change will have a negative impact on fisheries both directly and indirectly. 
Fisheries  will  be  impacted  by changing  water  levels  and  flooding  events; temperature 
changes  will  cause  a  shift  in the range  of  fish  species  and  a  disruption  to  the
reproductive patterns of fish. Rising sea levels could  also  affect  important  fishery  nursery
areas.  Warming  can  increase  disease transmission and have an influence on marine
pathogens.  Because  of  their  comparatively small  or  weak  economies,  a  number  of
countries  that  are  heavily  dependent  on  fish have low capacity to adapt to change. The effects
of climate change on livestock : In pastoral and agropastoral systems, livestock
is a key asset  for poor people, fulfilling multiple economic,  social  and  risk  management
functions.  The  impact  of  climate  change  is expected to heighten the vulnerability of livestock
systems and reinforce existing factors that are affecting livestock production systems, such as
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rapid  population  and  economic  growth,  rising demand  for  food  and  products,  conflict  over
scarce resources. For rural communities losing livestock  assets  could  trigger  a  collapse  into
chronic  poverty  and  have  lasting  effect  on livelihoods. The direct effects of climate change
will include, for example, higher temperatures and  changing  rainfall  patterns  which  could
translate into the increased spread of existing vector-borne  diseases  and  macroparasites,
accompanied by the emergence and circulation of  new  diseases.  In  some  areas,  climate
change could also generate new transmission models.
These effects will be evident in both developed and developing countries, but the pressure will
be greatest on developing countries, because of their lack of resources, knowledge, veterinary
and  extension  services,  and  research technology development. Some of the indirect
effects will be brought about by changes in the feed  resources linked to the carrying capacity of 
range  lands,  the  buffering  abilities  of ecosystems,  intensified  desertification processes, 
increased  scarcity  of  water resources, decreased grain production. Reptiles and Amphibians
The ability of reptiles and amphibians to adapt to changes in climate depends in part on their
ability to move to more suitable habitats. In the mountaineous cloud forest  of Costa Rica, the
base of the clouds has been climbing in altitude as the  climate  warms. Studies  have  shown  a
strong connection between decline in frequency of  mist  days  and  decline  in  amphibian
population  (IPCC,  2007a,b).  Sea  turtles  and crocodiles have been affected by the impact of
climate change on coral reefs and mangroves. Sea turtle population is also affected by tropical
storms.  In  North America,  many  amphibians, such  as  some  species  of  frogs  and
salamanders, lay there eggs in temporary pools that are formed in early springs after the snow
melts.  If  ponds  dry  earlier  during  the  season amphibian  population  could  suffer  (IPCC,
2007a,b). Effects on Wildlife and Habitat Our country is home to a diverse array of wildlife
ranging  from  the  highest  peaks,  to  the  driest deserts, to freshwater and marine environments
and to all the places in between. The abundant and  diverse  wildlife  resources,  which  are  so
important to our culture and well-being, face a bleak  future  if  we  do  not  address  global
warming. Wildlife depends on healthy habitats. They need: the right temperatures
fresh water food  sources places to raise their young
Climate change is altering key habitat elements that are critical to wildlife’s survival and putting
natural resources in jeopardy. Anju Agrawal 170 Temperature
Melting arctic ice removes hunting ground from Polar Bears. Warmer  water  temperatures  will 
cause population declines for trout, salmon and many  other  species  that  require  cold
water to survive. Rising ocean temperatures have already
caused massive coral bleaching, leading to the  collapse  of  these  ecosystems
which sustain huge numbers of fish. Water Larger  floods  are  expected  to  increase
erosion levels, reducing water quality and degrading aquatic habitat. Severe drought 
stress can kill plants on which wildlife depend for food and shelter,
and deprives wildlife of water sources. Food Climate  change  has  altered  food availability 
for  migratory  species;  birds arrive  on  schedule  to  find  their  food sources—insects,  seeds, 
flowering plants—have  hatched  or  bloomed  too early or not at all. Milder  winters  cause 
seasonal  food caches to spoil, so wildlife species like the Gray  Jay  depending  on  food 
stores  to survive  the  winter  are  left  without sustenance. Places to Raise Young Droughts 
caused  by  global  warming could dry  up  90  percent  of  central  U.S. wetlands, 
eliminating essential breeding habitat  for  ducks,  geese  and  other migratory  species.
Rising sea level and  changes in  salinity could decimate mangrove forests, leaving many  fish, 
shellfish,  and  other  wildlife without  a  place  to  breed,  feed  or  raise offspring. Often 
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overlooked,  just  as  important  as  the many  ways  in  which  our  climate  is  changing,
is that it is changing so fast and thus the need to address global warming. Species may not be
able to adapt to this rapid climate change or to move  fast  enough  to  more  suitable  areas  as
their  current  areas  become  less  suitable  for them.  Unless  significant  action  is  taken  now,
global  warming  will  likely  become  the  single
most important factor to affect wildlife since the emergence of mankind. Global Warming Has
Devastating Effect on Coral Reefs The biologists say that eight years after warming
seas caused the worst coral die-off on record, coral reefs in the Indian Ocean are still unable to 
recover. Many  reefs  have been  reduced to rubble, a collapse that has deprived fish of food
and shelter. The  first  long-term  study  of  the  effects  of warming-
caused bleaching on coral reefs and fish and as a result fish diversity has tumbled
by half in some areas. Warming Oceans Small but prolonged  rises  in sea temperature force 
coral  colonies  to  expel  their  symbiotic, food-producing  algae,  a  process  known  as
bleaching. While  the  dying  reefs,  which  turn ghostly  white,  can  recover from  such  events,
many do not. Climate change and sustainable agricultural productivity
The Intergovernmental Panel on climate change makes  it  clear  that  warming  of  the  climate
system  is  “unequivocal”  as  observations  of increases  in  air  and  ocean  temperatures,
widespread melting of  snow and ice, and sea level rise have made evident (IPCC, 2007a,b).
Effect  of  global  warming  on  climate  change 171 Ag riculture  therefore,  has  to  cope  with
increased climate variability and more extreme weathers. Climate  change,  coincident  with 
increasing human population and consequent demand for
food, feed, fibre and fuel, has the potential to irreversibly damage the natural resource base
on which agriculture depends and is a resultant threat  to  food  insecurity.  The  relationship
between  climate  change  and  agriculture  is manifold and climate change adversely affects
climate. Agriculture in this scenario has to find ways to feed the world with an environmentally,
socially and economically sustainable manner. The path that agriculture practices at present is
not sustainable nor it can feed the world without destroying the planet.
The Green Revolution drove widespread shifts in agriculture sector from subsistence and low
external input agriculture to monocropping with
high yielding varieties (HYVs). This agricultural paradigm required the adoption of a number of
factors  namely irrigation,  chemical pesticides, fertilizers  and  hybrid  seeds  bred  for  disease
resistence and high yield. By the 1970s, Green Revolution  –style  farming  had  replaced  the
traditional  farming  practices  of  millions  of developing  country  farmers. As  time  passed
that is roughly in 1990s, almost 75% of Asian rice areas were sown with these new varieties.
Green  revolution  later  ensued  a  shift  from diversity to monocultures, which caused many
traditional varieties to disappear and many local varieties  erupted.  Maintaining  agricultural
biodiversity is vital to long term food security as it is vital insurance against crop and livestock
disease outbreaks and improves the long term resilience of rural livelihoods to adverse trends or 
shocks  (Pimbert,  1999).  Other  costs  of Green  revolution  were  the  financial  costs  of
building huge dams for irrigation, the financial costs required for construction and operation of
the  projects,  heath  costs  incurred  due  to chemical contamination of food, costs involved
in soil losses from increasingly degraded soils, genetic  erosion  and  draining  of  groundwater
aquifers  (Alvares,  1996).  Green  Revolution farming  systems  also  required  substantial
irrigation, putting further strain on world’s limited water  resources. Productivity declines: Rice
as a case study Recently,  the  productivity  of  rice  and  other
cereals in green revolution area has declined. The data is best obtained from long term trials
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conducted by the International Rice Research Institute  (IRRI).  The  objective  is  to  monitor

maximum  yields  obtained  over  time,  holding knowledge best available cultivars and scientific
management,  rice  yields,  holding  input  levels constant, decline over long term (Pingali et al.,
1997). Sustainable agriculture as an option Agriculture  needs  to  undergo  for  a  radical
overhaul to address these issues in the era of climate  change.  This  is  not  just  because  it  is
important to take care of the environment, but also  because  sustainability  is  absolutely
necessary for the continuation of the productivity of  the  agro-ecosystem.  Threats  to
environmental sustainability of agriculture have threatened agriculture itself. A greater emphasis
is  needed for  safeguarding  natural  resources and  agroecological  practices,  as  well  as  on
tapping the wide range of traditional knowledge held by local communities and farmers, which
can work in partnership with formal science and technology.  It  stresses  that  sustainable
agriculture that is biodiversity-based, including agro-ecology and organic farming, is resilient,
productive, beneficial to poor farmers, and will allow adaptation to climate change.
Sustainable agricultural approaches can be in many  forms,  such  as  agro-ecology,  organic
agriculture,  ecological  agriculture,  biological agriculture, etc. Despite adequate global food
production,  many  still  go  hungry  because Anju Agrawal 172 increased food  supply  does 
not  automatically mean increased food security. It is important to
assess the food produces and the technology and knowledge to produce and the purchasing
power  to  acquire  it.  Sustainable  agriculture approaches thus allow farmers to improve local
food production with low cost, readily available technologies  and  inputs  without  causing
environmental damage. Sustainable agriculture is productive One  criticism  of  sustainable 
agriculture, especially organic agriculture, is that it cannot meet  the  world’s  food  demands, 
primarily because of low yields and insufficient organic fertilizer.  In  general,  organic  yields 
can  be broadly  comparable  to  conventional  yields  in developing  countries,  organic 
practices  can greatly increase productivity, particularly if the existing system has low-input
Organic farming is the form of agriculture that relies  on  techniques  such  as  crop  rotation,
green  manure,  compost  and  biological  pest control to maintain soil productivity and control
pests on a farm. Organic farming excludes or strictly limits the use of manufactured fertilizers,
pesticides  (which  include  herbicides, insecticides  and  fungicides),  plant  growth regulators 
such  as  hormones,  livestock antibiotics,  food  additives,  and  genetically
modified organisms (DGARD). Organic agricultural methods are internationally
regulated and legally enforced by many nations, based in large part on the standards set by the
International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM), an international umbrella
organization for organic farming organizations established  in  1972  (Paull,  2010).  IFOAM
defines the overarching goal of organic farming as:
“Organic agriculture is a production system that sustains  the  health  of  soils,  ecosystems  and
people.  It  relies  on  ecological  processes, biodiversity  and  cycles  adapted  to  local
conditions,  rather  than  the  use  of  inputs  with adverse effects. Organic agriculture combines
tradition, innovation and science to benefit the shared  environment  and  promote  fair
relationships  and  a  good  quality  of  life  for  all involved.” (Lasalle and Hepperly 2008).
International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFAOM) Since  1990,  the  market 
for  organic  products has grown from nothing, reaching $55 billion in 2009  according  to 
Organic  Monitor.  This demand  has  driven  a  similar  increase  in
organically managed farmland. Approximately 37,000,000 hectares  (91,000,000  acres)
worldwide  are  now  farmed  organically, representing approximately 0.9 percent of total
world farmland (2009) (Table 2). Climate change A recent study has found that organic methods
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could  produce  enough  food  on  a  global  per capita  basis  to  sustain  the  current  human
population,  and  potentially  an  ever  larger population, without putting more farmland into
production. The researchers examined a global dataset of 293 examples, and found that on an
average,  in  developed  countries,  organic system produces 92% of the yield produced by
conventional  agriculture.  In  developing countries,  however  organic  systems  produce 80% 
more  than  conventional  farms.  Organic agriculture emphasizes closed nutrient cycles,
biodiversity,  and  effective  soil  management providing  the  capacity  to  mitigate  and  even
reverse the effects of climate change. Organic agriculture can decrease fossil fuel emissions
and, like any well managed agricultural system, sequesters carbon in the soil. The elimination of 
synthetic  nitrogen  in  organic  systems decreases  fossil  fuel  consumption  by  33 percent  and 
carbon  sequestration  takes  CO2 out of the atmosphere by putting it in the soil in the form of 
organic matter  which is often  lost in  conventionally  managed  soils.  Carbon Effect  of  global 
warming  on  climate  change 173 sequestration  occurs  at  especially  high  levels in organic no-
till managed soil. Agriculture  has  been  undervalued  and
underestimated as a means to combat global climate  change.  Soil  carbon  data  show  that
regenerative organic agricultural practices are among  the  most  effective  strategies  for
mitigating  CO2 emissions. For  a  number  of  years,  there  have  been
concerns that climate change negotiations will essentially  ignore  a  key  principle  of  climate
change  negotiation  frameworks: the  common but differentiated responsibilities.
This notion of climate justice is typically ignored by  many  rich  nations  and  their  mainstream
media, making it easy to blame China, India and
other developing countries for failures in climate change mitigation negotiations. Development 
expert,  Martin  Khor,  calculated that  taking  historical  emissions  into  account,
the rich countries owe a carbon debt because they  have  already  used  more  than  their  fair
quota of emissions. Yet, by 2050 when certain emission reductions
are needed by, their reduced emissions will still add up to be go over their fair share. However,
rather than continue down the path of unequal development,  industrialized  nations  can  help
pay  off  their  carbon  debt  by  truly  helping emerging  countries  develop  along  a  cleaner
path, such as through the promised-but-barelydelivered  technology  transfer,  finance,  and
capacity building. So far however, rich nations have done very little
within the Kyoto protocol to reduce emissions by any meaningful amount, while they are all for
negotiating a follow on treaty that brings more pressure  to  developing  countries  to  agree  to
emissions targets. In effect, the more there will be delay the more
the poor nations will have to save the Earth with their  sacrifices  (and  if  it  works,  as  history
shows, the rich and powerful will find a way to rewrite history to claim they were the ones that
saved the planet).The climate is changing and the  earth  is  warming  up,  and  there  is  now
overwhelming  scientific  consensus  that  it  is happening,  and  human-induced.  With  global
warming on the increase and species and their habitats  on  the  decrease,  chances  for
ecosystems to adapt naturally are diminishing. Many have agreed that climate change may be
one  of the  greatest  threats  facing  the  planet. Recent years show increasing temperatures in
various regions, and/or increasing extremities in weather patterns. So we have to cut down on
our way of living. References Alvares, C (ed.) (1996) The organic farming sourcebook.
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