Write short note : Social Consequences of Globalisation. (2004)
Anthony Giddens (The Consequences of Modernity, 1990) defined globalisation as the intensification of worldwide social relations linking distant localities, so that local events are shaped by happenings far away. Dated in India to the reforms of 1991, its consequences are not uniform: it redistributed opportunity upward and risk downward, and culturally produced hybridity rather than sameness.
Stratification and the new middle class
- It created a visible, consumption-defined middle class that Satish Deshpande reads as a class speaking for the nation while pursuing its own interest. André Béteille insisted that inequality changes form rather than disappearing, its idiom shifting from caste rank to educational and occupational advantage.
- The World Inequality Lab (2024) found the top one per cent holding 22.6 per cent of income and 40.1 per cent of wealth in 2022-23, the highest concentration in a century.
Work and informalisation
- PLFS 2025 records 56.2 per cent of workers self-employed and 20.2 per cent casual against 23.6 per cent in regular wage work: growth has not generated secure employment.
- Manuel Castells’s network society explains it: capital and information move instantly, labour does not, and the unconnected are switched off. NITI Aayog projects 2.35 crore gig workers by 2029-30; the Code on Social Security, 2020 recognises them but is not fully operational, so Rajasthan (2023) and Karnataka (2024) legislated first.
- Zygmunt Bauman (Globalization: The Human Consequences, 1998) named the asymmetry — tourists and vagabonds — mobility being the new stratifying resource.
Culture: homogenisation, glocalisation, hybridity
- Roland Robertson’s glocalization holds that the global is always realised in local particularity, and Arjun Appadurai (Modernity at Large, 1996) analysed global flows as disjunctive scapes — ethno-, media-, techno-, finance- and ideoscapes — with imagination itself becoming a social practice.
- India bears this out: consumption is overwhelmingly in Indian languages and global formats are indigenised. Dipankar Gupta (Mistaken Modernity, 2000) supplies the caution — westernised consumption has spread far faster than modern attitudes to hierarchy and merit.
Family, gender and caste
- Kinship has stretched, not broken: transnational households sustained by remittances of $129 billion in 2024, the world’s largest, are joint in obligation while dispersed in residence.
- Female labour force participation stands at 40.0 per cent (PLFS 2025), but urban female unemployment of 6.4 per cent and unpaid care work qualify any claim of emancipation.
- The Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (2005) argues that markets erode caste by making the buyer indifferent to the seller’s birth. Devesh Kapur, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Lant Pritchett and D. Shyam Babu (EPW, 2010), surveying Dalits in two Uttar Pradesh districts, held that consumption measures miss the changes in socially structured inequality that matter. Yet NCRB recorded 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2023: the market has not dissolved caste.
Identity, risk and the losers
Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems framework locates India in a hierarchy it does not control, and Ulrich Beck adds that the risks generated — ecological, financial, epidemic — are globalised while protection is not. Castells’s resistance identity explains why religious, regional and caste assertion has grown, not shrunk. The digital divide marks the excluded: rural internet penetration of 48.31 per 100 against urban 126.80 (TRAI, early 2026).
Conclusion
Globalisation in India has been integrative and polarising at once. It widened opportunity while sharpening inequality, and the decisive variable is not the global force but the domestic institutions that distribute its gains.