Class 6 Social Science Chapter 14: Economic Activities Around Us Notes

Why group economic activities?

The chapter opens with a thought from Kautilya’s Arthashastra: economic activity is the root of prosperity, and without it a society faces hardship now and in the future. In Chapter 13 we saw that activities that create monetary value, value that can be measured in money, are economic activities. Long ago, most people farmed, reared animals, made tools and pots, or wove cloth. Today there are far more kinds of work: making computers, phones and drones; working in banks, schools and hotels; driving vehicles; making furniture; tailoring with machines; creating software; repairing fridges and washing machines. Grouping these activities into economic sectors helps us see how they work and how they are linked.

The three sectors

Primary sector: activities in which people depend directly on nature to produce goods, such as growing grains and vegetables, collecting wood from forests, extracting coal from mines, catching fish and collecting eggs from poultry farms. The most common are agriculture, mining, fishing, raising livestock and forestry.

Secondary sector: activities that take the outputs of the primary sector and transform them into goods. It includes construction of buildings and roads, supplying water, electricity and gas, and manufacturing in factories: grain becomes flour in mills, groundnuts give oil, tea leaves are processed into tea, wood becomes furniture and paper, cotton becomes clothes, and steel from iron ore becomes cars and trucks.

Vehicles made in India in 2022	Units
Passenger vehicles like cars	45 lakh
Commercial vehicles like trucks	10.3 lakh
Three-wheelers	8.6 lakh
Two-wheelers	2 crore

(Source given in the chapter: Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers.)

Tertiary sector: activities that support the other two by providing services we may not see but cannot do without: truck drivers carrying grain to factories and markets, vegetable vendors, doctors, nurses, teachers, lawyers and pilots, technicians and mechanics, electricians, mobile and internet services, software development, and services at hotels, banks, schools, hospitals, airports, shops and warehouses. It is also called the service sector. Read more in primary, secondary and tertiary activities.

AMUL: the sectors working together

Today, farmers in Anand district, Gujarat, milk their cows and buffaloes, sell the milk to the village dairy, and are paid at the end of the month for its quantity and quality. In the early 1940s it was different: they walked or cycled in the heat to sell milk in nearby villages before it spoiled, and middlemen bought it in bulk at very low prices. The farmers went to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who advised them to form a cooperative. AMUL (Anand Milk Union Limited) was set up in 1946, led by Tribhuvandas Patel, a lawyer and freedom fighter, and Dr Varghese Kurien, an engineer. The farmers, women among them, now took their own decisions on production, pasteurisation and sale, shared the work, and earned more. The cooperative grew, set up a factory in Anand for butter and milk powder, and today sells its products across India and exports them.

Sector	What happens in AMUL’s story
Primary	Farmers milk their cows and buffaloes
Secondary	Milk is made into milk powder, ghee, cheese, butter and more in factories
Tertiary	Lorries, trucks, railways, planes and ships carry the products; retail stores and shops sell them

Other milk cooperatives include Nandini (Karnataka), Mother Dairy (Delhi-NCR), Aavin (Tamil Nadu), Vijaya (Andhra Pradesh), Kevi (Nagaland), Sudha (Bihar) and Verka (Punjab).

From trees to textbooks

The books you study are made from pulp, the wooden fibre of trees. Trees are cut and the logs collected (primary), trucks carry them (tertiary), mills turn the pulp into paper (secondary), warehouses store it (tertiary), presses print the books (secondary) and shops sell them (tertiary). None of this would be possible without all three sectors working together. Used paper can also be recycled: recycling one tonne saves 17 trees and 2.5 cubic metres of landfill space, and takes 70 per cent less energy and water than making new paper from pulp.

The sectors depend on each other

Factories need raw materials from farms, forests and mines; farmers need tractors and tools from factories; and both need trucks, banks, shops, warehouses, phones and repair services. If one activity stops, the others are affected. Answers to every question in the chapter are in the NCERT solutions for Chapter 14.