Natural Resources and Location of Industries

What the official syllabus says

General Studies-I (Paper III), Main Written Examination:

• Distribution of key natural resources across the world (including South Asia and the Indian subcontinent); factors responsible for the location of primary, secondary, and tertiary sector industries in various parts of the world (including India).

Topics in detail

Natural resources

• Classification: renewable and non-renewable, biotic and abiotic
• Metallic minerals: iron ore, bauxite, copper, manganese; their main producing regions in the world and in India (the Chota Nagpur plateau, Odisha, Karnataka)
• Energy resources: coal, petroleum, natural gas, uranium; West Asia’s oil; India’s coalfields and oilfields
• Renewable energy potential: solar, wind, hydro, biomass
• Water, forests, land and fisheries; the world’s major fishing grounds
• South Asia and the Indian subcontinent: shared rivers, energy and mineral resources of the neighbouring countries

Factors of industrial location

• Raw materials, power, labour, market, transport, capital, water
• Government policy, incentives, industrial corridors and special economic zones
• Agglomeration economies and ‘footloose’ industries
• Weber’s theory of industrial location in outline

Primary sector

• Types of agriculture (subsistence, plantation, commercial grain, mixed farming) and where they are found
• Mining, fishing, forestry and the factors behind their location

Secondary sector

• Iron and steel, cotton textiles, sugar, cement, petrochemicals, automobiles, electronics: why each is where it is, in the world and in India
• Shifts of industry from developed to developing countries

Tertiary sector

• IT and IT-enabled services (Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurugram), finance, tourism, logistics
• Why services cluster in big cities

Further points

• Critical minerals: lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements; why they matter for clean energy and electronics
• India’s mineral belts: the Chota Nagpur plateau, the Odisha-Chhattisgarh belt, the Dharwar region of Karnataka, the Aravallis
• South Asia: hydropower in Nepal and Bhutan, natural gas in Bangladesh, resources of Myanmar and Sri Lanka; cross-border energy trade
• Industrial regions of the world: the Ruhr, the North American Great Lakes, the Pearl River Delta, Japan’s Pacific belt
• India’s industrial regions: Mumbai-Pune, the Hugli belt, Bengaluru-Chennai, Gujarat, Delhi-Gurugram-Meerut
• Clusters of small industry: Tiruppur knitwear, Surat diamonds, Moradabad brass, Panipat textiles
• Resource conflicts and the sustainable use of resources

Overlaps

• Haryana’s industrial clusters and resources: Haryana: Geography and Natural Resources.
• Industrial policy and infrastructure: HCS Mains: General Studies III.