UPMSP Intermediate Sociology flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Sex ratio

Number of females per 1,000 males. India's 2011 Census recorded 943 overall and a child sex ratio of 919 for ages 0–6, reflecting continuing son preference.

Demographic dividend

The economic advantage arising when a large share of the population is of working age and dependants are relatively few. It lasts only if jobs and skills expand.

Decadal growth rate

The percentage change in a population over ten years. India's growth fell from 21.5% in 1991–2001 to 17.7% in 2001–11, indicating declining fertility.

Jajmani system

Traditional rural exchange in which hereditary service castes received grain, land or patronage from cultivating households in return for services, tying caste closely to occupation and economic dependence.

Endogamy

The rule that marriage must take place within one's own group - caste, clan, religion or sub-caste. Endogamy is the mechanism that reproduces caste boundaries across generations.

Matrilineal kinship

Descent traced through the mother's line, as among the Khasi, Garo and Nair, where clan membership and often property pass from mother to daughter rather than father to son.

Varna and jati

Varna is the four-fold textual ideal of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra; jati is the many local endogamous birth groups that actually organise everyday caste life.

Social embeddedness

The idea, associated with Polanyi and Granovetter, that economic transactions are enmeshed in social ties, trust and norms, so markets cannot be explained by individual calculation alone.

Periodic market

A weekly or bi-weekly rural haat held on fixed days, where producers and traders gather to exchange goods; it lowers transport and storage costs for small sellers.

Fictitious commodities

Polanyi's term for labour, land and money when treated as goods to be bought and sold, although none of the three was produced for sale in a market.

Graded inequality

Ambedkar's description of caste as a hierarchy of ranked groups in which each accepts its position relative to those above and below, weakening solidarity against the system.

Mandal Commission

Commission chaired by B.P. Mandal (1980) that estimated Other Backward Classes at 52% of the population and recommended 27% reservation, implemented by the government in 1990.

Creamy layer

In Indra Sawhney (1992) the Supreme Court excluded better-off members of Other Backward Classes from reservation. The principle applies to OBCs, not to SCs and STs.

Social exclusion

The process by which groups are denied full access to institutions, resources and participation - in housing, education, marriage or public space - rather than merely having low income.

Sarva dharma samabhava

The Indian secular ideal of equal respect for all religions, as distinct from the Western model of strict separation between state and religious institutions.

Communalism

Politics that treats religious communities as homogeneous, mutually hostile blocs. Analysts distinguish communal consciousness, communal mobilisation and communal violence as escalating levels.

States Reorganisation Act 1956

Law redrawing most state boundaries largely along linguistic lines, following the creation of Andhra in 1953 after Potti Sriramulu's fast; it shaped Indian federalism.

Drain of wealth

Dadabhai Naoroji's argument that colonial rule transferred India's surplus to Britain through home charges, tribute and unequal trade, financing British economic development.

Deindustrialisation

The decline of Indian handicrafts and artisan industries under colonial rule, caused by machine-made British imports, railway freight policies and tariff arrangements favouring metropolitan industry.

Urbanism as a way of life

Louis Wirth's thesis that city size, density and heterogeneity produce impersonal, secondary and segmental relationships, generating a distinctive urban social psychology and form of association.

Green Revolution

The adoption of high-yielding wheat and rice varieties together with irrigation, fertiliser and price support from the mid-1960s, raising output mainly in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh.

Zamindari abolition

Post-independence laws removing intermediary landlords between the state and cultivators. They succeeded in many states but left loopholes and insecure tenancy for actual tillers.

MGNREGA

A 2005 law guaranteeing up to 100 days of unskilled wage employment per rural household each year, with a legal right to timely payment and works sited within 5 km.

Formal and informal sector

The organised sector offers regulated wages, written contracts and social security; the unorganised or informal sector, employing about 90% of Indian workers, largely does not.

Alienation

Marx's concept that workers separated from ownership and control of what they produce experience labour as an external, coercive force rather than as creative, self-realising activity.

Taylorism

Scientific management that breaks work into narrowly timed, repetitive tasks to raise efficiency; it separates conception from execution and tends to deskill craft labour.

Article 17

The constitutional provision abolishing untouchability and forbidding its practice in any form; the Protection of Civil Rights Act 1955 makes its enforcement a punishable offence.

Universal adult franchise

The principle that every citizen aged 18 or above may vote regardless of caste, sex, property or education; adopted in 1950, with the voting age lowered from 21 in 1989.

Public interest litigation

A judicial innovation from the late 1970s allowing any citizen or organisation to petition the courts on behalf of the poor, environment or prisoners, relaxing the traditional rule of locus standi.

Glocalisation

The adaptation of global products, media and ideas to local tastes and meanings, producing hybrid cultural forms rather than uniform global homogeneity.

New social movements

Late twentieth-century movements organised around identity, environment, gender and human rights rather than class-based redistribution, typically using networks, symbols and direct protest.

Chipko movement

A 1973 forest protest in Chamoli, Uttarakhand, where villagers, especially women, hugged trees to block commercial felling, linking ecological protection with local livelihood rights.