NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 13 The chapter in three points — Before we move on…

Book page 193 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

In this chapter, we learnt about economic and non-economic activities.

Answer

The whole chapter turns on one dividing line, and it is worth being able to state it in a single breath.

Economic activity — involves money, or is done in exchange for money or money’s worth
Non-economic activity — earns no income or wealth; done out of gratitude, love, care and respect

	Economic activity	Non-economic activity
Money involved?	Yes — money or money’s worth is exchanged	No
Purpose	To earn an income and to produce goods and services	To help, to care, to give back, to serve
Examples from the chapter	Selling school bags in the market; a farmer selling produce; a lawyer earning a fee; a truck driver carrying goods; workers in a car factory; Geeta Aunty in the Air Force; Rajesh selling a chair	Parents cooking food; helping children with schoolwork; youth caring for grandparents; the family renovating the house; free Geography classes; sevā and langar; Swachh Bharat Abhiyan; Van Mahotsav
How the doer is paid	Salary, wage, fee, payment in kind, or profit	Not paid — the return is satisfaction, gratitude and a stronger family or community
Counted in the country’s income?	Yes	Usually not — which is why this work is so easily overlooked

One line for revision: the difference is the payment, not the person and not the importance of the work. The same person may do both in one day, and the same task may be economic for one person and non-economic for another.

Q2.

We also learnt about the value addition that economic activities create.

Answer

Value addition is the increase in an item’s value at each stage of turning it into something else. Page 189: economic activities “add value at each stage of the process of transforming something into another form. This is called value addition.”

Value added at a stage = value of what comes out − cost of what went in
Rajesh: ₹1,000 − ₹600 = ₹400

It is not only carpenters. Follow one shirt from the field to Anu’s parents’ shop and watch the value climb at every pair of hands:

Stage	Who works on it	What it becomes	Value added by
1	Farmer	Cotton grown and picked	Ploughing, sowing, watering, harvesting
2	Ginning and spinning mill worker	Cotton becomes yarn	Cleaning, carding and spinning
3	Weaver / power-loom worker	Yarn becomes cloth	Weaving, dyeing, printing
4	Tailor	Cloth becomes a shirt	Cutting, stitching, finishing
5	Truck driver	The shirt reaches the town	Transport — a shirt in a warehouse is worth less than a shirt in a shop
6	Shopkeeper (Anu’s parents)	The shirt reaches the buyer	Stocking the right sizes, displaying, advising, selling

Why this idea is important: it shows exactly where money comes from in an economy — from work, not from nowhere. Every rupee of the final price is somebody’s skill, time and effort at some stage of the chain. And it shows why a country that only sells raw material earns far less than one that also processes it: the value is added by the working, not by the owning.

Q3.

We understood how non-economic activities contribute to social welfare, personal wellbeing and enhance the overall quality of life.

Answer

Take the three phrases one at a time — the chapter gives an example of each.

What it contributes to	What it means	The chapter’s example
Social welfare	The good of people outside your own family — the neighbourhood, the community, the nation	The langar that “serve[s] food to every visitor for free”; the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, whose “collective efforts … lead to a clean home, neighbourhood, society and nation”; Van Mahotsav plantation drives
Personal wellbeing	What the work does for the person who does it and for those closest to them	These practices “foster a sense of satisfaction and gratitude for what we have”; parents cooking and helping with schoolwork; youth caring for grandparents
Overall quality of life	Everything that makes a place good to live in, which no salary can buy for you alone	Clean streets and parks, trees and shade, festivals worth being part of, neighbours you can count on

Why a society needs both kinds of activity. Economic activities give a country its goods, services and incomes. Non-economic activities give it something economic activities cannot buy — care, trust, cleanliness that lasts after the sweeper has gone home, and citizens willing to do a thing simply because it needs doing. A place with plenty of the first and none of the second would be rich and unpleasant to live in. This chapter asks you to see both, and to respect both.

The chapter’s closing thought, in Vivekananda’s words from page 183: “When you are doing any work, do not think of anything beyond. Do it as worship, as the highest worship, and devote your whole life to it for the time being.” He is not talking about grand work. He is saying that the value of work lies in how it is done, not in what it pays — which is exactly why the pilot, the bulldozer technician, the farm labourer, the shopkeeper, the grandfather in his vegetable garden and the parent in the kitchen all belong in the same chapter.

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