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NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 1 Mapping two natural resources and weighing the cost of extracting them — Let's Explore

Book page 10 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
Select any two natural resources. Gather information about their availability across different parts of India. Mark them on a map. What do you observe about their distribution? What are the types of economic activities connected with them?
Answer

Choose two resources that behave differently — one mineral and one renewable — so that the contrast in the map itself teaches you something. Worked below with iron ore and solar energy.

How to do it: take an outline map of India, give each resource its own symbol and colour in a legend, mark the main areas from Fig. 1.11 and from an atlas or a State government portal, and write one line under the map saying where each figure came from.

Iron ore (non-renewable)Solar energy (renewable)
Where it is foundOdisha (Keonjhar, Mayurbhanj), Jharkhand (Gua), Chhattisgarh (Bailadila, Durg), Karnataka (Ballari, Chitradurga, Kudremukh, Tumkur), Goa, Maharashtra (Ratnagiri, Chandrapur) — all marked on Fig. 1.11Strongest in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Ladakh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu — the chapter notes on page 5 that most of India has abundant sunshine
Pattern on the mapPoints. A few dense clusters; blank almost everywhere else. It exists only where particular rocks formedA gradient. Available everywhere, more intense in the dry north-west and thinner where cloud cover is high. Nothing has to be transported
Economic activitiesMining; crushing and beneficiation; railway and port haulage (Paradip, Visakhapatnam, Mormugao); iron and steel plants at Bokaro, Bhilai, Rourkela; engineering, automobile, construction and railway industries downstream; mining townshipsSolar parks such as Bhadla in Rajasthan (Fig. 1.21) and the farm near Raichur, Karnataka (Fig. 1.22); panel and inverter manufacture; rooftop installation and maintenance; solar pumps for irrigation; grid transmission
LimitsA finite stock. Once a deposit is mined out, the town must find something else to live onNo stock to exhaust, but it needs land, storage for the night, and a grid to carry it to where people live

What you observe: a non-renewable is located — it fixes industry and settlement to a few spots, and everything else must come to it. A renewable like sunshine is distributed — it lets economic activity spread out instead of concentrating. That difference, and not just the quantity, is why the chapter treats the two categories separately.

Q2.
Discuss the implications of extracting the natural resources in those parts for current and future generations. Suggest ways in which we can use Nature's gifts in responsible ways.
Answer

Extraction gives real benefits now and imposes real costs later, and the chapter asks you to hold both in view at once.

For the present generationFor future generations
Gains: employment for local people; townships with schools, hospitals and transport; economic opportunities for others too; raw material for steel, cement and power; revenue for the State (page 9)Losses: the deposit is smaller or gone; India's coal is estimated to last about another 50 years (page 8)
Costs: displacement of people living in resource-rich areas; sacred places under threat, leading to conflicts (pages 9–10); dust, noise and polluted water around mines and cement plants (page 15)Degraded land and forest; a lowered water table; pollutants that persist — the chemicals dissolved in Punjab's groundwater are already a health hazard (page 13)
The benefit is concentrated and immediateThe cost is diffuse and delayed — which is exactly why it is easy to discount

Responsible ways to use Nature's gifts — the chapter's own prescriptions:

  • Match the rate of use to the rate of renewal. Timber only as fast as the forest grows; groundwater only as fast as it recharges. This is the single test that keeps a renewable renewable (page 6).
  • Stretch the non-renewables by using them judiciously, so they last long enough for humanity to find more sustainable alternatives (pages 8 and 17).
  • Recycle and repurpose — the chapter opens with exactly this idea, a regenerative economy that repurposes used resources, minimises waste and replenishes depleted resources.
  • Restore what has been taken. Refill and replant mined land with native species; revive ponds and tanks; harvest rainwater (pages 5 and 12).
  • Treat waste before it leaves the factory, so the river is not asked to absorb what it cannot break down (page 7); follow the Central Pollution Control Board's guidelines, as cement factories are required to (page 15).
  • Use less polluting materials — stone, mud, plant-based and recycled materials in place of some cement (page 15).
  • Include the people of the place in the decision, in the employment and in the compensation, so that development does not begin with displacement.
  • Add value at home. Converting ore into steel, and steel into machines, is how a region escapes the ‘paradox of plenty' — this is why India invested in such industries (page 11).
Why this is a question about fairness, not only about supply: the people who gain from extraction and the people who bear its cost are often not the same people — and future generations, who will inherit the exhausted deposit and the polluted aquifer, cannot argue their case at all. That is the thought behind lokasangraha on page 19: to act for the wellbeing of all, we have to count those who are not in the room.
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