CIVICS-CHAPTER 31: MARKET OPPORTUNITIES

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Q1. What do you understand by market opportunities?

  • A potentially favorable condition in which a business can capitalize on a changing trend or an increasing demand for a product by a demographic group that has yet to be recognized by its competitors.
  • For a market opportunity to exist, a company must be able to identify who its potentialcustomers are, the specific needs that need to be met, the size of the market, and its capacity to capture market share

Q2. Describe the plight of cotton farmers?

  • Small cotton farmers grow cotton on small piece of land.
  • Cotton plants require high levels of inputs like fertilizers and pesticides.
  • The farmers have to incur heavy expenses for that.
  • Sometimes, farmers need to borrow money in order to meet such expenses.
  • When the time of sale comes, most of the earning goes for the repayment of the loan.
  • Moreover, cotton bolls take time to mature completely. Also these bolls do not ripe and burst at a time. So farmer remains busy all the time.
  • Thus, farmer’s condition in spite of all this hard labour remains poor and miserable.

Q3. Describe the plight of weavers?

  • The weavers are usually poor.
  • They don’t have their own money to buy looms, which are very expensive, costing about Rs20000. As one loom is not sufficient, they need two at a time
  • Hence they borrow money at high rate of interest. And whatever money they earn goes in repaying the loan,
  • Sometimes, cloth merchants place orders with weavers. They not only give them yarn, but also distribute work among them.
  • Here the weavers lose their independence because they have to depend upon on the merchants for yarn.
  • Also as the merchants are the payers, they always control the weavers.
  • They never get a reasonable price for the work they do. On the other the merchants take the cloth to cloth market and sell it to garment factories at higher price.
  • Hence the plight of the weavers is pathetic.

Q4. What is putting-out system?

A4. This is a system in which the merchant supplies the raw materials like yarn

to the weavers and in turn gets the finished product.

Q5. How do the garment exporters earn profit?

  • The garment exporters usually make different items of dress with the cloth woven by the weavers.
  • These items are then exported to big foreign buyers from US, Europe etc.
  • These foreign buyers exercise great power over the supplier. They want quality goods at the lowest possible price
  • The garment exporters maximize their profit by getting work done from the workers at the lowest price and supply to foreign buyers at cheap rates

Q6. How are weavers, merchants, exporters and foreign business men interlinked?

  • The weaver produce the cotton cloth on the order of the cloth merchant
  • The cloth merchants take the finished product (cloth) to the garment exporting factory.
  • At the garment exporting factory, several items of dresses such as shirt, pants etc. are prepared with the cloth.
  • These items of dresses are then exported to big foreign business men who are generally from USA and Europe

Q7. Write a short on market and equality?

  • The people involved in this business of buying and selling do not gain or make profits equally in this market.
  • The farmers and the weavers who work very hard do not make much profit. Their condition is miserable and borrowing money appears to be the only means of survival.
  • Small business men who buy the cloth from the weavers make more money than the weavers. Still they do not earn as much.
  • The garment exporters at the cost of poor workers, is ready to supply goods at a cheap rate to foreign buyers, keeping the margin of profit unaffected.
  • The powerful foreign buyers earn huge profits in the market, while garment exporters earn moderate profit.
  • Thus, the cotton farmers, weavers and the workers at the garment exporting factory are exploited and their condition is miserable
  • Thus there is no equality in the market.

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