Chapter 7

TERTIARY AND QUATERNARY ACTIVITIES

FACTS THAT MATTER

•Tertiary activities are related to service sector. Man power is an important component here as most of the activities are performed by skilled labour, professionally trained experts and consultants. Tertiary activities include both production and exchange.

•Production involves provision of services that are consumed and is measured in terms of wages and salaries.

•Exchange involves trade, transport and communication facilities used to overcome distance.

•It involves commercial output of services rather than production of tangible goods.

•Service sector or tertiary activities rely on specialised skills, experience and knowledge of workers.

TYPES OF TERTIARY ACTIVITIES

(a) Trade & Commerce

•Trade is buying and selling of items produced elsewhere. Trading is intended for profit. The places (towns & cities) where these works take place are known as trading centers (collection and distribution points).

•Trading centres are divided as rural and urban marketing centres.oeoin o

Rural Marketing Centres:

-Cater to rural nearby settlements (Quasi urban)

-Rudimentary type-professional and personal centres are not well developed.

- Act as local collecting and distributing centres.

- Most have mandis (wholesale markets) as well as retailing areas.

-Periodic markets in rural area where no regular market is available.

-Temporal markets are organized at different temporal intervals weekly/biweekly.

-These markets move and cover different areas on different days/dates.

-Large areas get covered by the shopkeeper.

-Cater to the local demands.

Urban Marketing Centres:

- Have more specialized urban services.

-Provide both ordinary and specialized goods.

-Specialised markets labour, housing, finished products etc. are available.

-Specialised services of lawyers, consultants, dentists, doctors are also available.

Retail Trading:

-Activity concerned with sale of goods directly to the consumers.

-Mostly it is in fixed establishments /stores devoted to selling.

-Street peddling, handcarts, trucks, door to door, internet etc. are examples ne non store retail trading.

-Consumers cooperatives, departmental stores and chain stores are examples o retail stores.

Wholesale Trading

-Constitute bulk business through intermediary merchants and suPply houses and not through retail.

-Often extend credit to retail stores and retailers operate on wholesalers capital

(b) Transport .

•A service or facility by which people, materials and manufactured goods are physically carried from one place to another.

- Efficient transport system assists in the production distribution and consumption goods. At every stage the nature of the goods is enhanced by transportation.

-It is an organized industry to satisfy our basic need of mobility.

Transport distance can be measured as

(I) Km distance or actual distance of route length

(ii) time distance - or the time taken to travel on a particular route

(iii) cost distance - or the expense of travelling on a route.

•Network and Accessibility: Different places are linked together to form a network by transport systems. Network is made up of nodes and links.

•Node is a meeting point of two or more routes point of origin and destination.

•Every road that joins two nodes is called a link.

Factors Affecting Transport Services

•Demand influenced by size of population.

•Routes - depend on location of cities, industrial centres, climate, funds available etc for overcoming obstacles along the length of route.

(c) Communication

•Involves all services involving transmission of words and messages, facts and ideas.

•Both communication and transportation together are referred to as lines of Communication.

Telecommunications

•It has drastically change communication with speed and reducing time. Mobile, internet have made it instantaneous.

•Today radio and T.V. relay messages news, pictures all around the world and hence are termed as mass media.

•Satellite communication has made the world much smaller. Internet has changed today's world and bridged distances.

(d) Services

•Occurs at many different levels - some for the industries, some for people and there are some for both.

•Lower order services (grocery, shops, laundries) are more common than higher order services (consultants physicians).

•Services are provided to consumers who can pay for them.

•Many services are regulated.

•State and union govt. have established corporations to supervise and control the marketing of some services - (energy, water, transportation).

•Service sector is both formal and informal. Organised sector follow the governments set rules and regulations for functioning.

•Unorganised service sector does not have any fixed working hours and wages - mostly the migrants who help people in daily chores come under this category.

People Engaged in Tertiary Activities

•The number of people engaged in service sector is increasing day by day while it has remained unchanged or decreasing in the primary and secondary sectors. Example:

Tourism

•Travel is undertaken for purposes of recreation rather than business.

•It is the world's single largest tertiary activity giving job opportunities to many people at different levels.

•It fosters the growth of infrastructure industries, retail trading, handicrafts industries etc.

•It adds foreign exchange to the exchequer.

Tourist Regions

•Warmer areas around Mediterranean coast and West coast of India.

•Winter sports regions, Scenic landscapes, National parks, Historic towns, Pilgrimages centres.

Factors Affecting tourism:

•Demand: Improvements in standard of living and increased leisure time permit people to visit places.

•Transport: Improvement in connectivity through land, air and water modes have helped.

Tourist attractions

(i) Climate: People from colder regions prefer to holiday in the warmer climate and vice versa.

(ii) Landscape: Attractive environment of the lakes, mountains, sea coasts are not altered by man.

(iii) History and art: People visit archaeological sites, heritage places and explore them.

(iv) Culture and Economy: Local culture and the ability of a region to provide cheaper deals attract people.

Outsourcing

•It means giving work to an outside agency to improve efficiency and to reduce costs.

-off shoring' is when work is transferred to overseas regions.

-It has created employment opportunities in countries like India, China, Egypt with cheap and skilled workers.

-Reduced outmigration from these countries.

•New trends in quaternary services include KPO or Knowledge Processing Outsourcing.

•They require highly skilled labour and enable companies to create additional business Opportunities with IT. e.g e-learning, business research, intellectual property research etc.

•BPO or Business Process Outsourcing: include IT (information technology), human resource, customer support and call centre services and sometime manufacturing as well.

Medical tourism

•It is international tourism for medical treatment.

•India has emerged as leading country of medical tourism along with Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia for its world class services.

- Medical tests and data interpretation are also out sourced along with other medical services like MRI , Ultra-sonography etc.

•This segment of the service sector is knowledge oriented. It is divided into quaternary and quinary activities.

•Quaternary activities involve collection, production and dissemination of information or even the production of information. They centre around research, development and may be seen as an advanced form of services involving specialized knowledge and technical skills.

•Quaternary activities can be outsourced and are not tied to resources, affected by environment or localized by market.

•The highest level of decision makers or policy makers perform these activities. They focus on the creation, rearrangement and interpretation of new and existing 1deas and the use and evaluation of technologies.

•Gold collar professionals Senior Business executives, govt. officials, financial legal consultants. Their importance far out weigh their numbers.

The Digital Divide

-There is a wide gap among countries as far as the information and technology based development is concerned. There are wide range of differences in economic, es political and social conditions of the countries. The dividing factor for the countries is the IT access to its people. The developed countries have gone far ahead than the developing countries. This digital divide also exists within countries -between the urban and rural areas.

We hope CBSE/MP Board Class 12th "Geography" Chapter 7 "Tertiary and Quaternary activities" will help you.

Written By - HIMANSHU SHARMA