Breaking down the question
The question asks you to discuss the striking issues of development-induced imbalances that need urgent attention. Three cues matter. Development-induced signals that the imbalances arise from the very process of growth, not from its absence. Imbalances points to unevenness — between regions, classes, sectors and generations. Urgent attention invites a normative close on what must be done.
The sociological argument is that development in India, pursued largely through a top-down, growth-first model, has produced gains that are real but unequally distributed, and costs — displacement, dispossession, ecological damage — borne by the weakest. A first-class answer sets out these imbalances thematically and evaluates them, rather than cataloguing schemes.
How to approach it
Frame the answer with a distinction between growth and development in Amartya Sen's sense — development as the expansion of capabilities, against which mere growth can be judged. Then organise the striking imbalances into clear themes: regional and rural-urban disparity, sectoral imbalance between agriculture and industry, class and caste inequality within growth, development-induced displacement, ecological degradation, and social and cultural dislocation.
For each, give an Indian illustration and a sociological interpretation. Draw on A. R. Desai's critique of the state's development model and Walter Fernandes on displacement. Close by arguing for a people-centred, sustainable and inclusive development, which is the urgent attention the question seeks.
Model answer
Indian development since Independence has delivered impressive aggregate growth, yet the process has itself generated deep imbalances. Following Amartya Sen, development is properly the expansion of human capabilities; judged by that standard, growth that dispossesses and excludes is development-induced imbalance rather than genuine progress. Several such imbalances now demand urgent attention.
Regional and rural-urban imbalance. Growth has clustered in a few states and metropolitan corridors, leaving large tracts of central, eastern and tribal India behind. The gap between a prosperous urban-industrial India and a stagnant agrarian hinterland has widened, fuelling distress migration and, in the poorest districts, unrest. Development has thus deepened the very regional divides it promised to close.
Sectoral imbalance and agrarian distress. Investment and policy attention have favoured industry and services over agriculture, on which the majority still depend. The result is agrarian distress — fragmented holdings, indebtedness, volatile prices and, in extreme form, farmer suicides. A. R. Desai's critique of a state-led model that subordinates the peasantry to industrial accumulation remains pertinent: the countryside has borne the cost of a growth from which it has gained least.
Class and caste inequality within growth. Liberalised growth has enriched a propertied and educated stratum while informal and casual workers, Dalits and Adivasis have seen slower gains. This is growth without equity: national income rises but its fruits are cornered by those already advantaged, so inequality of income and opportunity sharpens even as poverty falls.
Development-induced displacement. Large dams, mines, industrial zones and highways have uprooted millions, disproportionately Adivasis. Walter Fernandes estimates that development projects have displaced a vast number of people, most inadequately resettled. Displacement destroys not only homes but livelihoods, commons and community, converting self-reliant cultivators into impoverished migrants — a striking imbalance in which the costs of national development fall on those with the least voice.
Ecological degradation. The growth model has extracted natural resources at a rate that degrades forests, water and soil. Ecological degradation is an intergenerational imbalance: present growth borrows against the environmental security of the future, while its immediate burden — polluted air, depleted aquifers, submerged forests — falls on the rural and tribal poor who depend directly on nature.
Social and cultural dislocation. Rapid, uneven development also dislocates community life — eroding tribal cultures, straining kinship supports, and producing anomie in the fringe zones between village and city. The psychological and cultural costs of dispossession are rarely counted in development accounting.
The urgent attention required. These imbalances call for a shift from growth-first to people-centred development: a fair and rights-based resettlement regime that treats the displaced as partners rather than obstacles; renewed investment in agriculture and lagging regions; environmental sustainability built into planning; and redistribution so that growth translates into capability for the poorest. Genuine development, in Sen's sense, is measured not by aggregate output but by the freedom and security it secures for the most vulnerable.
Development-induced imbalances are therefore not accidental by-products but the predictable outcome of a model that privileges accumulation over equity and the present over the future. Correcting them is urgent because unattended imbalance breeds distress, unrest and ecological crisis — and because development that leaves its weakest behind fails on its own terms.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners reward candidates who grasp the phrase development-induced — showing that the imbalances flow from the growth process itself — rather than writing a generic essay on underdevelopment. A common weakness is a scheme-by-scheme description with no analytical spine.
The strongest scripts anchor the answer in the growth-versus-development distinction, organise the imbalances into clear themes, and illustrate each with Indian evidence — displacement, agrarian distress, regional divides, ecological cost. Citing Sen, Desai and Fernandes signals reading, and a normative conclusion on people-centred, sustainable development answers the urgent attention the question invites. Analytical coherence sustained across some eight hundred words, in British spelling with em dashes, lifts a twenty-mark answer into the top band.