Why industries cluster where they do — and India's major industrial regions.
Industrial location depends on access to raw materials, power, labour, capital, market and transport. Heavy industries (iron & steel) tend to locate near raw material sources (coal/iron ore), while footloose industries (electronics, IT) can locate more freely, often clustering near skilled labour and infrastructure.
India's classic industrial belts include the Hugli Industrial Region (West Bengal), the Mumbai-Pune belt, the Bengaluru-Tamil Nadu belt, the Ahmedabad-Vadodara region in Gujarat, and the Chotanagpur industrial belt (Jharkhand-Odisha-West Bengal-Chhattisgarh) built around iron and steel, given proximity to coal and iron ore.
Since the 1990s, IT and IT-enabled services have created new industrial geographies — Bengaluru ("India's Silicon Valley"), Hyderabad, Pune, and the NCR — driven less by raw materials and more by skilled talent, telecom infrastructure and government-promoted Software Technology Parks (STPs) and Special Economic Zones (SEZs).
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