Tertiary and Quaternary Activities
• Tertiary activities are related to the service sector. Manpower is an important component of the service sector as most of the tertiary activities are performed by skilled labour, professionally trained experts and consultants.
• Tertiary activities include both production and exchange. The production involves the ‘provision’ of services that are ‘consumed’. Exchange, involves trade, transport and communication facilities that are used to overcome distance.
Types of Tertiary Activities
• Trade, transport, communication and services are four types of tertiary activities.
Trade and commerce
• Trade is essentially buying and selling of items produced elsewhere. It is intended for profit. The towns and cities where all these works take place are known us trading centres.
• Trading centres are divided as rural and urban marketing centres.
→ Rural marketing centres cater to nearby settlements. These are quasi-urban centres. They serve as trading centres of the most rudimentary type. Professional and personal centres are not well developed. These act as local collecting and distributing centres. Most have mandis (wholesale markets) as well as retailing areas. Periodic markets in rural area are found where no regular market is available. These markets are held on specified dates and move from one place to another.
→ Urban marketing centres have more widely specialised urban services. Urban centres, therefore, offer manufactured goods as well as many specialised markets develop, e.g. markets for labour, housing, semi or finished products. Services of educational institutions and professionals such as teachers, lawyers, consultants, physicians, dentists and veterinary doctors are available.
→ Departmental stores delegate the responsibility and authority to departmental heads for purchasing of commodities and for overseeing the sale in different sections of the stores.
→ Chain stores are able to purchase merchandise most economically, often going so far as to direct the goods to be manufactured to their specification.
Retail Trading
• This is the business activity concerned with the sale of goods directly to the consumers.
• Most of the retail trading takes place in fixed establishments or stores solely devoted to selling.
• Street peddling, handcarts, trucks, door-to-door, mail-order, telephone, automatic vending machines and internet are examples of non-store retail trading.
Wholesale Trading
• Wholesale trading constitutes bulk business through numerous intermediary merchants and supply houses and not through retail stores.
• It often extend credit to retail stores to such an extent that the retailer operates very largely on the wholesaler’s capital.
Transport
• Transport is a service or facility by which people, materials and manufactured goods are physically carried from one location to another.
• Transport distance can be measured as: km distance or actual distance of route length; time distance or the time taken to travel on a particular route; and cost distance or the expense of travelling on a route.
Network
• A network is a well developed transport system that is made up of nodes and links. A node is a meeting point of two or more routes and every road that joins any two nodes is called a link.
Factors Affecting Transport
• Demand for transport is influenced by the size of population. The larger the population size, the greater is the demand for transport.
• Routes depend on: location of cities, towns, villages, industrial centres and raw materials, pattern of trade between them, nature of the landscape between them, type of climate, and funds available for overcoming obstacles along the length of the route.
Communication
• Communication services involve the transmission of words and messages, facts and ideas.
• Where the transport network is efficient, communications are easily spread.
• Certain developments, such as mobile telephony and satellites, have made communications independent of transport.
Telecommunications
• The recent advancements like mobile telephony have made communications direct and instantaneous at any time and from anywhere.
• Radio and television also help to relay news, pictures, and telephone calls to vast audiences around the world and hence they are termed as mass media.
• Newspapers are able to cover events in all corners of the world.
• The internet has truly revolutionised the global communication system.
Services
• Services occur at many different levels. Some are geared to industry, some to people, and some to both industry and people, e.g. the transport systems.
• Low-order services, such as grocery shops and laundries, are more common and widespread than high-order services or more specialised ones like those of accountants, consultants and physicians.
• Services are provided to individual consumers who can afford to pay for them.
• Many services have now been regulated. State and union legislation have established corporations to supervise and control the marketing of such services as transport, telecommunication, energy and water supply.
• Professional services are primarily health care, engineering, law and management.
• Personal services are made available to the people to facilitate their work in daily life.
People engaged in Tertiary Activities
• Services are provided in all societies. But in more developed countries a higher percentage of workers is employed in providing services as compared to less developed countries.
Some Selected Examples
Tourism
• Tourism is travel undertaken for purposes of recreation rather than business.
• It has become the world’s single largest tertiary activity in total registered jobs (250 million) and total revenue (40 per cent of the total GDP).
• Tourism fosters the growth of infrastructure industries, retail trading, and craft industries (souvenirs).
Tourist Regions
• The warmer places around the Mediterranean Coast and the West Coast of India are some of the popular tourist destinations in the world.
• Others include winter sports regions, found mainly in mountainous areas, and various scenic landscapes and national parks.
• Historic towns also attract tourists, because of the monument, heritage sites and cultural activities.
Factors Affecting Tourism
• Demand: Improvements in standard of living and increased leisure time permit people to visit places.
• Transport: The opening-up of tourist areas has been aided by improvement in transport facilities. Travel is easier by car, with better road systems. More significant in recent years has been the expansion in air transport.
Tourist Attractions
• Climate: Most people from colder regions expect to have warm, sunny weather for beach holidays.
• Landscape: Many people like to spend their holidays in an attractive environment, which often means mountains, lakes, spectacular sea coasts and landscapes not completely altered by man.
• History and Art: People visit ancient or picturesque towns and archaeological sites, and enjoy exploring castles, palaces and churches.
• Culture and Economy: These attract tourists with a penchant for experiencing ethnic and local customs.
Medical Services for Overseas Patients in India
• India has emerged as the leading country of medical tourism in the world. World class hospitals located in metropolitan cities cater to patients all over the world.
• Beyond medical tourism, is the trend of outsourcing of medical tests and data interpretation.
• Hospitals in India, Switzerland and Australia have been performing certain medical services – ranging from reading radiology images, to interpreting Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) and ultrasound tests.
Quaternary Activities
• Quaternary activities involve some of the following: the collection, production and dissemination of information or even the production of information.
• Quaternary activities centre around research, development and may be seen as an advanced form of services involving specialised knowledge and technical skills.
Quinary Activities
• The highest level of decision makers or policy makers perform quinary activities.
• Quinary activities are services that focus on the creation, re-arrangement and interpretation of new and existing ideas; data interpretation and the use and evaluation of new technologies.
• Outsourcing or contracting out is giving work to an outside agency to improve efficiency and to reduce costs.
• It has resulted in the opening up of a large number of call centres in India, China, Eastern Europe, Israel, Philippines and Costa Rica.
• New trends in quinary services include knowledge processing outsourcing (KPO) and ‘home shoring’, the latter as an alternative to outsourcing.
• The KPO industry is distinct from Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) as it involves highly skilled workers.
• Examples of KPOs include research and development (R and D) activities, e-learning, business research, intellectual property (IP) research, legal profession and the banking sector.
The Digital Divide
• There are wide ranging economic, political and social differences among countries.
• While developed countries in general have surged forward, the developing countries have lagged behind and this is known as the digital divide.
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History – Themes
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Science – Contemporary World Politics |
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– Politics
in India since Independence |
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Geography – Indian
People and Economy |
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– Fundamental of Human Geography |
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Chapter 1: - Population: Distribution, Density, Growth
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Chapter 12: - Geographical Perspective on Selected
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