Is progress necessarily beneficial to our society?

I feel that 'progress' can be very subjective. Therefore, my opinion that progress may or may not be beneficial to our society depending on the time, the type of society and the progress itself. For example, in the book Village By the Sea, the government decided to transform Thul, a small, peaceful fishing village, into a industrial site for factories. This may be beneficial to the government's point of view because it has great financial benefits. However, to the villagers in Thul, they certainly do not think of the building of factories in their village as a benefit. They would rather get on with their peaceful lives as fishermen. Therefore, progress may not be beneficial to everybody.

In the book village by the sea, Hari also has had great progress when he went to Bombay. Instead of working in the fields and earning that small amount of money which was barely enough to support his family in the past, he went to Bombay and earned a lot of money relatively and was financially comfortable when he went back to Thul. This progress has a long term benefit but in the time of which Hari was gone, Lila would not have been able to cope if she was not lucky enough to have received help from the De Silvas like in the book. Therefore, this has also shown that progress has its advantages and disadvantages.