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What makes the city of Firozabad famous?


The city of Firozabad is famous for its bangles. Every other family in Firozabad is engaged in the business of making bangles. Firozabad is a centre of India’s glass-blowing industry. Since generations the families are working around furnaces, welding glass and making bangles for all the women on the land. The bangles are symbolised as woman’s Suhag.

There are bangles makers in the narrow streets of Firozabad in every house. The heaps of the spirals of bangles can be seen on every place there in Firozabad. All the members of the family can be seen welding and soldering the glass bangles in the different colours of a rainbow.

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What is Saheb looking for in the garbage dumps? Where is he and where has he come from?

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Why did Saheb become a ragpicker ? What did he look for in the garbage dumps?




Saheb hails from the green fields of Dhaka. His house and field were swept away by the storms. Their poverty and pitiable conditions of life forced him to become a ragpicker in Seemapuri, a suburban colony of East Delhi. He is always looking for gold in garbage dumps. For the children like him garbage is wrapped in wonder and for the elders it is a means of survival. It provides the daily bread for the rag-pickers. Sometimes, Saheb finds a rupee and even a ten-rupee note or a silver coin. There is always hope of finding more. In Dhaka, he was not getting enough food for survival but in Delhi they go to their bed without an aching stomach.

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Is Saheb happy working at the tea stall? Explain.

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Do you think Saheb was happy to work at the tea stall? Answer giving reasons.


Saheb was a rag-picker. By chance he got a job to work at the tea stall down the road. There he was paid 800 rupees and all his meals. But his face lost his care free look. He was no longer his own master. The steel milk canister seemed heavier than his plastic bag. It belonged to his teamster and the life under the master was not a life of happiness.

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Mention the hazards of working in the glass bangles industry.


Working in the glass bangle industry is full of numerous health hazards. The children work in the glass furnaces with high temperature. They work in the dingy cells where there is no light and no air. This spoils their health, eye-sight and other parts of the body.

The bangle-makers weld pieces of coloured glass into circles of bangles. They polish them and the dust of the polishing along with the high temperature flames result in losing their eye-sight before they become adult. They live and work in stinking lanes and thereby their health goes on deteriorating.

The bangle-makers with their families work for the whole day and fail to have enough food to eat. They could hardly succeed in putting on proper clothes and a roof over their head. They remain in perpetual state of grinding poverty.

The glass bangle industry of Firozabad is one of its kind which illegally employs the child labour. About 20,000 are engaged in this hazardous work and do not have an access to education. A vicious circle of Sahukars, middlemen, policemen, keepers of law, bureaucrats and politicians are responsible for their sorry state of affairs and they cannot start a cooperative. Most of them hardly reap their one time full meal in their entire life time.

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M. Imp.

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What explanations does the author offer for the children not wearing footwear?


The authoress sees the army of barefoot rag-pickers in her neighbourhood. They appear like morning birds and disappear at noon from the streets. She points that she has seen children walking barefoot in cities, on village roads. She takes this habit of remaining barefoot as a tradition to stay barefoot.

But remaining barefoot among the children is the perpetual state of poverty in their families. She notices many others like the ragpickers in her neighbourhood remain shoeless. For the children who have never owned shoes in their childhood, getting shoes become a dream comes true. Once Saheb gets a pair of tennis shoes with a hole. He wears it and does not mind any other thing. Lack of money is the real cause of not wearing footwear.

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