Question

Q. Mention the hazards of working in the glass- bangles industry?

Answer 1

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.