From bangles to bottles: the changing face of Firozabad’s glass industry

In the back lanes of Firozabad’s Imam Bara bangle mandi (market) in western Uttar Pradesh, a dozen clay bhattis (furnaces) burn inside the Nadar Bux & Co. glass factory. Built by Aijaz Azeem’s grandfather in 1948, it has a capacity to hold 80 kg of recyclable waste glass piled in glistening mounds — golden-brown, yellow, red — along with a concoction of sand, soda, chemicals, and colouring agents. The bhattis burn round the clock at 1,200 degrees Celsius. Azeem, who is in his sixties, says, “People of my generation just took on what our parents had started. My children don’t want to work here. There just isn’t enough money anymore.”

In the rudimentary factory, open from all four sides, men called gulliwalas carry red hot gobs of glass on long metallic pipes. They walk them across the mud-and-brick floor of the karkhana casually, either taking the glass to the fire or carrying it away to dump onto the small glass hills. Amid the din, rhythmic bustle and heat, some pull out the molten glass from inside the furnace and hand it over to the karigars, who wrap it like a thick wire around a muttha (iron rod) and skilfully rotate it on a motor to form glass coils. Each muttha will yield 368 bangles. Every day, Azeem’s factory churns out 38,000 to 64,000 bangles, going over 1.5 lakh bangles during festivals.

A man warms a roti on the hot coils that will later become red bangles at a bride’s wedding or a Karva Chauth celebration. Bangles are everywhere: they hang from wires on dusty windows, they are placed as weights over matkas, or lie on the ground in shards. A lone woman worker, Bijrani, swiftly clears the floor of the broken pieces to be put back in the furnace for recycling.

Changing times

Until about two decades ago, Firozabad was known as Suhaagnagari (suhaag meaning a sign of being married; nagari, a town). Before glass bangles from Firozabad began featuring on global online stores like Etsy in a rebrand that deemed them ‘cool’, they were, in the Indian tradition, a sign of being married, with the maximum number being worn by brides and newly-married women.

Today, the city of 20 lakh people is called the Kaanchnagari (glass town), as the demand for glass bangles has dipped to one-fifth from the early 80s. Simultaneously, there was a rise in the production of glass bottles, mainly for alcohol, and other glassware like lights and home accessories.

Given the sector’s unorganised nature, there is a lack of official data, but according to a member of the Uttar Pradesh Glass Manufacturers’ Federation, trade estimates indicate that Firozabad’s bangle industry may now be less than ₹1,000 crore. On the other hand, the turnover of the entire glass industry is pegged at more than ₹15,000 crore, according to a member of All India Glass Manufactures Federation (AIGMF).

The number of bhattis that handcraft bangles or use the mouth-blown process to mould decorative glass and tableware has reduced from 180-odd to 60 today, according to Devendra Sah, former director of Centre for Development of Glass Industry (CDGI). “The manual art industry is dying out and other businesses of glass products have come up,” he says, adding that there are three reasons for this. One, technology has allowed mass production of glass bottles, yielding a higher income, while bangles still need to be handmade. Secondly, traders and manufacturers say that as women’s incomes go up, their preference for glass jewellery has been replaced by more expensive metal ornaments. The third is a more complex reason.

Technological changes

Azeem’s bhattis are about 40 km from Agra, where in the 80s, people began to see the yellowing of the Taj Mahal. Conservationists began to report ‘marble cancer’ — the erosion of the stone through acid rain.

In 1986, lawyer and environmentalist M.C. Mehta filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court (SC), seeking protection of the Taj Mahal from environmental pollution. In December 1996, the SC directed industries in the 10,400 sq km Taj Trapezium Zone (encompassing Mathura-Firozabad-Makhanpur-Agra) to shut down, relocate, or opt for a technology upgrade in order to prevent the yellowing of the monument’s marble structure. This impacted over 1,000 small to big karkhanas. The technology upgrade involved switching the running of furnaces from firewood and coal to natural gas.

With the government mandating gas furnaces and the SC deciding on a sanctioned quota (4,000 metric cube to 30,000 metric cube per day depending on the unit size) at a subsidised rate from GAIL, the bhattis were compelled to switch to this cleaner fuel by 2006. Gas, as a fuel, was more expensive than coal or wood, and the whole industry came to be more government-regulated. A fallout of this was that the small, individual bangle bhatti owners no longer found their businesses viable and began to shut down.

In Nagla Bhau industrial estate, several old families of Firozabad came together to form Rachna Industries in partnership. Here, they provide bhattis on rent in eight-hour shifts to manufacturers of crockery, lamps, and other glassware, using the traditional mouth-blown process. About 50 skilled karigars stand in a circle on a raised platform, raising metal pipes with a stream of molten glass at the end. They blow air into the hollow pipe at the other end, then drop the glass into an iron mould to take the shape of a vase or a bell jar.

Rajesh Sharma, with his grandfather Srichandra Yadav, is one of those who shut down his family-owned coal-based bangle bhatti and shifted to the rented gas furnace, hiring daily-wage workers to make glass products on order for the domestic and global market. “Though small scale, it is easy on us this way, as we now manufacture glass products only when we receive a bulk order. In the off-season, we focus on wheat and potato farming,” he says, seated in his office, where he shows off pictures of glass columns as tall as 10 feet — an order from a wedding decorator.

“Initially, gas was offered at ₹4 per metric cube under the Administered Pricing Mechanism. The cost of fuel rose to ₹12 per metric cube when GAIL changed its policy to Uniform Pricing in 2012, and the average rate of gas got revised periodically, benefitting bigger units,” says Parsa, a member of CDGI’s governing council. “Between 2022, when the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, and now, the cost of gas has touched ₹42 per metric cube, making the bangle business non-profitable,” he adds.

From bhatti to bazaar

Across Firozabad, pushcarts with half-done bangles zig-zag through bylanes. The bangles, which take at least a month to make, are delivered to women workers who do the sikai-judai-sajai (heating, sealing, decorating) in their homes.

Down a narrow gali from the Nagla Bari intersection in Nasir Ganj, Shanin Begum lives with her three children and husband. While he makes ₹300 a day in a glass-bangle factory, she says she earns ₹13 per katta (300 bangles) for the job. “Depending on the trader’s requirement and my time, I finish up to 300 kattas in a month,” she says.

Shanin uses a toothpick to create patterns of dots and lines on each bangle with thick multani mitti paste. The work is time consuming, says Shanin, but she often sits through the night to complete it, or will ask her daughters to help her in the evening. “I want to give my children a decent life,” she says, sitting on the terrace of their two-room home. The larger house is shared with other families; the other women do the same job.

After drying, the bangles are sent back to the bhatti for a final polish before they reach traders’ godowns. Here, they are then bound into a few dozen for sale in the market.

The Imam Bara bangle mandi is a world unto itself. The bangles tinkle and shine against the morning light as the wholesale market opens daily at 6 a.m. Here, a whole guchha (several dozens) can cost as little as ₹100. Buyers come from across the country for bulk purchases, and the cacophony of selling, bargaining, buying and packing falls silent by 10 a.m., after which the streets are taken over by regular life.

The glitter and jingle returns when the churi (bangle) bazaars in Bohran Gali, Purani mandi, Nalband crossing and Suhas Nagar come alive in the evening. “Business is down by more than 50%,” says Rajiv Gupta, a third-generation bangle shop owner, who makes ₹40,000 a month selling bangles from the small shop built by his grandfather in 1940. “The churis, depending on the colour [red and green sell the most] and the work done on them, sell for ₹15 to ₹60 a dozen,” he says, lamenting that young women no longer want to wear them. “They prefer plastic, metal, or lac ones now,” he points out, adding that earlier, glass bangles were a part of the culture of weddings, godh bharais (baby showers), and daily wear.

“We have catered to customers not only across India but also in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and the Indian diaspora across Saudi Arabia, Europe, U.K., and the U.S.,” says his neighbour Mohamed Ali, a bangle seller of 28 years.

Next door, a woman from Ajmer bargains loudly with Jagmohan, who tells her that the price of bangles is already low. “Now, mostly older women follow the tradition of wearing glass bangles on festivals like Karva Chauth, Teej, and Id,” he says.

New businesses for old

Third-generation manufacturers at Pooja Glass Industries, Chaitanya Singh and Ashish Bansal, both in their twenties, explain that as the bangle industry struggled, many glass manufacturers sought to transform their businesses. “We had 10 small bhattis but our families decided to take a leap and invest in fully-automated big furnaces in partnership. It opened our business links with the alcohol, food and cosmetics industries,” says Singh, ambitious for Firozabad’s future. Behind his office chair is an array of bottles, some machine-made, some mouth-blown, many quirky.

Close to midnight, their factory belts out bottles made to hold a variety of wares, from alcohol and water to jams and sauces. One conveyer belt has just nail polish bottles, another goli soda, yet another, bottles of a popular rum brand. The German-imported individual section machine set for six different moulds speedily shapes the glass that drops from furnace to feeder. Within seconds, a finished product emerges, and is cooled and quality-checked.

From December 2023 to February 2024, Pooja, which is also the main supplier for Seagram, manufactured 75 lakh rum bottles. They have a summer order of 15 million goli soda bottles. They have, in the past, also manufactured from 3 lakh to 50 lakh honey bottles in a day, among other items from their portfolio of 400 products. The bangle business pales in comparison.

Devendra Sah, who in the past has encouraged glass artists like Reshmi Dey, who runs Glass Sutra, and Nandini Datta of Studio Glasshopper to bring innovation to the industry, says more than half of Firozabad’s population is engaged in the glass industry and more than 70% of the workforce has migrated from the bhattis to automated bottle-making units. In the Pooja factory, 2,000 workers are employed in three shifts for the 150-tonne capacity furnace.

“Today, 80% of all utility-based glass products for the domestic market is produced in Firozabad. More than 50% of all glass products, from lanterns and headlight lamps to float glass for cars, filaments for thermos flasks to premium liquor bottles and crockery, are major export items now,” says Bansal, enthusiastic about the new turn the industry has taken.

Ashish says alcohol bottles now constitute 80% of all glass products produced in Firozabad, so the industry is B2B (business-to-business) driven. His uncle Rahul Singh, who buys raw glass in Firozabad and cuts, shapes, and embellishes it in Moradabad, customising bell and candle jars for his clients Anthropologie and Curios overseas, says the export market has grown from ₹200 crore to ₹1,000 crore in the last 12 years.

Challenges remain

Devansh Gupta, managing director of Tiger & Sons Glass, which makes the inner insulated layers of thermos flasks for markets across the world, says there is a shortage of skilled workers, especially glass blowers. Also plaguing the industry is the pricing and shortage of raw materials like silica, quartz, borax, limestone, calcite, feldspar, and dolomite, which come from Odisha, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat.

The price of soda ash, too, has doubled post-COVID-19. “China, the main competitor in the global market, has reserves of iron-free silica sand (known to produce better quality clear white glass); we don’t. Chinese manufacturers also get better support from their government in terms of bank loan rates,” he explains.

Gupta adds that businesses are impacted by global factors as well, such as economic downturns, wars (like the Israel-Hamas conflict), and natural calamities. “When cargo ships avoid certain routes, transportation costs spike,” he says, referring to the Red Sea-Suez Canal route impacted by Houthi militants, which has forced ships to go around Africa, adding two weeks to travel time.

A core challenge that remains is the consumer’s shift away from glass to plastic. “Be it the fragile bangles or bottles for storing carbonated beverages, water, or pharma products, there is a need to restore the buyers’ confidence in the benefits of using glass,” says the CDGI director Sanjeev Chellamani.

Though many Indian manufacturers hope the cost of fuel becomes an electoral matter, there is hardly any talk of it.