Class 12 English Book 1 Chapter 2 Lost Spring NCERT Solutions

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

Answer:

Saheb is looking for “gold” in the garbage, meaning not literal gold but anything of value:
scraps he can sell, and once in a while “a rupee, even a ten-rupee note”.
Garbage means something different to a child than to an adult who does the same work: for children
like Saheb it is “wrapped in wonder,” while for their elders it is simply “a means of survival.”

Saheb scavenges in the garbage dumps of the author’s own neighbourhood in Delhi, and lives in
Seemapuri, a squatters’ settlement on the periphery of Delhi. He has not come from Delhi
originally: his home was set amidst the green fields of Dhaka, in Bangladesh, until many
storms swept away their fields and homes. So the family left, “looking for gold” in the big city;
Seemapuri’s squatters, Saheb’s family among them, came from Bangladesh back in 1971.

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

Answer:

The author is given two different kinds of explanation, and does not fully accept either as
the whole truth. The boys’ own reasons sound almost accidental: one says his mother “did not bring
them down from the shelf”; a second boy, commenting on the first, says even if she had, he would
only throw them off anyway; and a third, who has never owned a pair in his life, simply says
“I want shoes.”

Beyond these individual excuses, the wider explanation offered to her, once she notices barefoot
children everywhere she travels in the country, is that going barefoot is “not lack of money but a
tradition.” The author is skeptical of this. She wonders whether calling it a tradition is only
“an excuse to explain away a perpetual state of poverty.”

Q. Is Saheb happy working at the tea-stall? Explain.

Answer:

No, Saheb is not truly happy, even though the tea-stall job pays him a fixed wage of ₹800 and
all his meals. As a ragpicker, Saheb worked for himself: the plastic bag he carried was his own,
and he would carry it “so lightly” over his shoulder. At the tea
stall he carries a steel canister that belongs to the shop owner, and this canister “seems
heavier” than the bag ever was; this can be read as standing for a loss of independence, not
actual weight. His face, the author notices, has lost its “carefree look.” The chapter’s
own verdict is blunt: “Saheb is no longer his own master!”

Q. What makes the city of Firozabad famous?

Answer:

Firozabad is famous as the centre of India’s glass-blowing industry, and specifically for
making bangles. “Every other family in Firozabad is engaged in making bangles,” and families have spent
generations working around the furnaces, producing the spirals of
coloured bangles (“sunny gold, paddy green, royal blue, pink, purple”) , “for all the women in the land it seems.”

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

Answer:

This is the same question the book asks again, word for word, under “Talking about the Text”
further down this page; see Talking about the Text, Question 2 for the full answer.
In short: children work “in the glass furnaces with high temperatures, in dingy cells without air and light”,
“often losing the brightness of their eyes”; the dust from polishing bangle glass blinded Mukesh’s
grandmother’s husband; and in the dark hutments lit by oil lamps their eyes are “more adjusted to the dark
than to the light outside”, so “they often end up losing their eyesight before they become adults”. This work
is illegal for children, and the book says the law, “if enforced”, could get them out of the furnaces.

Q. How is Mukesh’s attitude to his situation different from that of his family?

Answer:

Mukesh’s father, his grandmother and the rest of his family have come to accept their poverty as
an unbreakable “karam,” or destiny, tied to the caste they were born into: his grandmother asks,
“Can a god-given lineage ever be broken?” as if the answer is obviously no. Mukesh refuses this.
He insists on being his “own master,” announcing “I will be a motor mechanic,” and shows he means
it by being willing to walk a long way to a garage to learn the trade, rather than simply
inheriting bangle-making the way his father and grandfather did.

His ambition still stays modest: he wants to learn to drive a car, and says no to flying
a plane. “He is content to dream of cars that he sees hurtling down the streets of his town. Few
airplanes fly over Firozabad.” One reading is that even his dream is shaped by the limits of
the only world he knows. But where his family has resigned itself to bangles as fate, Mukesh dares
to imagine a different, self-chosen future.

Q. What could be some of the reasons for the migration of people from villages to cities?

Answer:

Based on Saheb’s story in the chapter, migration usually happens when people can no longer survive
on the land they have. Saheb’s family used to live amid green fields near Dhaka, but storms swept
away their fields and homes. With no crop and no home left, the family had nothing
to stay for, so they left, in the author’s words, “looking for gold” in the big city of Delhi.

This shows that migration from villages to cities is rarely a choice made for excitement or
opportunity. It is usually forced by the loss of a livelihood; in Saheb’s case, storms swept away
the fields and homes. People move to cities hoping that any work, even
rag-picking, will give them a better chance of survival than staying on ruined land. The chapter
does not suggest that this hope is always fulfilled: in the city, migrants like Saheb’s family end
up in settlements like Seemapuri, living “without an identity, without permits”, where “survival
in Seemapuri means rag-picking”.

Q. Would you agree that promises made to poor children are rarely kept? Why do you think
this happens in the incidents narrated in the text?

Answer:

Yes, the chapter shows clearly that promises made to poor children are rarely kept. The author
herself makes such a promise to Saheb: when he says he would go to school if one existed nearby,
she half-jokingly asks, “If I start a school, will you come?” Saheb agrees eagerly, and days later
comes running back to ask if the school is ready. The author has to admit, embarrassed, “It takes
longer to build a school,” “embarrassed at having made a promise that was not meant.” The chapter states directly that “promises like mine abound in every corner of his bleak world.”

This happens for two connected reasons. First, such promises are often made casually, by people
who are moved by a child’s situation in the moment but do not have the means, or the real intention,
to follow through. Second, even a genuine promise, like building an actual school, needs money,
land and years of effort that never arrive for children like Saheb, because nobody with the power
to provide these things is actually accountable to him. The result is that poor children like
Saheb grow up learning, quietly and sadly, not to expect promises to be kept at all.

Q. What forces conspire to keep the workers in the bangle industry of Firozabad in
poverty?

Answer:

Several forces work together, forming what the chapter calls a “vicious circle,” to keep
Firozabad’s bangle workers trapped in poverty.

1. The sahukars and middlemen. The young men “have fallen into the vicious circle of
middlemen who trapped their fathers and forefathers”; the sahukars and middlemen are named first in
the vicious circle.

2. The police. When the young men are asked why they do not organise themselves into a
cooperative to escape the middlemen, they say they would instead be “hauled up by the police,
beaten and dragged to jail for doing something illegal.” The police are named in the same vicious circle.

3. The bureaucrats and politicians. The chapter names them directly as part of the same
vicious circle. The law against child labour in the furnaces exists but, as the chapter’s “if enforced” implies,
is not enforced; fixing this would need official action.

4. The absence of leadership. The chapter notes there is “no leader among them, no one
who could help them see things differently,” so even workers who sense the unfairness of their
situation have nobody to organise them into resisting it.

5. Tradition and caste. Mukesh’s grandmother’s belief that their poverty is “his karam,
his destiny,” and her question “Can a god-given lineage ever be broken?” show how deeply the family
itself has come to accept the trade as fixed by birth, rather than as an injustice that could be
changed.

Together, the family’s world and the circle of “the sahukars, the middlemen, the policemen, the
keepers of law, the bureaucrats and the politicians” have “imposed the baggage on the child that he
cannot put down”, and he accepts it “as naturally as his father”. That is why the chapter calls this
a vicious circle: each of these forces belongs to one system that keeps the workers poor.

Q. How, in your opinion, can Mukesh realise his dream?

Answer:

Mukesh shows the first requirement for realising his dream already: the will to be different
from his family, saying plainly, “I will be a motor mechanic,” and being willing to walk a long
way to the garage that is “a long way from his home” in order to learn. This willingness to make an
effort, rather than simply accepting his family’s trade as destiny, is exactly the “daring” the
chapter says Firozabad’s children are rarely allowed to show.

To actually realise the dream, though, Mukesh would need more than willpower. He would need
someone in the garage to actually train him, some means of supporting himself while he learns
(since his family’s bangle income is already too little), and, ideally, some support from outside
the “vicious circle” that traps the rest of his family, since that circle offers him no help of its
own. One reading of the chapter is that individual courage like Mukesh’s
is necessary but not sufficient. Real change would also need the law against child labour to be
enforced, and some access to schooling or training that Firozabad’s own system does not currently
offer its children.

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

Answer:

The chapter mentions several serious hazards faced by workers in Firozabad’s glass bangle
industry. Workers labour in furnaces at very high temperatures, inside “dingy cells without air
and light.” The dust from polishing the glass of bangles blinded the husband of Mukesh’s grandmother. The
20,000 children slog their daylight hours in the hot furnaces, “often losing the brightness of their
eyes”. In the dark hutments lit by flickering oil lamps, the workers’ eyes are “more adjusted to the dark
than to the light outside. That is why they often end up losing their eyesight before they become adults.”
Beyond the physical dangers, the work is illegal for children and dangerous to their long-term
health and education, yet the law that should protect them is not enforced, as the chapter’s “if
enforced” implies.

Q. Why should child labour be eliminated and how?

Answer:

Why it should be eliminated. Child labour, as the chapter shows through Mukesh, Savita
and the roughly 20,000 children of Firozabad’s furnaces, takes away a child’s chance at school,
damages their health (blindness from glass dust; work in high temperatures in dingy cells without air and light), and traps them in the same
poverty their parents could never escape. It denies children exactly what the chapter’s title,
“Lost Spring,” describes: a childhood of growth, play and hope, replaced instead by years of
physical labour before they are even adults.

How it could be eliminated. First, the law that already makes such child labour illegal
needs to be properly enforced, with real consequences for the sahukars and factory owners who
employ children, not just the workers who might try to organise against them. Second, free and
accessible schools would need to reach children like Saheb, whose promised school is not built in the chapter. Third, families would need alternative sources of income so that a
child’s wage is not something the family cannot survive without, which is currently one reason
children are sent to work rather than to school. None of these fixes are things a single child, or
even a single family, can achieve alone. As the chapter suggests through its “vicious circle,” it
needs the sahukars, the police, the bureaucrats and the politicians to act differently, not just
the poor to try harder.