The Supreme Court has mandated that only green crackers would be allowed to combat the depleting air quality, but the paucity of these crackers has annoyed most. If only this order was passed well in advance, Assam would provide the perfect solution for it. For 130 years now, residents of Ganakkuchi village have been making green firecrackers.
The village has been producing firecrackers with a traditional formula which ensures that they make less noise, produce no flame, and doesn’t release harmful chemicals.
“Our products are almost like green crackers. They are less polluting as we don’t use high explosive content, but the issue in our country is that we need experts and a system to certify which is green cracker and which is not. Once that happens, it will give a boost to indigenous industries like ours,” Gopjit Pathak, a traditional cracker manufacturer from Ganakkuchi told NDTV.
Image used for representational purpose only
Assam has also tried to promote these indigenous crackers and set up a facility near Ganakkuchi. “We are yet to move to machines, and the entire process is manual so we cannot try variety of products and the volume of production is also low,” said Narayan Das, told NDTV.
Recently, the apex court limited the use of fireworks only between 8 and 10 pm during Diwali. They also mandated that only crackers with reduced emissions can be manufactured, sold. The Indian Express reported on how Delhi police has been raiding shops selling the banned firecrackers. In one evening, police officials confiscated around 645 kgs of firecrackers from sparklers to “atom bombs from Delhi’s Sadar Bazar area. So far, Delhi Police has recovered more than 3,800 kg of firecrackers in 29 separate cases.
