Firecrackers the day after - a National Embarrasment

Written By Unknown on Senin, 04 November 2013 | 21.17

Veeresh Malik
04 November 2013, 10:45 AM IST

 

I did a quick dipstick survey on fire-crackers over the last few days.

In my local South Delhi market, there was not a single shop selling fire-crackers, and pavements that used to be crowded on Diwali afternoon with last minute shoppers looked empty.

A few years ago, at the same time and spot, you would not have been able to stand still, leave alone drive a car or ride a bike here. Many of the shop-keepers here, Defence Colony market, are known to me. Certainly, sales are down, for a variety of reasons. Lower prices elsewhere, online options, and generally subdued sentiments.

Also, people tend to head for markets that offer savings on bulk buying, here is a photograph of the flower mandi, in Gazipur, East Delhi, where you could not get to within a few kilometres of the shops, there was so much traffic and crowd.

Delhi is going into elections. Big global and national issues are being addressed and brought centre-stage. Question asked by a friend to me was - which political party has made any statement against fire-crackers and other Diwali pollution please? Answer appears to be - not wanting to mess with "sentiments", they appear to have left this job to school teachers, to issue appeals to children,

Why is that so? It may well be a trader lobby. After all, Indian fire-crackers have suddenly become cheaper than imported ones this year, one of the few products to beat the inflationary spiral. Though not cheap by a long shot. And the result is-extremely high levels of air, sound and garbage pollution the next morning. 

But here's the interesting part - in my walkabout this morning, surveying about 75 houses, I noticed that just 4 were responsible for large garbage. Which means, heavy coverage of the road with fireworks left-overs, some burnt out, some scattered. Not as bad as this, borrowed from Rajesh Kalra, but close enough.

 I sat and analysed the 4 houses near my home where there were major fireworks last night. All of them are 3-generation joint families. In ALL cases the oldest generation stayed away from the fireworks for whatever reason. In ALL cases the children go to the best of schools and may have certainly been part of the whole anti-fireworks thing. In ALL cases it was the middle generation that was more visible into the fireworks thing. And eventually, after the first flush of fireworks, it was the guards and drivers who completed the process of letting go the rest of the fire-crackers.

(If it is any indication, near one of the houses, an expensive German car acquired a huge fire burn from some other fire-cracker rocket thing which landed out of nowhere and made a huge impact on the rubber beading and windscreen wipers.)

Point is this, if only a few people, single-digit percentile point at most, are bursting fire-crackers to the detriment of more than 90% of the people, then why is this not an electoral issue? In addition to the whole social issue and appeals business? Why should people not be told to burst their fire-crackers in the confines of their homes and rooms, instead of out in the open, why mess up things for the majority of people?

It is, after all, our taxpayer money and public funds being used to clean up, as well as pay for the hospitals - which are over-burdened already. It is the air we breathe, most of all, which is damaged beyond what a year's worth of automobile vehicle pollution under control measures can cause.

All for the sake of a handful of people?

I think a great electoral opportunity has been missed by the political parties in the fray for Delhi's elections.


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