The morning after Diwali broke not with the joyous spirit of a new dawn, but with a suffocating, dense, and acrid smog that swallowed the National Capital Region whole. Delhi’s Air Quality Index (AQI) soared past the 900 mark in several monitoring stations, settling firmly into the ‘Hazardous’ category, which is considered detrimental to even healthy individuals. This severe spike followed a night where citizens, given a conditional reprieve by the Supreme Court, burst firecrackers with a vengeance, effectively nullifying efforts to clean the city’s air.
The regulatory environment leading up to the festival was marked by a tense judicial and political compromise. While the Delhi government had initially sought a complete ban, Chief Minister Gupta later specifically requested the Supreme Court to allow the use of ‘green firecrackers’ in the capital. The court agreed, imposing a tight window for their use. CM Gupta hailed the decision, calling it a successful “balance between tradition and environment.” This optimism however proved seemingly misguided.
The catastrophic air quality witnessed the next day confirmed what many environmental activists had feared: there is virtually no serious, immediate, or reliable mechanism to gauge which firecrackers are genuinely green and which are not. The market responded to the ruling with predictable opportunism. Reports from across the city confirmed that unscrupulous manufacturers simply slapped ‘eco-friendly’ labels onto existing stock of conventional, high-emission firecrackers, selling them without fear of meaningful scrutiny.
The result was a deafening, toxic night. The air was heavy, thick with the smell of spent gunpowder and industrial metals, an olfactory sign that this was not just smoke from dried biomass. Emergency rooms across the city reported a swift surge in patients suffering from acute respiratory distress, severe irritation of the eyes, and persistent coughing fits. Children and the elderly bore the brunt, spending the day indoors behind multiple layers of filtration, praying for the wind to change.
In the aftermath, the political machine quickly engaged defense mechanisms. The Delhi government, facing uncomfortable questions about the immediate source of the smog, immediately pinned the crisis on the recurring issue of stubble burning. The narrative focused heavily on the smoke travelling south from agricultural fires in Punjab and Haryana, the traditional scapegoat for the city’s winter woes.
However, data analysis from independent environmental research groups directly contradicted this deflection. A report released highlighted a significant reduction in farm fires, noting a 77 per cent drop in incidents across Punjab and Haryana compared to the previous year. The report stated unequivocally that despite this major decrease in regional biomass burning, Delhi’s AQI turned more toxic after Diwali than in previous years, pointing to local, festival-related emissions as the dominant cause of the spike. The correlation was clear: the immediate, intense saturation of pollutants from fireworks, compounded by the already stagnating post-monsoon air, was the primary trigger.
The fundamental flaw lay in the enforcement of the ‘green cracker’ concept itself. The concept of a ‘green cracker’, developed by scientists to reduce particulate matter and harmful gases by using less barium nitrate, remained a theoretical aspiration rather than a practical reality. It pollutes less than traditional crackers, but still causes issues. As Dr. Arvind Kumar, Founder and Trustee at Lung Care Foundation and Chest Surgeon at Medanta – The Medicity said while speaking to NDTV, “the word green is a misnomer; a cracker is a cracker. If you burn a cracker, there will be pollution. The best strategy to safeguard yourself is to not burst crackers at all.”
By creating a loophole based on a non-enforceable label, the authorities effectively gave tacit approval to mass pollution. The public, believing they were acting within the legal and ethical bounds of the ‘green’ allowance, let loose the full force of their celebration, leading to a pollution event that was locally generated and immediately disastrous.
As the city waited for high-speed winds to sweep the toxic haze away, the crisis stands as a sobering lesson. Political gestures, even those sanctioned by the highest court, crumble when faced with poor enforcement and regulatory evasion. For Delhi’s citizens, the promise of a ‘balanced’ Diwali delivered only a dangerous illusion, leaving them to choke on the tangible consequences that linger long after the celebrations faded away.
