Courting Controversy: Crackers and Crackdowns - Delhi’s Annual Smog Ritual

Every Delhi resident knows the calendar. Sometime post October, the city rediscovers its need for air purifiers, school groups debate closures, the AQI app becomes the most-checked screen in the house, prime-time panels convene and the courts take up the matter of air pollution with urgency. For three or four months, it is all that anyone talks about. Then March arrives with bluer skies, the masks go back into the drawers and the city forgets, until the next October, when the conversation begins again as though for the first time.

In keeping with Delhi’s cyclical conversation about its air, this column too, returns to the subject of pollution. Last year, in Crazy Little Thing Called Air, it was observed that an intermittently imposed Graded Response Action Plan (“GRAP”) alone was not sufficient to tackle the problem of poor air quality. A year on, the script has barely changed.

This year, the air turned well before the festivities did. Delhi recorded its first poor air quality day of the season on 21 October 2026. By 6 November 2026, two days before Diwali, the city-wide average AQI stood at 382, half the monitoring stations were in the severe band, and Stage III of GRAP had been invoked. The festival-day average of 376 was the highest since 2021, and the next morning the AQI stood at 371, the worst post-Diwali reading in five years.

Last year, the corresponding figure was 351 the day after Diwali. The years differ, but the story does not: a sky already saturated, and a night of firecrackers adding to it. This raises the question of whether a complete ban on firecrackers would have made a difference.

Firecrackers were completely banned in Delhi from 2020 to 2024. This year, even as the days leading up to Diwali were among the worst of the season, the Supreme Court, in Arjun Gopal v. Union of India, allowed certified green crackers for two days during fixed hours. Diwali day then recorded an average AQI of 376, higher than in each of the last three years of the firecracker ban, that is, 312 in 2022, 218 in 2023 and 328 in 2024.

The Court candidly acknowledged that while a blanket ban seemed ideal but that it was short of adequate data, particularly on the impact of green crackers, largely because the States had failed to produce the requisite data. It also described the bursting of firecrackers as a religious practice, albeit a qualified one, even while tracing the custom to the arrival of gunpowder in India and noting that the scriptures speak of lamps as a way of celebrating the festival.

Where the data is missing, the precautionary principle, long part of Indian environmental law jurisprudence, would ordinarily counsel caution rather than relaxation on the practice of bursting firecrackers. Separately, lending religious colour to the practice of bursting crackers, may also make next year’s debate on the ban of firecrackers even harder.

Piecemeal environmental measures for a few months cannot deliver a long-term, sustainable answer to Delhi’s poor AQI, especially when, as this year showed, the weeks leading up to Diwali were already dangerous and the firecrackers only made them worse. Rules regulating firecrackers must be settled well before the festival season, enforced steadily by district authorities against illegal stock, and supported by local bodies encouraging community displays in place of thousands of individual ones. Vehicular pollution, which the Supreme Court has itself flagged as rising sharply, also demands an equally long-term and continuous effort.  While crackers and crackdowns make for a busy few weeks, it is only a year-round effort that can ensure that the next season does not bring the same smog and along with it the same column.

Nakul Dewan is a Senior Advocate and King’s Counsel.