How India’s illegal fireworks factories are hiding in plain sight

The factory was meant to be quiet. And it managed to stay hidden. A flat-roofed building with no signboard, its lights always dim. In a town like Deesa, north Gujarat, it was a kind of silence that didn’t signal danger. But when the explosion came, its sound travelled past the sugarcane fields, even past a school 2km away. People in neighbouring compounds would later tell police they hadn’t known a firecracker unit existed next door. But it did, and it took 21 lives. Eight of them were children.For weeks before the blast, the workers there had been sleeping inside the tight structure. They had been ferried from Madhya Pradesh with a promise of ₹100 a day to pack and bind chemical compounds they didn’t recognise, whose destructive powers they were unaware of.The factory, once licensed, had lost its permit after a negative police report. But the owners — Khoobchand and Deepak Mohonani — continued to run their business until it went up in smoke. Among the wreckage, authorities found aluminium powder, yellow dextrin, traces of sulphur, and packaging materials stacked in quantities that suggested not just illegal storage but rapid, round-the-clock production.Within days, police and fire services raided and sealed six other illegal cracker units in Gujarat. It wasn’t the first crackdown. It won’t be the last. In the firecracker trade, disaster is often not the starting point for reform. medium120344827Most units function sans permitsTo understand how common that pattern is, one merely needs to follow “sulphur trails” across India: from Sivakasi’s workshops to Shamli’s family-run sheds, from the basements of Bhagalpur to the farmland units of Vanch village.“The idea is that if there’s a blast, people can run in any direction they want,” said Nitin Patel matter-of-factly. Patel owns a unit just outside Ahmedabad and his foot soldiers do their job in an open space surrounded by crops. There are no walls, no cameras, no record of who shows up to buy. Last year, a worker died while binding explosives. “We try to train new hands for two months,” Patel said. “But everyone’s in a hurry. There’s no time.”That pressure — the need to meet demand, to meet it fast, and to meet it cheap with as little fuss as possible — sits at the heart of nearly every fatal accident in the industry. What helps is that despite decades of accidents, there is no national registry that tracks how many people die each year making firecrackers. Units often operate without permits. Workers are not formally employed. Materials are procured informally and stored off-book. Many of the worst explosions have taken place in residential buildings repurposed as factories. When they collapse, they take down not just workers but neighbours, passers-by, and sometimes children asleep two floors above.Mohammad Yunus, a former firecracker maker from Meerut, asked, “What is licensed, what is illegal? It’s hard to tell. There are people I know who worked for three months in a factory and then started making crackers at home. They think they know enough but they don’t have great knowledge of explosives.”His family, he said, was in the trade for “10 generations” before they gave it up after a neighbouring unit exploded. “This work has always carried risk. Baarood ke kaam mein khatra toh rehta hi hai (There’s obvious danger in gunpowder). But we knew the proportions. Even if you hammered our sparklers, they wouldn’t go off in your face. Now, it’s all about speed. On top of that, you want extra colour, extra shine. They don’t know how much is too much,” he said. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/wmnfZnEeKZQ?si=BB4iJSwxKHdgfbpzThe basic formula for the fireworks hasn’t changed: potassium nitrate, sulphur, charcoal. But today’s market demands brighter colours and more dramatic effects. That means chemical additions: barium chloride for green, sodium nitrate for yellow, strontium carbonate for red. All of them are more volatile than the original mix. And unlike traditional manufacturers, many new entrants don’t understand that volatility is not just about what’s used — but how it’s handled, measured, and stored.Recent accidents in Uttar Pradesh have all had a familiar feel — an anonymous “factory”, a fire or spark, then a blast. Five dead in Bijnor. Four in Saharanpur. Seven in Bulandshahr. Five in Bareilly. The units had no safety clearance and no signage. Often, locals learn what was being made after it explodes.Easy-to-source ingredientsEnforcement, when it comes, is swift but shallow. Sunil Singh, chief fire officer in Raebareli, has seen enough to know that licensing tells only part of the story. “Most districts in UP have around a hundred authorised units,” he said, “but the number of illegal ones is far higher.” Ingredients are easy to source — potassium nitrate, sulphur, aluminium powder — and a few weeks of observation are often enough for someone to try replicating the process at home for a quick buck. “One wrong combination, one stray spark from a wire,” Singh said, “and it’s a blast site.”Even as inspectors keep tabs on licensed operations, it’s the invisible ones, tucked deep into neighbourhoods and lanes, which pose the real challenge. The 2018 blast in Nalanda’s Khasganj (Bihar) is a case in point. It flattened a building and killed eight people, including three children. In Bhagalpur, a 2022 blast brought down a three-storey home, killing 15. In Patna, in 2005, a factory explosion killed 35 people. “We are alert,” said Bihar’s ADG (law and order) Pankaj Darad. “Most incidents happen during Diwali. That’s when everything ramps up.”Shady dealingsLegality doesn’t always ensure safety either. Tamil Nadu offers proof. In Virudhunagar district, home to Sivakasi — the country’s biggest hub of licensed firecracker units — more than 500 people have died in factory accidents over the past 15 years. Nearly 90% of India’s fireworks are produced here, across more than 1,000 registered units. Despite that, the fatalities keep coming. In 2021, the toll was 51. In 2023, 40. Last year, 42.For ‘karigars’, it’s not just hazardous work, it’s often a hole in hell. Inside the units, temperature is stifling. Electricity is banned to prevent ignition, so workers sit inside 10x10-foot concrete rooms with no fans. “It’s hard to breathe by noon,” said L Poovalingam, a worker in Thayilpatti. “We open the doors for air, but the work doesn’t stop.” His colleague, M Nagarathinam, said the pay varies by task. “₹300 to ₹1,500 a day. But only when there’s work. After the ban on barium nitrate and joint crackers, production dropped. So did our days.” medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/ud39ftNqK3w?si=JH3sMaV3VuCo8HjFMost workers are paid per piece. The faster they work, the more they earn. It’s an incentive model that, according to researchers, creates structural risk.In 2022, two engineering professors — S Rajaram and GD Sivakumar — published a study in the International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics after studying dozens of incidents and interviewing workers. They identified 58 root causes. Among the most common: friction during filling, improper chemical disposal, and storage of leftover material. “If a unit is allowed five kilos a day,” Rajaram said, “they will mix 10. What’s not used is kept for the next day. That’s when the reaction happens.”Some units, licensed to only make simple fireworks like flowerpots or chakkars, illegally produce aerial shells — crackers with greater lift, louder impact, and far more chemical volume. These are riskier to assemble, but fetch better margins.Across states, inspections spike after a tragedy. Factories are sealed, material is seized, reports are filed. But in most cases, production resumes within weeks. Often the owners register under a relative’s name or shift the work to a different place. There is no central database, no long-term blacklist, no coordinated effort to trace where raw materials are coming from or where finished goods are going.In Deesa, the building where the blast occurred had no name. The walls have been cleared now. The families are gone. But people nearby still talk about the days before it happened — the shuttered windows, the unusually regular comings and goings, the way children wore school uniforms in the morning but stayed behind after everyone else left. They talk about the quiet. That’s what made it invisible, and in many ways inevitable.