Delhi cops dig pits in police stations to store seized illegal crackers

NEWDELHI: This Diwali, burying bombs is perhaps the safest bet for the Capital’s cops.

They are sitting on a tinderbox of about two tonnes of confiscated firecrackers, prompting a frantic hunt for a plan to safely store the stockpile in their cramped police stations.

Solutions range from burying them to shipping them out.

These were seized from vendors after the Supreme Court banned the sale of fireworks in New Delhi for a fortnight, including the festival of lights, in a preemptive step to cut air pollution.

The downside is the problem of storing these highly inflammable firecrackers as these aren’t contraband technically that they can be destroyed.

The ban is against sales, not storage, in which case a seller can reclaim his stock. If he pleads guilty, the material seized can be smashed. If not, the cops have little option but to store the fireworks.

Then again, what if the temporary ban is lifted in November and the vendors ask for their rockets and bombs for the winter wedding season?

But these are too hazardous for the staff and visitors to be stored inside police stations.

The answer is to put the patakhas in the pits, “filled with sand and sandbags, and levelled out with soil so that no neglected spark can ignite a fire”, according to Delhi Police chief spokesperson Dependra Pathak.

Any open space on the premises of a police station is chosen for the cracker grave.

Precaution is paramount in Mangolpuri police station, where nearly 20kg of fireworks were buried in a ditch and rundown cars were parked atop as an added safety measure.

Some of these crackers are sent to a safe storage in Haryana with court permission, but an unspecified amount remains inside station buildings as timepressed cops are unable to get the hazard out of the way.