No bang, no sparkle: Cracker making hub silent now
Sisendi town, which has a 90-year history of making fireworks, has shut shop due to inflation, anticracker campaigns, thrust on ‘green crackers’ and now the ban on crackers
Once infamous for producing deafening fireworks, the cracker manufacturing units in Sisendi (Mohanlalganj block), 29 km from the state capital, have lost their bang.
Most of the other manufacturers have switched to bangle selling, cycle repair and other work.
The traditional cracker makers blame inflation, anti-cracker campaigns and cracker ban as major reasons behind the decline of Sisendi’s cracker manufacturing business, but cite the focus on green crackers as the last nail in the coffin. And now, the ban on crackers has come as another blow to them.
“The government did nothing to make us aware of the concept of green crackers that is now in trend. The cracker ban has dealt a huge blow to us,” said Shakir
Ali, a cracker manufacturercum-seller in Sisendi.
Those engaged in the trade said the sudden change in the trend was witnessed last year after the Supreme Court’s order making use of green cracker mandatory on Diwali.
In October 2019, the Supreme Court in its judgement had mandated use of green crackers for Diwali and prescribed specific norms for the manufacturers, ordering them to make milder avatars of traditional crackers in terms of sound and smoke.
Until then, majority of them here said ‘green cracker’ was an alien term for them.
“Since the very beginning, the manufacturers believed the quality of cracker depended upon the noise it produced,” said Jamma, another cracker manufacturer who has now switched to bangle selling.
Locals, however, said the advent of the green cracker era put a full stop to Sisendi’s cracker business.
“Cracker making is an ancestral business for all those who are born and brought up in Sisendi, which is into cracker making for the past 90 years or even more,” said Mohammed Saleem, another cracker manufacturer who is now into cycle repair business.
Saleem said Sisendi’s crackers were quite famous even during the British era because of a rare composition of a chemical (called shora in local lingo) and powdered charcoal that made the crackers quite popular in the market.
He said the place thrived till a blast at a cracker manufacturing unit in 2014 in which 16 people were killed and around 20 injured.
All cracker licenses in the village were cancelled after the blast.
Qamar Jahan, who lost her husband and other six family members in the 2014 blast recalled, “The blast was so loud as if a missile was airdropped.”