None of these concerns are invalid and as an environmentally conscious individual, I share all these, but there is something very wrong with the picture.

How can one be both – environmentally conscious and an opposer of the no-cracker clique? Are the two not mutually exclusive? At first glance yes. But, as with all issues and causes, there are several facets that one needs to consider before one can take a hard line on them.

The first facet that I faced and pondered about was child labour, as this was the reason my childrens’ school teachers asked them to eschew crackers on Diwali. The valid concern of child labour too has other facets. Our children were made aware of the horrors of forced child labour and this (forced child labour) was the reason they were told never to buy crackers. We have not bought crackers for several years now.

The thought of small children working in any factory, let alone in a factory that uses gun powder as its main ingredient, is abhorrent. That this practice needs to be rooted out of our society is undeniable. But consider this – the maid who comes in to work in our homes often has a common story to tell – of being the sole person responsible for her children’s future due to family circumstances. She does all sorts of menial jobs to ensure her children can go to school and have a better life. She works herself to the bone so that her children need not go through the same drudgery.

But what of those who send their children to such factories? Isn’t it conceivable that the circumstances which force the parents to send their children must be dire indeed? Would a parent choose to send their child there if there was another option?

I think not.

When we talk of forced child labour in these factories, the force comes from their circumstances and not from other individuals. So when we say “don’t buy crackers” or “ban crackers” are we not, in effect, saying that the only means of earning that these people have, should be removed from them? We, sitting pretty in our decent homes, with our bellies full of goodies, saying that since we want to ‘protect’ the environment, these people should lose their only means of getting a meager meal in theirs?

The protection of the environment at the expense of human needs? Doesn’t seem fair, does it? Unless we ensure that the circumstances that force these parents to send their children to such factories are eradicated, we cannot talk of banning crackers.

Then comes the pollution factor. Crackers create toxic fumes and no one can deny that. But so do vehicles. And we use them indiscriminately each day of our lives. If we were to take a minute to look around, we would see several of our contemporaries in cars with a single occupant. The heat generated from vehicles is the largest contributor to global warming – do we ever check ourselves when we use vehicles? There are families which can afford drivers, where the vehicle is on the road for the major part of the day, ferrying every member individually to his/her destination. Do we tell them to stop doing this – or, if we ourselves are the culprits, have we stopped doing this in the name of protecting the environment?

I think not.

And we preach about the pollution created by an hour of crackers on one single day in a year?

Over use of resources also adds to degradation of the environment in various different ways. Central air conditioning that uses power to cool areas which has no human inhabitants (stairwells for example) for the most part of the day, central heating where additional clothing could do the job as well, concealed lighting that requires the use of several light fixtures when a single one could do the job, are all types of overuse that contribute to environmental degradation. And yet more and more of us are incorporating these in to our lives as our spending power increases. And this overuse goes on 24X365, year after year after year, once these gadgets are installed!

How then can we justify demands to ban crackers, which, if one were to quantify, would come to less than an hour of use per person in an entire year, and which, as an industry feeds thousands?