The Supreme Court of India today refused to entertain a plea related to blanket ban on firecrackers in the country.
The petition was mentioned before a bench led by Chief Justice of India (CJI) UU Lalit which refused to entertain it, stating that the petitioner should have approached the court sooner because injuncting now would result in losses given the upcoming Diwali season.
The court precisely said that it cannot entertain this. Diwali is round the corner and people must have invested in it already and now injuncting this will lead to losses etc. You should have come few months earlier.
Earlier this week, a plea by BJP’s Manoj Tiwari was put in court by Advocate Shashank Shekhar Jha, in which the apex court had declined to stay Delhi Government’s decision prohibiting storage, sale and use of all sorts of firecrackers in the national capital until January 1 in order to reduce pollution levels.
However, the plea was tagged by a Justice MR Shah led bench with other such pending cases and is set to be heard before Diwali.
As Diwali is within a few days,many States have exercised prudence in terms of the sale, purchase, and bursting of crackers due to their impact on air quality.
However there are quite a few states that have allowed bursting of crackers only for a few hours, but the crackers need to be green crackers.
Green crackers are low-emission fireworks which have been approved by Supreme Court during festivals, lifting the total ban on fireworks imposed in 2017 and confirming that there was no general restriction on the use of fireworks, and adding that only those crackers containing barium salts are illegal.