Siwan's children died in a cracker unit officials had been told about. Every district must check before Diwali

The fire at Mohd Amiruddin Mian’s house in Alampur village began at about 5:30 on Friday evening. Firecrackers being made inside caught fire and kept exploding for about two hours, long enough for the front of the house to collapse onto the road. When it was over, five people were dead: the 65-year-old owner, his two granddaughters aged 14 and 8, a 10-year-old boy from the neighbourhood and one person not yet identified.

Then came the familiar sequence. The Siwan police chief suspended the local station house officer and the village chowkidar for negligence. A special team was formed. And the district magistrate, Vijay Prakash Meena, said something that should trouble every official in the state: the administration had received information that firecrackers were being made at the house.

A pattern, not an accident

Siwan is the latest entry in a long list. In April last year a blast flattened a firecracker godown near Deesa in Gujarat and killed 21 people, all of them workers and their families from Harda and Dewas in Madhya Pradesh. The godown’s licence was for storage only, it had expired on 31 December 2024, and its renewal had been put on hold because the unit lacked proper facilities. It went on working anyway. The police said it had been stocking crackers illegally. In the same fortnight, eight people of one family died in a home unit in West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas and eight more in Anakapalle in Andhra Pradesh, where a unit had stored far more raw material than it was allowed. In February 2024 a factory blast at Harda itself killed 13.

In each case the unit was known to someone: a licensing office, a police station, neighbours. What was missing was anyone obliged to act before the explosion.

The fair objection

There is a livelihood here, and a large one. Sivakasi alone makes about 90% of India’s firecrackers, and the trade employs poor workers who earn as little as ₹300 a day. Crackdowns before Diwali can drive small makers underground, into homes and back rooms, where conditions are worse. The regulator, the Petroleum and Explosives Safety Organisation, has been reported to have 106 officers against 137 sanctioned posts to watch about 3.7 lakh hazardous units. Nobody can inspect everything.

That is an argument for inspecting the right things, not for inspecting nothing. Siwan did not need a national survey. It needed a police station to act on what it had been told.

What should be done before Diwali

First, every district in Bihar and other states where crackers are made or stored should run an inspection drive in the next two weeks, and publish a list of licensed manufacturing and storage units, with what each is licensed to do. Anything not on the list is illegal, and residents should be able to report it.

Second, information about illegal manufacturing must be logged and answered in writing within days, with a named officer responsible. A tip-off that sits in a file is how children end up under rubble.

Third, a lapsed or refused licence should mean the premises are sealed, not left to carry on, as at Deesa.

Fourth, making explosives inside a home where children live should be prosecuted as endangering life, with the same seriousness as any other threat to them.

Finally, the Centre should fill PESO’s vacant posts and states should give district fire services the power and staff to check small units, especially in the weeks before the festival season, when stocks are at their highest.

Diwali is a little over two weeks away. Stocks will only grow until then. The time to find the next Alampur is now.

The reporting behind this view

• 5people, three of them children, killed in the Siwan blast on 23 October 2026
• 21people killed at an illegal firecracker godown near Deesa, Gujarat, on 1 April 2025
• 106 of 137officer posts filled at the explosives regulator PESO, as reported in 2025