A visit to India's cracker town Sivakasi could tell you how it's been lax in adopting safety-related measures - right from worker gear to factory design.
A week before Diwali last year was time to practice what's become a ritual for me in over a decade - a visit to India's firecracker town Sivakasi, 75 km from Madurai. Over the years, as much as Sivakasi has gained fame for its crackers it has also gained notoriety for employing child labour.
My visit last year gave me some signs that winds of positive change were finally blowing. First, the impression that I got was that the town had by and large cleaned up its act as far as child labour is concerned.
Two, the cracker makers were betting the future on automation. The good thing, I was told, is the younger generation is increasingly aspiring for IT jobs. So, people are increasingly valuing education. You could see many a fancy car here, something that was unimaginable only some years back.
But the tragedy earlier this week, when fire at a firecracker-making unit consumed 39 lives and injured many others, brought to focus how some important aspects of Sivakasi's staple business haven't changed. And these pertain to safety. There are about 500 units, mostly small, employing 1.5 lakh people to make 90% of India's fireworks need, earning in the process about half a billion dollars.
Over the years, I have toured 40-50 of these units, many of them small and unorganised, and have never felt entirely comfortable while there. Here's why.
Walking through many of these units could make you feel you are Pac-Man walking through a maze. The manufacturing units more often than not are a collection of many small rooms. Some look like train compartments without proper ventilation. The 'gunpowder' smell is indeed overwhelming.
Inside each of these rooms in a typical factory about 5-7 workers, all seated on the floor, do everything from mixing the chemicals, filling them into the outer core, labelling and packaging. Everything from rockets to flower pots and the multi-thousand walas are made here. Even today workers handle dangerous chemicals with their bare hands; no gloves, no protective gear.
By August-September, the crackers are ready for the upcoming Diwali. For a while, till they are shipped out, they are stocked in huge carton boxes in the same work rooms. Visiting them, I have always felt uneasy because of the absence of quick exit points. Save for some of the bigger firms, the others don't have emergency exits. Many of these manufacturing facilities are situated so close to each other than a fire at one firm can endanger a whole colony of cracker makers. Thankfully, 'No Smoking' is something everyone seems to follow.
Then, there's still the issue with illegal units - even those that are made by people inside their homes or, quite audaciously, in front of their homes. In 2010, I bumped into one such audacious family. They were just filling in the chemicals in a random way, the oldest member of the family told me. He said, "It doesn't matter much because the products have a market anyway."
Many fire accidents and government monitoring squads later, the safety element is still to be addressed adequately. Perhaps the only time the industry talks in unison about safety is when it requests the Government not to allow import of Chinese crackers as they are made of a mix of chemicals that are friction-sensitive and therefore unsafe.