The nine slender-bodied, half-naked young men sitting immersed in their work inside the frond-thatched single-room mudhouse in the sun-beaten vacant lot of the backward village in Thrissur district are handling materials that even qualified explosives experts would approach only with extreme care. None of these nine men has completed even primary education or undergone any kind of formal training in the trade.
This fact is not particular to the village mentioned above. This is the inescapable reality of the entire fireworks sector of Kerala, where hundreds of crores of rupees are spent every year on pyrotechnic shows. There is not even a simple certificate course in the sector despite the fact that the thousands engaged in it are dealing with the most hazardous and unpredictable materials on Earth.
The question of how callously Kerala is allowing its fireworks shows to take place without having even the basic systems in place has come up as a big discussion point once again in the context of the April 10 tragedy during a pyrotechnic display at a temple in Kollam which claimed, as per official estimates, 107 lives.
“Why should you undergo any course to do this jobIJ” asks Velayudhan (name changed), a 35-year-old pyrotechnic worker from Vennoor village in Thrissur district, a famous spot on the fireworks map of the State. “I have been doing this since I was 12. I have never felt incapacitated by the lack of a degree in the science of explosives,” he says.
It is not the fault of Velayudhan or any of the thousands of others in the fireworks sector that they have not done any course in this dangerous trade. Simply, there is no such course in Kerala though it has centres where mahouts are getting formal training in taming and keeping elephants and men and women are taught how to climb up and down coconut trees.
According to explosives experts, many foreign countries have courses in pyrotechnics by which those in the trade get theoretical and practical training in the “art” of explosions. Such institutions are also holding researches on how to enhance the visual beauty of pyrotechnic displays by reducing sound levels and possibilities of accidents, they say.
Experts say Kerala has no systems to pre-determine explosion intensity, sound-level expectation, extension of explosion, etc at fireworks shows. “In a sense, the sobriquet of God’s Own Country for Kerala is greatly meaningful because the rate of accidents is negligible considering the callousness and primitiveness seen in the sector,” said a top police official.
“Pyrotechnic workers in Kerala, including the so-called Asans (teachers), don’t have much knowledge about the substances they are handling. They know about potassium chlorate and sulfur and that the two should not be kept together but that is all. Practical lessons are often learnt the hard way,” said a former expert with the Government’s Explosives wing.
According to him, several foreign countries have developed systems, by which fireworks shows are controlled by computers with effective programs that trigger and end sessions from control rooms at safe distances, and methods for conducting shows almost at zero risk. “But our men are still throwing torches into heaps of high-intensity explosives to trigger explosions,” he said.
likewise, the stockpiling of explosives meant for use in the event near the spot of the show itself enhances the possibility of accidents as sparks from the fire show could fall on the storage sheds. This is how the gruesome tragedy at Kollam was triggered.
One of the main reasons for the high rate of fireworks accidents and the high number of casualties in such mishaps is the Keralites’ strange craze for high-intensity explosions rather than the beauty of firework shows. In competitive fireworks events, the winner is decided by how much sound is created in explosions.
“look at the names given to particular types of dynas (dynamites),” says Gopalakrishnan of Nenmara, Palakkad, a place which sees one of the biggest fire-shows in Kerala every year. “Garbham Kalakki (inducing abortion of pregnancy), Quaker, Cheviminni (ear-shattering)… That should give us a fair idea about the Keralites’ love for big-bang blasts,” he says.