reckless adjective showing a lack of care about danger and the possible results of your actions
Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries[1]
There are several ways to critique the Supreme Court’s order of 29 October 2026, which lifts the ban on firecrackers in Delhi and the National Capital Region for the week of Diwali.[2] One could show that the Court, having admitted it lacked the data to say whether a ban works, concluded that the ban had failed simply because people broke it.[3] That shows only that the ban was not enforced, not that it does not work. One could point out that the order ignores its own record: every earlier direction in this litigation went unimplemented, and the same authorities are now trusted with a more elaborate scheme at a few days’ notice.[4] I also considered critiquing the order from the perspective of the precautionary principle, which allows a court to protect the environment without waiting for conclusive evidence of harm.[5] One could ask on what basis the Court describes the bursting of crackers as a religious practice, when its own order says that the scriptures speak of lamps and that crackers arrived with gunpowder a few centuries ago.[6]
I considered writing that article and decided there was little point in it. Criticism of a judgment assumes that the judgment contains reasoning, so that one can find the step at which it goes wrong. This order does not allow that. It states the problem accurately, records the evidence accurately, and then reaches a conclusion that none of it supports. There is no faulty step to identify, because the conclusion is not connected to the steps at all. One cannot engage with reasoning that is not there.
Consider what the order itself accepts:[7]
● every party before the Court agreed that bursting crackers contributes enormously to pollution in the region (paragraph 24);
● the particulate matter they release stays in the air for days and passes into the bloodstream (paragraph 7);
● children, the disabled and the elderly are the most exposed (paragraph 6);
● the Court’s earlier directions were not implemented, and the State “utterly failed” to collect the data it was told to collect (paragraphs 16 and 26); and
● conventional crackers were sold as green crackers even while the ban was in force (paragraph 27).
Having recorded all of this, the Court permits crackers to be manufactured, sold and burst.
The obvious
The case for the ban does not depend on the data the Court says it lacks. It rests on things that are plain to anyone who has watched a law being enforced in this country.
A ban is easy to enforce because the direction is clear. Any firecracker found in the region is unlawful. A constable at a check post, a patrol in a market and a police station taking a complaint at midnight need decide only one thing: whether the object in front of them is a firecracker. Under the order, each of them must now check whether the box carries a QR code specific to the product and the batch, whether that code leads to a valid registration, licence and test certificate, whether the box is sealed, whether the seller is at a designated site, whether it is the right date and the right hour, and whether the spot is more than 300 metres from any school, hospital, nursing home or old-age home.[8] No police force in the country will carry out those checks on a festival night, and the Court cannot seriously expect it to.
Under a ban, crackers are hard to procure. They have to be bought quietly, from someone willing to take the risk, by a buyer who knows he is breaking the law. Under the order, they are on sale in licensed shops, under banners, with the permission of the Supreme Court. The Court’s own finding is that conventional crackers are being passed off as green ones.[9] Open sale does not cure that problem. It gives the illegal product a lawful shop to sit in.
Under a ban, a violator can be caught at once, because every cracker that goes off is evidence of an offence. Under the order, the sound of a cracker at nine in the evening on 8 November tells the police nothing, since it may well be lawful.
Green crackers also pollute. The claim made for them by CSIR-NEERI, which developed them, is that they emit about thirty per cent less than conventional crackers.[10] A cracker that pollutes less is still a cracker that pollutes. In November,
Delhi’s air is routinely several times over the safe limit before a single cracker is lit. Adding a somewhat smaller quantity of particulate matter and metal compounds to that air is not a compromise between health and celebration. It is a further load on lungs that are already overburdened, imposed with the Court’s authority.
Two kinds of polluter
The real cost of this order is not one more week of bad air. Delhi has many such weeks. The cost lies in what the order reveals about how seriously the Supreme Court takes the problem.
Compare its approach to stubble burning. The Court has pressed Punjab and Haryana hard to stop farmers from burning paddy residue. It has criticised the States for prosecuting too few farmers and imposing only token penalties,[11] and in 2025 it asked the Centre to consider penal provisions, observing that jailing a few offenders would send the right message.[12] The States have registered FIRs, and the Centre has since doubled the penalties.[13] That pressure was right. Stubble burning
will stop only when burning becomes costlier for the farmer than not burning, and the Court’s insistence on enforcement has moved the incentives in that direction.
The farmer who burns stubble is usually poor, often has no affordable alternative, and burns because the window for sowing the next crop is short. The Court did not treat any of this as a reason to let him burn on designated days in designated fields. It treated his fire as a source of pollution that had to stop. The firecracker trade is organised and well represented in court, and the festival carries religious and emotional weight. Faced with that source of pollution, the Court has spent the years since 2018 searching for ways to accommodate it: improved crackers, green crackers, time windows, test cases, and now restored licences.[14] The air in the region makes no distinction between smoke from a field in Sangrur and smoke from a rocket in Lajpat Nagar. The Court does.
That double standard cannot be defended. To call the order disappointing would understate it. It is a dereliction by the institution that has, since the 1980s, presented itself as the final guardian of the country’s environment, and it is all the more deplorable because the Court plainly knew better. Its own order sets out every reason for keeping the ban.
What a right to clean air is worth
The right to a clean environment exists in Indian law because the Supreme Court read it into Article 21, and paragraph 22 of this order repeats that the right to life includes the right to a healthy and pollution-free environment.[15] A right is worth
only as much as its enforcement. A right that gives way every October to a traders’ association and the festive mood exists on paper and nowhere else.
The people who will pay are the ones the order itself names:[16] children, the elderly and the disabled, along with everyone with weak lungs or a weak heart. Since the Court has found that conventional crackers are sold as green ones, they will breathe in not only fine particulate matter but the barium, cadmium, lead and other metals that give crackers their colour and their bang. They cannot opt out. They live here.
The order will be read, fairly or not, as the Court giving way to religious sentiment and commercial pressure at the expense of everyone else in the region. The Court has only itself to blame for that reading. It has written an order that records every reason to keep the ban and then lifts it, without any reasoning capable of displacing the obvious inference.
The order ends with an appeal to members of the Bar, celebrities and sportspersons to lend their voices to a voluntary campaign for a responsible festival.[17] Every judge of the Supreme Court, on taking office, swears to “uphold the Constitution and the laws”.[18] No film star or cricketer has taken that oath. The judges have, and with it they took on the duty of enforcing the right to life under Article 21. Article 32 gives a citizen whose fundamental rights are violated the right to move the Supreme Court, not the right to appeal to a celebrity.[19] An appeal to public figures, made in the same order that lifts the ban, reads as an attempt to hand that duty to people who never undertook it and have no power to discharge it.
This is the saddest part of the order. It suggests that, having declined to use the powers the Constitution gave it, the Court is now looking for someone else to bear the responsibility that comes with them. When the right of millions of people to breathe clean air is being violated, are they to look to Virat Kohli for protection, or to the Supreme Court?[20]
The real danger
The question in this case was never complicated. Firecrackers add to air that is already dangerous. A ban is the simplest rule there is to enforce. The authorities have failed to enforce anything more complicated, and the Court has said so in each of its orders. What it lacked on 29 October was not data, but the resolve to act on what it already knew.
That is the real danger in this order. It gives the impression that the Court does not think it needs to take hard steps at all, and that greater public awareness will somehow solve India’s air pollution problem without any change in the way people live, celebrate or do business. It places remarkable faith in the executive to do what is needed, though the same order records that the executive failed to do what it was told last year, and it sees no need for the Court itself to take a firm line.
The Supreme Court has more independence and more power over this question than any other body in the country. If it is not serious about the air its citizens breathe, there is little reason to expect seriousness from the governments and authorities below it. A country whose institutions, from the Supreme Court down,
without-crackers-involve-virat-kohli-supreme-court.
are not serious about the air its children breathe is in serious trouble, and this order gives no reason to think otherwise.
*Noor Shergill Managing Partner, Swarnim Legal
[1] Reckless, Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries,
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/reckless (last visited Nov. 3, 2026).
[2] Arjun Gopal v. Union of India, I.A. No. 245432 of 2026 in W.P. (C) No. 728 of 2015, 2026 INSC 1181 (India Oct. 29, 2026), 2026 LiveLaw (SC) 1115; see also Amisha Shrivastava, Supreme Court Allows Certified Green Crackers In Delhi-NCR For Diwali On Nov 7-8; Year-Round Ban To Resume On Nov 9, LIVELAW (Nov. 2, 2026), https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/supreme-court-allows-certified-green-crackers-in-delhi-ncr-for-diwali-on-nov-7-8-year-round-ban-to-resume-on-nov-9-556915; Ritu Yadav, Diwali 2026: Supreme Court allows bursting of green crackers in Delhi-NCR on November 7 and 8, BAR & BENCH (Nov. 2, 2026), https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/diwali-2026-supreme-court-allows-bursting-of-green-crackers-in-delhi-ncr-on-november-7-and-8.
[3] Arjun Gopal, 2026 INSC 1181, ¶¶ 25–27.
[4] Id. ¶¶ 16, 26, 28.
[5] Vellore Citizens’ Welfare Forum v. Union of India, (1996) 5 SCC 647, ¶¶ 11–14 (India); A.P. Pollution Control Bd. v. Prof. M.V. Nayudu, (1999) 2 SCC 718 (India); Arjun Gopal, 2026 INSC 1181, ¶ 31.
[6] Arjun Gopal, 2026 INSC 1181, ¶¶ 5–6.
[7] Id. ¶¶ 6–7, 16, 24, 26–27.
[8] Id. ¶ 29 (Directions B, D, F, I, J, L–N).
[9] Id. ¶ 27.
[10] Manu Sebastian, Questions At Supreme Court’s Order Diluting Firecracker Ban In NCR, LIVELAW (Oct. 24, 2025), https://www.livelaw.in/articles/questions-at-supreme-courts-order-diluting-firecracker-ban-in-ncr-307759 (discussing the Environment Ministry’s affidavit of March 2025 and NEERI’s claimed reduction in emissions).
[11] Amisha Shrivastava, Stubble Burning Increased Substantially In Some Punjab & Haryana Districts, Yet Only Mild Penalties Imposed : Supreme Court, LIVELAW (Oct. 3, 2024), https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/stubble-burning-increased-substantially-in-some-punjab-haryana-districts-yet-only-mild-penalties-imposed-supreme-court-271530; Abhimanyu Hazarika, Punjab, Haryana not taking penal action against stubble burning; air quality panel silent: Supreme Court, BAR & BENCH (Oct. 3, 2024), https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/punjab-haryana-not-taking-penal-action-stubble-burning-air-quality-panel-silent-supreme-court.
[12] Anmol Kaur Bawa, Jailing Farmers Who Indulge In Stubble Burning Will Send Right Message : Supreme Court Asks Centre To Consider Penal Provision, LIVELAW (Sept. 17, 2025), https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/jailing-farmers-who-indulge-in-stubble-burning-will-send-right-message-supreme-court-asks-centre-to-consider-penal-provision-304228; Debayan Roy, Farmers important, but why not arrest those who violate stubble burning directives? Supreme Court, BAR & BENCH (Sept. 17, 2025), https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/farmers-important-but-why-not-arrest-those-who-violate-stubble-burning-directives-supreme-court.
[13] Shrivastava, supra note 10 (FIRs registered under section 223 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023); Amisha Shrivastava, After Supreme Court Rap, Centre Doubles Penalties For Stubble Burning; Farmers To Pay Up To Rs. 30,000 For Violations, LIVELAW (Nov. 8, 2024), https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/after-supreme-court-rap-centre-doubles-penalties-for-stubble-burning-farmers-to-pay-up-to-rs-30000-for-violations-274583.
[14] Mehal Jain, Breaking: SC Refuses Complete Ban On Sale Of Firecrackers; Online Sale Banned; Duration For Bursting Crackers Fixed, LIVELAW (Oct. 23, 2018), https://www.livelaw.in/sc-refuses-complete-ban-on-sale-of-firecrackers; Anmol Kaur Bawa, Supreme Court Relaxes Absolute Firecracker Ban In NCR For Diwali; Allows Sale & Use Of Green Crackers, LIVELAW (Oct. 15, 2025), https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/supreme-court-relaxes-absolute-firecracker-ban-in-ncr-for-diwali-allows-sale-use-of-green-crackers-306958; Arjun Gopal, 2026 INSC 1181, ¶¶ 10–14.
[15] Arjun Gopal, 2026 INSC 1181, ¶ 22.
[16] Id. ¶ 6.
[17] Id. ¶ 32.
[18] INDIA CONST. sched. III, form IV.
[19] INDIA CONST. art. 32.
[20] At the hearing on 29 October 2026, the Bench suggested that the authorities ask cricketers such as Virat Kohli to record a message encouraging people to celebrate Diwali without firecrackers. Amisha Shrivastava, ‘Make This Diwali Enjoyable’: Supreme Court Suggests Virat Kohli, Other Public Figures Promote Firecracker-Free Celebrations, LIVELAW (Oct. 29, 2026), https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/make-this-diwali-enjoyable-supreme-court-suggests-virat-kohli-other-public-figures-promote-firecracker-free-celebrations-556541; Ritu Yadav, Raise public awareness through ads on Diwali without crackers; involve Virat Kohli: Supreme Court, BAR & BENCH (Oct. 30, 2026), https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/raise-public-awareness-through-ads-on-diwali-