Abstract
The festival of Diwali and it associated fireworks, which were not so common in the past, are slowly penetrating into rural Brahmaputra Valley. PM10 monitoring was done during the 2009 Diwali festivities at a rural site in the Brahamputra Valley of Northeast India. Sampling of PM10 was done on a 12 hourly basis for an extended period of 13 consecutive days. The mean PM10 concentration during the monitoring campaign was found to be 40.88 ± 19 µg/m 3 and the maximum concentration of PM10 was recorded on the Pre-Diwali night. Elemental and ionic constituents of PM10 were analyzed by ICP-OES and Ion Chromatograph (IC), respectively. The ratio of ∑anions to ∑cations was found to be 1.26 for the study period, which is indicative of a cation deficient condition. Pearson’s correlation and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) were carried out to trace the impact of Diwali celebrations. In addition, the elemental enrichments due to Diwali fireworks, which we term Diwali Induced Enrichments (DIE) were calculated for the festival day samples. DIE showed marginal enrichment of elements and ions, indicating the beginning of the impact of Diwali in the rural areas of the region.
Highlights
Though some success has been achieved in terms of noise reduction on implementation of noise standards for firecrackers, such strict emission control measures are not implemented in terms of Diwali celebrations in India
Daytime PM10 was found to be the maximum on Diwali day (Fig. 3(b)), which was much on the lower side of other fireworks studies; but was comparable with the study conducted during FIFA world cup victory (Vecchi et al, 2008)
Nighttime PM10 maximum was observed on Pre-Diwali night (Fig. 3(b)), which could be due to thermal inversion at ~200 m above ground (Fig. 3(c))
Summary
Such celebrations range from small local events like birthday parties, wedding ceremonies, and victory in a sports event to huge nationwide celebrations. Diwali is one such festival of India marked with lighting of lamps and celebrations with major fireworks all over the country. Diwali celebrations are growing in magnitude and scale in large cities. This trend could be explained in terms of relative affluence of the urban population in the country. Though some success has been achieved in terms of noise reduction on implementation of noise standards for firecrackers, such strict emission control measures are not implemented in terms of Diwali celebrations in India
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
