COVID-19 Implicated ban on Diwali fireworks: a case study on the air quality of Rajasthan, India

Diwali is a five-day festival celebrated every year with lamp illumination and bursting of firecrackers in India. Considering the present situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Rajasthan government imposed a ban on firecrackers during the five-day festivities in the year 2020 to tackle air pollution caused by the emission of harmful pollutant gases from their burning. This paper has assessed the concentration of PM10, PM2.5, CO and SO2 pollutants, which are released from fireworks in large amounts in the environment during the Diwali festival. Seven air quality monitoring stations viz. Ajmer, Alwar, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kota, Pali and Udaipur in Rajasthan state were selected to examine the effect of a ban on the use of firecrackers during the Diwali festival. The analysis was done by comparing the mean concentrations of baseline data and Diwali day data of 2019 and 2020. The results depict that the firecracker ban helped in declining the concentrations of all the air pollutants (PM2.5, PM10, CO and SO2) taken into consideration, which significantly improved the ambient air quality of Rajasthan during the Diwali festival, and it is suggested that such regulations should be implemented from time to time to improve the quality of air and human health effectively.