Chander Singh Nayak, 44, from Sandalpur village in Madhya Pradesh’s Dewas district was elated when he got a call from his daughter on Saturday (March 29). He had been working as a labourer in Dholka, in Ahmedabad district, in Gujarat, and had got word that Sunita, 22, and her husband, Lakhan, 24, were moving closer to him. “They said they had got a job working at a firecracker factory in Banaskantha (in north Gujarat),” Chander Singh recalls.
Three days later, Sunita and Lakhan were dead — two among the 21 people killed in an explosion at a firecracker factory just outside Deesa town in Banaskantha district on Tuesday (April 1) morning. The explosion, at about 9 a.m., flattened the premises of the two-storey factory where they lived and worked, throwing debris and body parts up to 300 feet away, into the potato fields behind it. The blast sent up columns of smoke that eyewitnesses say went up “as high as we could see”.
Chander Singh had not watched the news that morning. “Sometime at the end of my shift, I heard about an explosion in a firecracker factory, and I went to my contractor. He pulled out his phone and confirmed it. I remember being in a daze,” he says, on Wednesday afternoon, after having spent a sleepless night at the Deesa Civil Hospital, where he was told the remains of his loved ones had been brought.
Outside the hospital, Shanti Panwar, Lakhan’s aunt, sits on the porch and wonders, “I don’t know why they went to work there. I guess the promise of money was too hard to resist — ₹500 to ₹1,000 for every box filled. The contractors in Sandalpur had goaded them on.” On this promise, Lakhan had also brought along his siblings — two sisters and a brother, all teenagers, to work at the factory. All of them died in the explosion.
Governments and ground reality
As the authorities in Deesa worked on getting the debris removed on Wednesday morning, the police and district officials held press briefings announcing that they had arrested the owner of the factory, Khubchandbhai Renmul Mohanani, and his son, Deepakbhai Khubchandbhai Mohanani.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister each announced a ₹2 lakh ex-gratia to the kin of the deceased and ₹50,000 to the injured. Six people were hurt, including a 3-year-old, and some from outside the factory. Additionally, Gujarat Chief Minister announced an ex-gratia of ₹4 lakh for the kin of the deceased and ₹50,000 for the injured. All 21 killed in the explosion were migrant workers from Madhya Pradesh’s Harda and Dewas districts, among them eight children, the youngest of who was 3. There were 24 people in the building, working and living together.
While the remains of 19 victims have been identified, two of the factory workers, one of them 10 years old, were declared “missing”, given that too little of their remains had been recovered and DNA testing would be required to identify them.
Banaskantha District Magistrate Mihir Patel told local reporters that the factory — Deepak Fatakda — did not have a licence to manufacture firecrackers. It had a licence to store and sell them, but this had expired towards the end of 2024, Patel had said.
The police declared that they had found aluminium powder and yellow dextrin at the factory, both used for making explosive substances, concluding that these materials had likely caused the explosion to be as massive as it was.
In the first information report (FIR) registered by the police, the local revenue officer had said that the factory had no fire safety equipment. The FIR invoked charges of culpable homicide and endangering lives and personal safety, of the Bharatiya Nyaya Samhita, along with sections of the Explosives Act, 1884, and Explosive Substances Act, 1908.
But Patel told reporters that the local police had conducted a spot check at the factory just 15 days ago and not found any materials indicating that crackers were being manufactured. “After their licence had expired, a renewal application was filed with the SDM (sub-divisional magistrate) office. It was for this that the police had gone to check the place,” he had said. The police had given a report against renewal, but the DM says this wasn’t because manufacturing materials were present there.
The police says they are investigating the source of the chemicals at the factory. More than 24 hours after the explosion, the site of the factory has bundles of firecracker threads smouldering, the smell of gunpowder in the air, and small spherical sutli bombs strewn across the debris. Civic authorities are at work with earthmovers and investigators take stock of whatever is left of the factory located in a row of warehouses.
According to latest available data on accidental deaths compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau for 2022, India had seen 60 incidents of fires at factories where combustible materials like crackers and matchboxes are made, leading to 66 deaths and 32 injured people. The highest number of these incidents were recorded in States like Tamil Nadu (18), Bihar (9), Jharkhand (9), Uttar Pradesh (9), and Rajasthan (9).
Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani with families of victims of the firecracker blast, at Deesa Civil Hospital on April 2, 2025.
| Photo Credit:
Vijay Soneji
First responders
The morning of April 2 was like any other weekday at the Majirana household in the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation area outside of Deesa railway station. Babubhai Madabhai Majirana, 32, had started the day getting his children ready for school as his wife and mother prepared to tend to the farmland they have been working at all their lives.
Across the road from Majirana’s home, inside the Deepak Fatakda factory, Rajesh Nayak, 22, was getting ready for the day’s work. The work had been familiar to him. Just ahead of Holi this year, Rajesh had worked at the same factory for 17 days, allegedly making firecrackers.
“The children were still asleep on the upper floor. We had just finished breakfast and had started work on making the sutli bombs. Around 8:45, I stepped out of the factory with my 3-year-old sister to fill up some drinking water. I turned my back and felt the impact: a deafening sound and then ringing in my ears, I was thrown to the ground,” says Rajesh, who survived with his sister. “I sprang up, looked around for my sister, and rushed out. We were then brought to the civil hospital in Deesa,” Rajesh says.
Majirana was in Deesa town dropping his youngest daughter off at school when he heard the explosion. “I saw smoke rising and thought it must have been an electrical pole that caught fire, so I rushed back home. As I got closer, I realised what had happened. We knew it was a firecracker godown, but did not know what work was going on there,” Majirana said. His mother, Moriben, was at home when the explosion occurred. “I had never seen something so terrible. The smoke went up so high,” she says.
“All I could hear were continuous explosions and screams of people. I rushed into the factory to help, but all I could see was smoke,” says Majirana, one of the first people at the scene. “Just as the smoke cleared, I saw it – corpses everywhere, and body parts. It was horrific.”
He says he began clearing out whatever he could. “I brought out about 11 bodies from inside the factory. The other farm labourers in the area also helped. We put the remains on a tractor, from where the ambulances took them away one by one,” he says.
As the hospital authorities were making sense of the remains that were arriving throughout Tuesday, confusion and chaos was brewing, as the family members started arriving there from Madhya Pradesh.
Confusion around bodies
“I reached the hospital around midnight,” Chander Singh says, adding that he and other relatives were asked to wait in the hospital lobby all night. “We did not know where the remains were. We did not even know for sure that our sons and daughters had died because we had not seen their bodies,” he says. “I don’t know why no one would talk to us or give us any details. Some police officials kept asking us to wait.” He says they drank some water, had some sugarcane juice, and waited. On Wednesday morning, they were escorted by the police into a hospital room.
Dulichand Kamal, Lakhan’s brother, had arrived in Deesa by then. “As soon as we entered the room, I saw police officials bolting the door from the inside. One of them then produced a list of people who they said had died in the explosion, asking us to sign the papers. We refused as we were yet to see the bodies.”
By the afternoon, Chander Singh was informed that the remains of his loved ones were being taken back to their hometown in Madhya Pradesh. “The police officials told me I could ride with the bodies in the ambulances, but I kept insisting they wait, because more of our family members were on their way. They took them away anyway.”
The frustration of the family members built up and some of them sat in protest in front of the hospital, demanding that the remains of their loved ones be handed over to them. Opposition politicians, including Congress MLA Jignesh Mevani joined the protest and alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led administrations in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat were trying to “hide the bodies” to purportedly shield the owners of the factory. The family members also wrote petitions to the Gujarat Chief Minister, alleging they were not allowed to identify the remains of their loved ones. As the day went by, the dejected family members eventually left Deesa for their hometowns in Madhya Pradesh where the bodies had arrived by Wednesday night.
Investigations begin
The Gujarat investigators, who had by this time begun visiting the spot of the incident, began piecing the sequence of events together. As investigators went about their work, the village was brimming with questions: Why was the factory manufacturing when it only had a licence for storage and trading? Why did the authorities not seal the factory when the police visited? What triggered the explosion?
Many, like veteran journalist Pankaj Soneji, question why the authorities initially gave journalists another reason for the explosion. “At first, the authorities claimed that it must have been a boiler explosion. But there was no boiler at the place. Now, they are saying it could have been chemicals.”
Tapan Jaiswal, editor of the daily BK News, a local Gujarati language broadsheet, says, “I have been reporting in north Gujarat for decades now and I know that this factory owner had monopolised the industry in the area. How could the district authorities not have known?”
He says it was the initial reportage that forced the Gujarat government to set up a Special Investigation Team with officers from Gandhinagar to probe the incident. “If this factory had been running in this area for so long, it would not be possible for the local police to investigate it fairly.”
abhinay.lakshman@thehindu.co.in
Edited by Sunalini Mathew
Published – April 05, 2025 06:00 am IST
