On Sunday, 25 people died in a Tamil Nadu firecracker factory that wasn’t supposed to be open. On Monday, 13 more died in a Kerala fireworks unit that was.
The blast at Mundathikode in Thrissur district hit around 3:35 PM on April 21 — five days before Thrissur Pooram, Kerala’s most famous temple festival. The unit was preparing fireworks for the Thiruvambady Devaswom, one of two temple committees whose competitive pyrotechnic displays define the festival. Roughly 40 workers were inside a dried-up paddy field. A second explosion during rescue operations made evacuating the injured even harder.
48 Hours, 38 Bodies
The Virudhunagar factory was operating illegally on a rest day. The Mundathikode unit had a licence. The licensee, Mundathikkod Satheesh, was himself among the injured — admitted to Thrissur Medical College Hospital alongside 22 others, five of them critical.
Bodies of seven men were recovered intact. Parts of five others were not. That’s what thousands of kilograms of firework chemicals do in an open field.
PM Modi announced Rs 2 lakh ex-gratia for families of the deceased and Rs 50,000 for each injured person. The District Collector ordered a magisterial enquiry. If that sequence sounds rehearsed, it’s because India keeps rehearsing it.
The Chemical That Keeps Coming Back
Unconfirmed reports point to potassium perchlorate in the Mundathikode stock — a cheaper compound that produces louder bangs. The same chemical was implicated in Kerala’s worst fireworks disaster: the 2016 Puttingal temple fire in Kollam that killed 111 people.
That was a decade ago. Regulations were tightened. PESO introduced new norms. In October 2024, over 150 people were injured at a Kasargod temple festival — days after those new safety rules took effect. The pattern isn’t that India lacks fireworks regulations. It’s that regulations don’t survive contact with festival deadlines.
Thrissur Pooram is on April 26. The flag-hoisting ceremonies began the day before the blast. The fireworks these workers were building — they were meant to be the show.
India’s festival fireworks economy runs on two things: tradition, and the workers who absorb the risk when tradition goes wrong — a pattern mirrored across India’s industrial safety record. This week, 38 families learned the price.