CHENNAI: The advent of monsoon did not augur well for firecracker traders.Heavy rains that lashed the city on Monday night and Tuesday morning took a toll on cracker business for Deepavali as the owners of the 40-plus shops that were put up at Island Grounds, after an order from the High Court regarding the same, complained of damage to their stock owing to water stagnation.Several makeshift pandals also came crashing down due to the downpour that continued on Tuesday.According to several shop owners, while the court had asked them to move their shops from Parrys Corner to Island Grounds, the administration had made no arrangements, even though they were aware of the rain predictions.Guna, whose shop crashed in the morning, said that most of the cracker stocks fell into stagnant water, resulting in huge losses.“This is the reason why we resisted coming here,” he said. Shop owners argue that most of their business happens in the last three days leading up to Deepavali as people usually finish shopping for other items before coming to crackers. Many of these shopkeepers had invested anywhere between Rs 10 lakh to Rs 30 lakh, which they said they would not be able to recover owing to the rain.Mastan, another shop owner, blamed the officials for the situation as they had not heeded to their requests of providing better facilities. “We requested them to have motors ready for pumping out stagnant water, in case it rained. They did not do it. Only at around 10 am, one motor pump was brought to pump the water out,” he said.Several shopkeepers said that rain was only the culmination of a number of woes that they faced this season, the most important being price rise. Saravanan, a trader, said that prices of almost all varieties of crackers had gone up by 35 per cent when compared to last year. “Even though people were ready to spend the same amount that they did last year, they got very little for the money due to high prices,” he said, adding that a gift box of fireworks cost a minimum of Rs 1,000 this year as against Rs 650 last year.Also, taking into account the interest rates for the loans that they had taken to put up the shops, the owners said that this Deepavali was the worst they had faced in the last decade.
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