With the police having issued fewer licences to firecracker vendors and come down heavily on their illegal sale, crackers are not that readily available in the city. As a result, environmentalists foresee a significant dip in the noise and pollution levels on Diwali night.

The Delhi Police's licensing department issued about 1,000 licences this year, compared to about 5,000 that are normally given out. Most of these shops are concentrated in and around Old Delhi and Sadar Bazaar with a sprinkling in other areas.

A senior police official said this year saw a big crackdown on illegal firecrackers that came into the city from nearby areas. "We have been stopping their entry at the border itself. Secondly, due to the terror threat in the city, guidelines for obtaining temporary licences for selling crackers have been very stringent. Just getting a no-objection certificate from the fire department implies that the area where the shop is located needs to be wide enough to allow the entry of a fire tender. That automatically eliminated a large number of shops," said the official.

Firecrackers have also become almost 40% more expensive than last year, both due to the shortage and rising costs of raw material. At a time when Delhiites are reeling under the effects of the global meltdown and high inflation, crackers don't seem to be high on the priority list. "There is roughly a 30-40% increase in prices of crackers. People are finding it exceedingly hard to be able to locate shops and then find that they can't even afford them," said Praveen Khandelwal, general secretary, Confederation of All India Traders. "I spent the same amount as last year but managed to get only half the crackers. I went shopping with my son and it took me an hour to first locate a shop. Then we realized that anything even remotely fancy was much above our budget. We spent about Rs 800 on barely four-five boxes of basic crackers. All parents in our colony are facing similar problems and many families have cut down on the crackers they are bursting this time. Most children will be bursting crackers only on Diwali and not before and after it," said Ramesh Thapar, a resident of Safdarjung Enclave.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, are happy with the trend. "Bursting crackers is not the only way of celebrating Diwali. In the fun of things, nobody realized the highly harmful impact crackers have on health, specially those of children and people with breathing problems. Each year, air and noise pollution levels were going up unimaginably high, harming not only human beings but also animals. For a city like Delhi, that is already under the onslaught of severe air pollution due to the high number of vehicles on the road, I think we can do without an added problem," said a senior government official in the environment department.