NEW DELHI, INDIA, November 13, 2001: The festival of lights and fireworks, Divali, is just round the corner but wholesalers of firecrackers in the capital have done only a fraction of the business they normally do. Compared to a business of around US$13,000 that they averaged in the last ten to seven days before Divali last year, sellers in Sadar Bazaar, the capital’s wholesale market, are already foreseeing a dip of more than 50 per cent in their earnings. “The business has never been so slow. We are hardly selling anything. It just doesn’t seem like Divali,” says Virendra Kumar, a wholesaler.
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