Timing Your Show Around Society and Court Rules

The starting point is the Supreme Court's order of 23 October 2018, in WP(C) 728/2015. It permitted the manufacture and sale of green crackers, banned barium-salt and joined crackers outright, and limited Diwali bursting to a roughly two-hour window, commonly observed as 8–10 PM. That two-hour window is the baseline every household show should be built around, not a suggestion, the actual boundary the order set.

On top of that, the NGT's orders of 9 November and 1 December 2020, in O.A. 249/2020, banned firecrackers outright in poor-air-quality regions, including the NCR. If you live in or near a region the NGT order covers, that supersedes the two-hour window entirely, the question there isn't "when" but "whether", and the answer on a bad air-quality day may be no bursting at all, not a shifted schedule.

Neither of these orders is a fixed calendar date. They're conditions (a two-hour evening window; an air-quality threshold), so the practical move is checking the current status for your city or state before you fix a start time, rather than assuming last year's timing still holds.

A two-hour window is tighter than it sounds once a full box is involved. Rather than trying to fit everything into a single unbroken stretch, treat the two hours as your hard outer edge and plan the show to finish comfortably inside it, leaving buffer at both ends for setup, for kids needing breaks, and for any dud that needs the wait-and-check treatment before it's handled. Starting right at the opening of the window, rather than drifting into it twenty minutes late, is the easiest way to avoid running past the close.

If your building or street has multiple families bursting crackers independently, a shared understanding of the window matters more than any individual household's planning, one family finishing at 10 PM sharp doesn't help if three others are still going at 10:30.