Bhogi Crackers 2026

Bhogi is the first of the four-day Sankranti festival (Wikipedia), landing on the last day of the Agrahayana or Margashirsha month of the Hindu solar calendar, which works out to 13 January on the Gregorian calendar, the day directly before Makar Sankranti (Wikipedia). It's celebrated most widely in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana (Wikipedia), where the day opens before sunrise with the Bhogi Mantalu: households collect old clothes, broken furniture and farm waste and burn it all in a communal bonfire, a literal clearing-out before the harvest festival proper begins (Deccan Chronicle). Homes get cleaned and decorated ahead of the fire, and once it's lit, families gather round it rather than around a cracker display, so any crackers that do come out are a side event to the bonfire, not the main one. That's the difference from the Pongal hub, where Bhogi is folded in as day one of a longer four-day run: this page treats Bhogi as the single, self-contained dawn festival that Andhra and Telangana households actually plan around. A household that only marks Bhogi typically wraps up by mid-morning, well before the Sankranti festivities the next day even start, so the cracker window here is shorter and earlier than on any of the other Sankranti-linked pages on this site.

Bhogi falls under the same green-crackers rule as every other Indian festival, even though it's a smaller, regional observance than Diwali. Bursting hours are set by the state, check the 2026 notification from your city police or state pollution control board for the exact window. Andhra Pradesh and Telangana both issue their own timing notices around Sankranti, so confirm the local one rather than assuming a Diwali-style hour applies. The green crackers guide has the formulation details if you're unsure which of today's picks qualify.

Whatever the state adds, two nationwide orders come first. Supreme Court, 23 Oct 2018 (WP(C) 728/2015): permitted manufacture/sale of green crackers, banned barium-salt and joined crackers, limited Diwali bursting to a ~2-hour window (commonly 8–10 PM). NGT, 9 Nov & 1 Dec 2020 (O.A. 249/2020): ban on firecrackers in poor-air-quality regions including the NCR. Our green crackers guide explains what the CSIR-NEERI formulations change.