LUDHIANA:
The delay by district authorities in allotment of cracker stalls is giving city businessmen sleepless nights. Ludhiana Wholesale Fireworks Association (LWFA) on Tuesday organized a meeting to decide the next course of action regarding the delay in the process.
According to the businessmen, in the previous years, the stalls were allotted at least 2 months prior to
Diwali. However, this year, the decision has not been taken till now by the authorities.
“Since we are not sure when the process will be started, the members of the fraternity are restless as they already have huge stocks of unsold crackers from last year with them.
LWFA chairman Ashok Thapar, said, “Every single day’s delay in the allotment process is proving to be costly as it takes a lot of time and money to get a stall ready for the festive season. Moreover, the companies are pressurizing us to order the crackers now or they will not accept any orders after a few days. This is a tricky situation for us as we can not place any orders until we know from which date we will be allowed to put up our stalls. We can calculate the required stock only after we are aware of how many days our stalls will be in place.”
According to Vishal Sharma, vice-president of LWFA, the district administration should realise urgency of the problems being faced by businessmen and without wasting any time the old licences for cracker stalls should be renewed. “Besides the pressure from manufacturers, we also have a large quantity of unsold stocks from last year which we were hoping to sell this year to come out of losses.
