Hyderabad  :The city celebrated the festival with Colourful display of fireworks, strikingly bright traditional attires, flying rockets, dancing fire wheels, colourful sparklers and ‘thunder bombs’ marked the city’s Diwali celebrations this year. The festival of lights seemed less noisy and evidently ‘safer’ than last year.

As on last year Diwali, there are 18 serious cases of retinal detachment and retinal haemorrhage, besides over 100 corneal burns cases have come to the state-run Sarojini Devi Eye hospital in just a single day. This year witnessed only 35 fi recracker-related eye injury cases a day after the festival. Out of this 35 eye injury cases only eight were reported to be serious injuries such as clotting in the eye ball and corneal injuries, which required victims to be hospitalized. Dr MR Rathod, resident medical offi cer, Sarojini Devi Eye hospital said that “The Majority of the victims were children who were treated as our patients (OP). They suffered minor injuries to their eyes due to entry of foreign material, dust and smoke”.

GHMC’s fire prevention wing had nearly 58 incidences of fire, Out of them three of which were termed ‘major’ reported in the city.

C Lakshmi Prasad who is an additional director, state disaster response and fire services said that “all 21 fire stations falling under GHMC limits were active during Diwali and fortunately, there have been no reported firecracker-related fatalities in the city”.

While the incessant calls for a ‘green’, crackerfree Diwali found resonance in the IT belt that remained very less noisy with many ‘environment-conscious’ techies or either giving firecrackers a complete miss this year, it wasn’t true in some areas of the city. Residents of these areas, on the contrary, rued how the booming sounds from firecrackers continued to ‘haunt’ them well into the might night.

“Starting daybreak, the deafening crackers kept going off every other minute and I was even afraid to step out as the roads were taken over by people celebrating Diwali. They had no concern for the vehicles or the pedestrians and sometimes even set off fi recrackers without warning bystanders to be careful,” said Krishna Reddy, a resident of Banjara Hills, who decided to stay indoors to avoid the Diwali ‘madness’.

The noise level has been increase in areas such as Abids (75 to 83), JNTU (69 to 73), Punjagutta (80 to 83), Pragathinagar (52 to 79.4), Uppal (69 to 78dB (A)).  According to PCB officials the air and noise pollution levels increased three-fold in densely populated and commercial areas in the city.

That wasn’t clearly true of many others, as many city malls reported an increase in footfall this Diwali. Inorbit mall recorded over 50,000 people strolling into its decked up interiors on Diwali night as on Wednesday to participate in the mela and sign up for shop-and-win contests.

Allauddeen Badhusa, head of marketing, Inorbit mall said that “We have noticed that customers who were simply visiting the mall, upon finding out that they could participate in the mela after shopping for Rs 1,000 or more, actually went to the stores to make one big purchase or went to family dinners to put together a bill amounting to Rs 1,000 or more,” said Allauddeen Badhusa, head of marketing, Inorbit mall.