Five killed in explosion at illegal firecracker factory in Ahmedabad

The blast came without warning on a Saturday afternoon in Ahmedabad's Vastral neighborhood. A firecracker factory—one operating without legal permission—erupted in a violent explosion that killed at least five workers and sent nine others to hospitals with severe burns and trauma. The force of it traveled five kilometers through the city, a shock wave that announced something had gone catastrophically wrong.

The factory sat on Ramol-Gatrad Road, tucked behind a Rapid Action Force camp. When the explosion tore through the structure, it trapped workers beneath collapsed debris and triggered a fire that would require more than five fire engines to contain. The building itself was devastated, its walls compromised, its interior a maze of wreckage that rescue teams would have to navigate carefully in the hours that followed. Firefighters described extensive structural damage—the kind that makes search operations slow and dangerous, the kind that means bodies might still be buried when darkness falls.

The first responders were soldiers from the RAF camp nearby. They heard the blast and moved immediately, pulling people from the rubble before the fire brigade arrived. It was improvised rescue work, urgent and necessary, the kind that happens in those first minutes when the difference between life and death is measured in seconds. By the time official fire crews reached the scene, those initial rescues had already begun. The injured were loaded into ambulances and rushed to L.G. Hospital and Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, where doctors treated them for burns and the kind of trauma that comes from being caught in an industrial explosion.

Authorities moved quickly to the site. The Ahmedabad Mayor, municipal corporation officers, and senior police officials, including Joint Commissioner Jaipal Singh Rathore, arrived to oversee operations. Rathore told reporters that five people were confirmed dead, eight or nine injured and hospitalized, and the fire was under control. He noted it was not a large establishment—a detail that somehow made the casualty count feel worse, not better. A small operation, but deadly enough.

What emerged in the hours after was a picture of regulatory failure. The factory's operator was identified as Mehul Dodiya. His license to manufacture firecrackers had been cancelled at some point in the past, yet the factory had continued operating anyway. No one had stopped it. No inspection had shut it down. The machinery kept running, the workers kept coming, and the risk accumulated silently until Saturday's explosion made it impossible to ignore. Police launched investigations into both the cause of the blast itself and how an unlicensed operation had been permitted to function in a residential area of a major city.

As evening fell, rescue teams were still searching the debris. The identities of several victims remained unconfirmed. Officials acknowledged that the death toll could rise. The fire had been brought under control, but cooling operations continued through the night—a precaution against fresh explosions, against the possibility that something in that wreckage might still ignite. The story was not finished. The investigation was just beginning, and somewhere in the city, families were waiting for news that might never come.