The Ravana effigy burning that closes Dussehra has grown in many Indian cities into a major public spectacle involving enormous effigies, sometimes reaching well over a hundred feet, packed with substantial quantities of fireworks and burned before crowds numbering in the tens of thousands at dedicated grounds such as Delhi's Ramlila Maidan, a scale of production that has turned what began as a village or neighbourhood Ramlila tradition into organised civic events requiring significant municipal planning and sponsorship.
That scale has brought its own modern problems: fires spreading into crowds, structural collapses of oversized effigies, and stampede risk at some of the largest gatherings have led Indian state governments and municipal authorities to introduce specific safety regulations in recent years, including height and firework-quantity limits, mandatory fire safety clearances, and crowd-control planning requirements for organisers of large public effigy burnings, an administrative layer of modern public safety law now sitting on top of a religious and dramatic tradition that, in its village form, involved nothing like the same scale of pyrotechnics or crowd density.
Kullu in Himachal Pradesh keeps a distinct, week-long Dussehra of its own, in which the valley's local deities, represented by decorated palanquins, are carried down from villages across the region to gather before the image of Raghunathji at Kullu, a mountain observance built around a procession of local gods rather than the Ravana-effigy burning or Durga immersion that mark the festival elsewhere in India, illustrating how widely regional practice diverges under the single shared name.