Labouring over a warhorse

Ship-breaking is a lucrative industry that thrives on squeezing labour

Ranjit Bhushan Delhi
The world's largest ship-breaking yard is in a bit of disarray. At its peak in the 1990s, the 10-kilometre long beach in Gujarat's Alang, was the final resting place for over some 300 ships, carriers and vessels which came from countries as diverse as Brazil, Norway and Greece. Today, that number has shrunk to less than 200 a year and there is every chance of it going down further. If the problems and controversy surrounding Alang in Bhavnagar's Gulf of Cambay were not bad enough, the latest outrage against breaking of the French warship Clemenceau carrying with it a huge amount of asbestos, has once again highlighted the environmental hazard and the appalling working conditions that the Alang ship-breaking yard has come to signify.
The 27,000 tonne French aircraft carrier, Clemenceau was decommissioned at Toulon in France in 1997. Since then, it has been lying there for all these years as no country in the world appeared keen to take it, even as scrap, given the huge amount of hazardous chemicals in the form of asbestos that it carries. In the last week of December 2005, a French court cleared the sending of the ship for breaking to Alang, after rejecting petitions by campaigners trying to block its transfer. Activists, particularly from Greenpeace, say that the breaking down of ship by impoverished workers, would lead to death and destruction, apart from violating the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes, which clearly prohibits one country transporting hazardous material to another country.

"Dumping Clemenceau on India or any other Asian ship breaking yard not equipped to deal with this toxic behemoth would result in yet another casualty of war, this time the victims would be unprotected, vulnerable and poor workers," said Rampati Kumar of Greenpeace India. Points out Shailendra Yashwant, Campaign Director of Greenpeace India: "End-of-life ships should be treated like any other toxic material under the internationally-recognised Basel Convention which bans the dumping of such waste by OECD countries in non-OECD countries. Clemenceau has been rejected earlier by Turkey, Greece and India on the grounds that its export violates the Basel Ban amendment. We have reasons to believe that this latest effort to export, allegedly after asbestos removal, is nothing but an attempt to greenwash, as the ship still contains large quantities of asbestos. The French government has the moral responsibility to ensure that it respects the Basel recommendations in letter and spirit."

Exposure to asbestos over a period of time, experts say, can lead to conditions of cancer. One of its varieties, the blue asbestos is banned in India, but the ship-breaking industry thinks nothing of it, prompting former minister and environmental activist, Maneka Gandhi, to say that what India now requires is a full-fledged campaign against asbestos.

Since the furore broke out, a Monitoring Committee of the Supreme Court of India on Hazardous Wastes has declared that the Clemenceau should not enter India. According to activists, it is possible to decontaminate large ships of their asbestos and other toxic material but it is cost-intensive and deters ship-breaking companies. So they prefer a destination like Alang where labour laws are non-existent, there is virtually no protection to workers and whatever few regulations exist are so heavily weighed in favour of ship-owners, that it leads to, on an average, of a death of a worker every day.