The death ships
Tankers, container ships, passenger liners, aircraft carriers -- like the French warship, the 24,200-tonne Clemenceau that its owners told the Supreme Court on Monday will not enter Indian waters -- arrive at Alang with the high tide to meet their end.
Alang is the largest ship graveyard on the planet. Some 300 ships a year are broken down here.
As the tide recedes the ships are left beached on the shore like stranded whales and that's the beginning of a month's work for the labourers of Alang.
Hundreds of them crawl onto an aged ship and begin to painstakingly dismantle it with a few crude tools, blow torches and their bare hands. They have no safety gear or protective suits. Nor is there any standard set of precautions in place for the system of dismantling each vessel.
Many of them earn a meager Rs 100 a day.
They also gain a lifetime of deathly sickness the longer they work in Alang.
For Alang is not just the final resting place of much of the world's ships. Alang is also the curse on India's poorest, who arrive in this Gujarati town to earn a living out of work the rest of the world disdains from doing.
Most of these decrepit vessels, that this mixed bunch of workers -- hailing from UP, Jharkhand, Orissa and Bihar-- pull apart contain enormous amounts of asbestos in their bowels. The white and blue asbestos found in the skeletons of these ships is one of the most toxic chemicals in the world. Prolonged exposure to asbestos guarantees a date with lung cancer a few years down the line.
These end-of-life ships, most of them built before laws regulated what a ship could be built from, may also contain PCB, lead and explosive materials. These materials damage the environment, the health of ship-breaking crews and cause serious accidents and explosives. It is estimated that 300 people die each year in Alang.
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