LABOUR-INDIA: Feeble Laws Fail to Dent Shipbreaking Industry

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Dev Raj

NEW DELHI, May 10 1998 (IPS) - The shipbreaking industry in India provides the best example of how workers are exploited by a business that follows no rules except that of profitability.

With environment and safety regulations being tightened around the world, the highly hazardous shipbreaking industry has drifted to countries where laws are either lax or unenforceable – and India fits that description.

Even nature seems part of the conspiracy. At Alang, on the coast of Gujarat state, favourable tide movements, which facilitate beaching the giant steel carcasses, have turned that coastal town into the world’s biggest shipbreaking yard.

Every day, on average, one worker loses his life through the frequent accidents at Alang, according to the international environment group ‘Greenpeace,’ which has conducted several studies on the industry.

Greenpeace blames mainly the United States for patronising the industry and the group periodically demonstrates outside the U.S embassy here to protest against policy sending naval and maritime ships to Alang for scrapping. In January, Greenpeace activists were joined by members of the powerful Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) in a sit-in demonstration outside the embassy demanding an end to the highly exploitative and environmentally hazardous industry.

“As far as the U.S is concerned, developing countries are the scavengers of the world with India heading the pool,” said Nityanand Jayaraman, Greenpeace representative in India. But, if the the U.S government is unconcerned about the hazards posed by shipbreaking to the 40,000 workers employed in the industry, or to the environment, neither are Indian authorities.

In fact, the Gujarat state government is doing everything it can to support an industry which has an annual turnover of 500 billion dollars and also brings in 2.5 million tonnes of scrap steel – about 10 percent of the country’s steel production. But the workers at Alang, most of whom are migrants from distant states like eastern Bihar or southern Andhra Pradesh, cannot expect to earn more than USD two for a day of playing around with cutting torches and dodging flying metal chunks.

Death or maimings at Alang can come form falling girders, explosions set off by the cutting flames, toxic fumes or the many diseases that thrive in the labour camp conditions in which the workers are forced to live.

According to Greenpeace workers, labour laws simply do not apply at Alang and concepts like medical insurance or pension are almost unheard of. “When a worker dies of injuries or disease that is usually the last anybody hears of him,” Jayaraman said.

Although the Alang yards have been in operation since 1982, the Gujarat Maritime Board (GMB), which controls it, never bothered to introduce safety guidelines till last year. Few workers are given basic protective gear such as gloves or helmets and employers interviewed by Greenpeace say the workers are there on their own volition, and that conditions in their home towns and villages are far worse than at Alang.

Savings on worker safety adds to India’s competitiveness against other countries like Thailand and the Philippines which are also in the business. “No country can match India for cheapness of labour and the unaccountability of employers,” says Ravi Agarwal who runs the Delhi-based environment group Srushti.

Prodded by vocal environment groups such as Greenpeace, Srushti and Toxic-links, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), brought out this month, a set of ‘guidelines’ which to many environmental activists little more than eye-wash.

Although the CPCB has in recent times displayed toughness by ordering closure of several polluting and hazardous industries, its seems hamstrung on Alang because of what Agarwal describes as the “prevailing mafia-like conditions there.”

The CPCB guidelines merely state that although ship-breaking is a source of re-rollable metal scrap, saving on direct import costs, the pollutants that seep out during shipbreaking pose a threat to the marine eco-system.

According to CPCB chairman, D. K. Biswas, the Unions Ministry of Environment and Forests is expected to study the dangers posed by hundreds of wrecked steel hulks beached at Alang, but nothing appears to stop the industry growing. Despite protests by Greenpeace and other environment groups the U.S Government recently supported the continued consignment of naval and merchant vessels to developing countries for scrapping.

The Basel Action Network (BAN) an international coalition of NGOs, including Greenpeace, has specifically condemned the activity at Alang but with little response from either the U.S Naval Department or the maritime administration beyond suggestions that new safeguards need to be introduced.

As signatory to the Basel convention, India cannot be a destination for hazardous waste and although the CPCB places discarded ships in that category, no one can say how the guidelines are going to be implemented – if ever.