MARCO PALLADINO: Shipbreaking Yards of Alang, Gujarat (India)

From chapter 2 of the book “Elegance and Dignity – Stories from India”

Alang is the largest ship recycling yard in the world, a kilometres-long expanse of sites where gigantic carcasses of ships are waiting to be disassembled by hand-workers, who recycle parts and components. Here are employed about 40000 workers, as much as a medium town. It’s a dirty, dangerous, exhausting and deadly job. They climb on these metal giants that stay torn apart and half-cut into the sea. They handle oxyhydrogen flames throughout the day, the air is unbreathable and saturated of combustion gasses, of oils, lubricants and acid fumes, the air is pungent, stinging, it burns the eyes and the nose. Here as elsewhere the workers are poor labourers coming from agricultural areas even poorer than here, like Bihar, Assam, Orissa, West Bengal or the neighbouring Pakistan, they flee from hunger, do not have any formal training to deal with toxic materials, are willing to make this life for the equivalent of a few euros per day. For this little money they are daily exposed to arsenic, lead, contaminated by asbestos, all of which under deafening noise. In the closer village people live by sheep farming and by a related industry (recovery and distribution of spare functioning pieces of the ships). It’s like stepping back 200 years when you exit the shipyards and visit the village. But even here the pollution is terribly high.

Scrap materials, however, are a big business and thanks to cheap Indian labourers a too little costly one, and these environmental risks are not taken into any account. India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China and Turkey are the homes of the world’s shipbreaking facilities. Every year the shipping industry sends around 600 ships of all types to be dismantled on their beaches. Workers here are totally unqualified, having very little education and are thus easy to be exploited. Workers are being provided neither with the adequate training nor with the equipment to work in such a dangerous and toxic environment, although shipbreaking is considered by the International Labour Organisation as one of the heaviest and most hazardous occupations in the world. Their general living conditions after migrating to the yards are extremely bad. Every year thousands of workers are the victims of deadly accidents at the yards of India, Bangladesh and other shipbreaking countries. The working conditions are extremely bad and safety measures hardly exist. If the shipbreaking workers don’t die or get seriously injured because of an accident, they suffer a big risk of falling ill or dying from toxic waste-related diseases.

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