THE DEATH CHAMBERAlang provides us with tonnes of iron but gives only disease and death to its workers, writes TARUN K BOSE

lang, the world's largest ship breaking yard at Bhavnagar district in Gujarat, where toxic ships from rich nations are sent for dismantling under the guise of recycling. Workers employed in the yard are exposed to asbestos and

other poisons from the ships broken in unsound environmental conditions. Recently, 13 people died and many more injured. The deaths in Alang Shipyard and its frequent reporting in press highlight the problems of the shipyard. Many questions about the functioning of Alang Shipyard raised but are left out.

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Ship owners sending their ships do not remove the hazardous material from the ship prior to sending it for scrapping. In the world, there are about 45,000 ocean-going ships such as container ships, general cargo ships, roll on/roll-off ships, refrigerated cargo ships, tankers, ferries, cruise liners and special ships for research or cable-lying. Warships are not counted. About 700 are taken out of service, after an average service life of 29 years at sea. These ships are sent to Alang for dismantling.

In the 1970s shipbreaking was still a highly mechanised industrial operation carried out in the berths of shipyards, mainly in Great Britain, Taiwan, Spain, Mexico and Brazil. Since the early 1980s shipbreaking has been increasingly shifted to poor Asian countries. By 1993, half of the ocean-going ships were scrapped in China. At the new millennium, 70 percent of the ships were dismantled in Alang and remaining 30 percent were in Bangladesh, China, Vietnam and Philippines.

WORKERS IN ALANG SHIP BREAKING YARD

When a ship reaches Alang at the end of its sailing life as it is no longer profitable, its classification certificate- the 4-year special survey-expires, and it is no longer able to meet safety requirements, it as a rule offered to brokers in Hamburg (Germany), London or New York, who pass on to the business to India. One kind of business for the broker in Alang consists of attaining good price and another lies in converting payments in the form of a non-convertible Indian currency into prices in US dollars. The dollar price per tonne of unladen weight sometimes reaches $ 170. The main purpose of dismantling ships is to recover the steel. 95 percent of the mass of a defunct ocean- going ship consists of high quality steel. Remaining 5 percent is made up of non-ferrous metal components, paints and coatings, insulation and sealing materials, electric cabling, cabin walls, decorative materials, floor covering etc. These materials are firmly installed on the ship or even inseparably bonded to the valuable iron, and need to be stripped, disposed of or at least taken into consideration in the process of breaking the ship.

SHIPS FROM DIFFERENT COUNTRIES ARRIVE AT ALANG

Numerous consumer items taken from the ships are sold in the shops that thrive on this trade along the access road to the scrapping area. Items sold are furniture, crockery, washing machine, electronic gadgets, canoes, diesel engine, generator, motor, iron plates, valuable fittings, the asbestos-containing decorative tiling, panels and insulating materials. As Alang is a rural region so there is greater demand for consumer items sold by ship breakers' shop. Items are much cheaper than the market and there is much rush of buyers. Those buying consumer items do not think for while that behind the items purchased by them there are thousands of human wailing's. As remarked by largest circulated German magazine in its photo feature caption - ' On the altar of the Alang ship breaking yard everyday human lives are sacrificed'

Scrapping old ships in Alang poison people and environment. Ships manually dismantled here, workers come in contact with toxic substances. The pollutants contaminate water, air and the soil. The contamination of ship parts by toxic and carcinogenic substances, which have been banned in developed countries, reaches high levels in the older ships.

SHIP BREAKING YARD WITHOUT ANY SAFEGUARDS

In Alang ship breaking yard, asbestos is openly and carelessly handled without any kind of safeguards. Asbestos can be seen everywhere- be it on the ships, next to the ships, on the beach, in big bowls on the heads of women workers and on uncontrolled dumps on the land behind. Asbestos-containing material is stripped from the ships in everyday clothing, without protective masks and with bare hands, and subsequently picked apart with same disregard for safeguards. Workers in the Alang ship-breaking yard are mostly youths. Some of them are as young as 17 years, exposed to hazardous asbestos dust for a longer lifetime and are threatened not only by the acute dangers, but also to its medium and long-time hazards. Cancers caused by asbestos only emerge after decades. As Dr. Frank Hittmann, Occupational physician and industrial physician in Bremen, Germany says, “The incidence of cancer in Alang's working conditions is 25 per cent. Every fourth worker in Alang must be expected to contract cancer."Approximately 100 ship breakers in Alang employ about 40,000 workers who live in make shift shanties directly next to the workplace on the 184 plots into which the beach is organised. The makeshift accommodation along the beach is only separated from the scrapping yards by the main road running along the beach. Due to constant inflow of material from the ships that are broken daily, asbestos dust is omnipresent both at the workplace and where the workers sleep. The heavy traffic on the road whirls up the dust, which then settles on the tables and chairs on the roadside where the workers spend their leisure time. Many of the workers sleep on the floor or very close it. The shanties are open, and it can be assumed that the composition of dust on the road and in house scarcely differs.

Asbestos dust on worker clothes contributes to the spread of asbestos in the houses. These make shift shanties are sans water or toilet facilities.

WORKERS TOIL AT HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS

Majority of the 40,000 workers in the shipbreaking yards have migrated from Bihar, UP, Orissa, West Bengal and Rajasthan. They get poor quality of rice, mixed with liberal quantities of dust even scarp particles. The disease rate among these workers is 11 to 20 per cent. They are commonly afflicted with cholera, typhoid and urticaria. Throughout the country, 8 per 10,000 suffer urticaria but in shanties of Alang it is 97 per 10,000. Everyday at least twenty major mishaps take pace at the harbour. It has become a regular feature, when either someone falling down from above or being crushed by heavy iron plate or getting trapped amongst flames. Sometimes crane gets snapped while lifting a load beyond its capacity, crushing some workers to death. Cylinders burst or the oil in a tanker catches fire, exploding the tanker. Hospitals are quite ill equipped; hence the ailing and the wounded have to be rushed to Tadaja or Bhavnagar.The typical form of employment in the shipbreaking yards is the cutting steel parts with small cutting torches. These torches are in operation day and night; oxygen and propane flasks lie around everywhere. The work is also done without protective masks. Some of the cutters tie light woven cloths in front of their mouths at their own initiative. After 15 minutes in the yard, I had already metallic taste in my tongue. As long as wreck still stands upright, much cutting is carried out in the interior of the ship. In order not to suffocate during the work, openings are cut into the hull. Nonetheless many deaths have occurred during cutting work, caused by gas explosions and fires, mainly in the interior of the ships. After a gas explosion in which 50 people were killed in Alang, the government made the wearing of protective helmets mandatory by law in 1997. In fact I saw few of the workers wearing helmets in Alang. All the same accidents take place everyday and the workers run the risk quite consciously. However, there is no awareness of the broader health hazards. In addition to exposure to

asbestos dust, the workers are permanently exposed to toxic vapours emanating from multi-layered coatings when the metal is cut apart.

WORKERS AT ALANG

In Alang, it appeared to me that too many people work on small areas, maximising the risk of accidents. They are exposed to pollutants not just for eight hours, as is required for by the provisions for safety at work, but day and night. They have no opportunity to recover from this exposure as they also live in the immediate vicinity of their work, from which they are separated only by a low wall and a two-lane road, so they are exposed to the pollutants 24 hours a day. Slowly developing health hazards are not acknowledged. As well as pollution from asbestos dust workers are permanently exposed to toxic vapours coming from substances in the multi-layered coats of paints when the metal parts are taken part. Flame cutters in Alang have higher dioxin concentration in their blood fat. Ship paints, particularly the older ones have components containing chlorine that tend to lead to dioxin forming - for example chlorine rubber used in underwater paints, vinylidene chlorine used as a paint medium, or chloride ions in tributyl tin (TBT) anti-fouling paints. Sodium chloride from deposited sea salt can likewise cause dioxin to form on a considerable scale. The high temperatures that arise when coated steel is flame cut lead to the formation of toxic lead fumes. The paint often continues to burn after cutting. In a soil sample for a study commissioned by Ministry of Labour, Singapore, in the soil collected in one km. inland from the scrapping site in Alang, it showed in a kg of soil contained 77 mg chromium, 90 mg in Iron, 108 mg nickel, 112 mg. copper, 35 mg arsenic, 2 mg lead and 74 mg zinc. However, lead is potent blood, nerve and kidney poison. Both metallic lead and its compounds are toxic. It enters human body through ingestion, inhalation and

skin absorption. If there is steady intake of lead, even very slight amount impair the blood count and damage the nervous system. Low levels of lead exposure already contribute to cancer of the stomach and duodenum. Lead poisoning, as the result of continuous exposure is characterised by tiredness, painful colic's, feebleness, pallor of the skin, anaemia and muscular weakness. Handling substance-containing arsenic can cause arsenic poisoning. An intake of as little as 0.1g.arsenic immediately causes death. Arsenic is a vascular poison and neurotoxin, causing polyneurosis with paralysis, skin and lever cancer. The nickel contamination and a part of the chromium contamination of the soil are due to the composition of the ship steel. The other part of chromium contamination comes from the paints. Hexavalent chromium compounds (chromates) causes’ eczema and chromate dust causes lung cancer. Extremely toxic organ such tributyl tin oxide (TBTO) and tributyl tin chloride (TBCL) used as anti-fouling paints in shipping since 1960s, enters water and harms the entire aquatic ecosystem.

WORKERS TOIL HARD WITHOUT PROTECTIVE MASKS

Workers in Alang hammer saw and weld the steel without protective masks, thereby inhaling TBT vapours and dust. Organotins are additionally absorbed through smoke. It accumulates in the human body and gets distributed to varying extents the liver, kidney, brain and blood. The absorption of organotins in the nervous system is especially dangerous of their marked neuro-toxicity. TBTO has an acutely poisonous and strongly caustic effect; it is genotoxic and influences the endocrine hormone system. Oil remnants are often burned on the shore at Alang in order to prevent the sea from being polluted. Rotten ropes are thrown into these fires of used oil together with pieces of wood, unusable parts of ships and structures, which cannot be sold, burn with the help of the oil. These fires burn constantly and their deep black smoke plumes can be seen for many miles inland. Most of the materials made in building ships contain flame retardant intended to make it difficult to catch fire. Burning such flame-resistant substances usually produces 'smouldering fires'. The more incomplete incineration is, the more pollutants are produced and contained in gases and residues from the fire. In burning organic matter not everything is ever completely burned, that is, oxidised to carbon dioxide. A certain residue of incomplete burned matter always remains. These products of

incomplete combustion include diverse hydrocarbons, the simplest of which is carbon monoxide. After 18 years of ship breaking, environmental pollution is generally very apparent in Alang. Even if activities were stopped at Alang, the high concentration of TBT in the marine sediment and thus the food chain will remain in the next 10- 20 years. Heavy metals, asbestos dust and poorly degradable pollutants from the combustion processes are also contaminating people living in neighbouring areas. The subsequent damage includes the dangers to health resulting from further use of ship materials containing asbestos and emissions in steel rolling and smelting arising from paint still remaining. However, daily 10,000 tons of scrap iron is thus obtained from Alang. The harbour meets to 10 to 15 percent of the iron requirement of the country. It feeds 120 re-rolling mills spread over India. At the rate of 15% excise and 11% custom duty, annually Rs.600 crore goes to the government coffer. Tadaja octroi post at Bhavnagar collects about Rs 70,000 from this harbour everyday.Alang shipbreaking yard managed by Gujarat Maritime Board has collected Rs 100 crore as premium from the plot leased to shipbrokers and earns Rs. 35 crore annually as a rent. Despite huge revenue generated, workers lead a precarious life facing mishaps, suffocation and uncongenial working conditions. Serious doubts are being raised over the way No Objection Certificates (NOC) is doled out by regulating agencies like the Gujarat Maritime Board (GMB) and the Controller of Explosion (CoE). Though the GMB authorities continue to blame ship-owners after every mishap, it is the system failure, which is the root cause. There is hardly any accountability on the part of various agencies that issue clearance certificates to ensure safety of workers. In case of “Inville”, authorities had issued safety clearance certifying the ship was fit for breaking. The Controller of Explosion had granted the “man entry”, “gas free “and “hot work” approval certificate before dismantling commenced. Despite CoE clearance presence of hydrocarbon and gases in the interior of ‘Inville’ was detected. “It is surprising how the certificates were granted there are ample traces of gases such as sulphur, furnace oil and other materials, which can wreak havoc if exposed to heat, “said an official of Forensic Science Laboratory. While GMB officer in charge admits, “Probably there are lot of areas which are ignored. “And with CoE having its office in Vadodara, functioning often becomes difficult. Certificates are granted on mere verbal assurance and without any physical inspection. Ship-owners often do not wait for all clearances certificates,” said Dwarika Nath Rath, a PUCL and Socialist Unity Centre of India (SUCI) activist, who is presently fighting for rights of the migrant workers in Gujarat. The role of GMB in granting certificates raises many questions. Even after a ship breaker obtains certificates from the CoE, it is the duty of the GMB to verify them before the final go ahead is granted. And the GMB has just a chief officer and three safety supervisors, who are expected to completely survey

the ship. “There could be slip-ups which come to light only after mishaps” admits Captain Deukar Of the three safety supervisors, only one is permanent employee, the others being on contract”. However, the Central Pollution Control Board of India states in its 'Environmental Guidelines for Shipbreaking industries " Old vessels containing or contaminated with substances such as PCBs, waste asbestos dust and fibre, lead and lead compounds are accordingly classified as hazardous materials. The customs authority and /or the concerned State Maritime Board should ensure this and issue a certificate to this effect that the vessel is free from prohibited materials." Does Gujarat Maritime Board comply with such guidelines? Under Indian law imports of toxic waste from OECD countries and shipbreaking work in tidal ocean zones are prohibited. The Supreme Court decided on 5th May 1997, it states," No import should be made or permitted by any authority or any person of any hazardous waste, which is already banned under Basel Convention or to be banned hereafter with effect from the date specified therein." Besides this, several other Supreme Court judgement reaffirm that the Government of India is obliged to incorporate promptly international conventions to which it is party. The Union Environment & Forest ministry decreed the following regulation on 19th February 1991 under the reference Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) Notification, “For regulating development activities, the coastal stretches within 500 metres of the high tide line of the landward side are classified into 4 categories. Paragraph 2 of the Notification lists out the 'Prohibited activities and exceptions' The activities declared as prohibited within the CRZ, namely, Para 2 (ii) states, " manufacture, handling, storage or disposal of hazardous substances as specified in the 'Notifications of the Government of India in the Ministry of Environment and Forests' No. S.O. 594 (E) dated 28th July 1989, S.O. 996 (E) dated 27th November 1989 and G.S.R. 1037 (E) dated 5th December 1989. Para 2 (v) states, “discharge of untreated wastes and effluents from industries, cities or towns and other human settlements. The 300 fishermen living around the Bhavnagar coast have found that the number of fish has decreased in the sea near the Alang shipbreaking yard. A fisherman opines, "The fuel remnants and bilge oil, which flows down into the sea during dismantling, should be stopped going into the seawater."