Alang, about 250 km from Ahmedabad, has for long been a booming graveyard of ships from the world over, a place where vessels are ripped apart for every little particle that will fetch money as scrap. The ship-breaking yard came up in 1982. Alang's unique geographical feature, with the highest ebb-and-high-tide difference, helped the ship breaking industry to grow.The 10-km stretch of muddy beach started seeing ships coming to meet their end. It first started attracting business from Mumbai....
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Alang, about 250 km from Ahmedabad, has for long been a booming graveyard of ships from the world over, a place where vessels are ripped apart for every little particle that will fetch money as scrap. The ship-breaking yard came up in 1982. Alang's unique geographical feature, with the highest ebb-and-high-tide difference, helped the ship breaking industry to grow.The 10-km stretch of muddy beach started seeing ships coming to meet their end. It first started attracting business from Mumbai. Soon the yard was receiving as many as 315 ships out of an estimated 600 ships decommissioned around the world annually. While that meant good profits for ship breakers, activists alleged that the nearly 40,000 workers, mostly from Orissa, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, faced toxic waste of old ships, becoming victims of diseases in the process. The end-of-life ships, most of them built before any regulations on shipbuilding came into effect, usually contain asbestos, lead and explosive materials. These materials damage the environment, the health of ship-breaking crews and also cause serious accidents. Once hailed as Asia's biggest ship-breaking yard, the fortunes of Alang feced a downturn. The number of ships arriving for their death fell from more than 300 in 2002 to 73 in 2005. The business had moved to Bangladesh and Pakistan because environment protection laws in the two countries were not as tough. Moreover, cheaper labour in those countries was an economical advantage. As a result, only 19 of the 183 ship breaking units were operational in 2006. Another factor responsible for Alang's downfall was the unfavourable duty structure. Compounding Alang's problems were a sharp rise in steel and sponge iron production and increased imports of melting scrap. Alang's share of steel production through recycling of scrap had come down from above three million tonnes in 1998-99 to about 680,000 tonnes in 2004-05.
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