Monir Chauhan takes off his gumboots and wriggles two stumps at the end of his feet where his big toes should be. "I went to work even when I lost these. If you do not, you lose your job here," he says. "Here" is Alang, a six-mile stretch of shoreline in Gujarat, largely obscured from view by dozens of rusting tankers and cruise liners in various stages of dismemberment. On the oily, grimy coast lie the steel carcasses of vessels brought from as far as Brazil and as close as Iraq.

The biggest hulk belongs to Britain's 400,000 tonne supertanker Hellespont Grand.

Situated off the Arabian Sea coast on India's western flank, Alang is where the world's ships come to die.

Shipbreaking is one of India's economic success stories, a £270m business that provides steel for the country's booming industry and much-needed jobs.

Its critics say Alang is a modern Indian version of Victorian Britain's dark satanic mills: an engine of industrial growth which provides poorly paid jobs to destitute people in inhumane conditions.

Around the ships swarm 40,000 migrant workers, prepared to toil in the 190 "plots" that line the coast. The work is dangerous, backbreaking and by western standards cheap - a 10-hour shift pays as little as £1.

Mr Chauhan, 38, says he earns a little more as he is a "gas cutter", a person who slices ships up with an oxyacetylene torch.

Eight years of inhaling hot paint fumes have left him with persistent coughing and frequent bouts of breathlessness. "The doctors have told me that I have gases and poisons inside me," he says.

But he says competition for jobs is so intense that workers can lose their jobs for being ill. "If you fall sick and take leave, there will be no job for you when you come back."

At plot V4, the beach is littered with steel plates from the Hellespont Grand's hull and engine parts cut by blowtorch and saw. The work began last November and it will take a year to finish. While hard hats and goggles are worn by most labourers, masks, gloves and boots are not. This is an improvement on the past, when workers went about barefoot and bare-headed.

Last year, workers say, 25 people were blown up when a torch cut through a Greek tanker containing unreleased gas.

Naveen Singh, the supervisor for the Hellespont, admits that workers might be killed or injured, but adds: "You have risks in every industry in India. Alang is no different."

Most workers are migrants who live in slums opposite the shipbreaking yards, with no toilets or electricity. Yet despite the conditions, workers say it is better to work and die than to starve and die.

Burnt shoulder

Almost all come from northern India's poorest states, Orissa, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

"I came here five months ago, because I have a family to feed," says Shivram Pradhan. "I was a farmer, but I could not make enough from my two acres. Here I can make 80 rupees [£1] a day." But he cannot work at present because he has burnt his shoulder carrying hot steel plates.

There is a hospital in Alang, but most workers travel the hour's drive to the nearest big town, Bhavnagar, for serious complaints. Malaria is rife and a study estimated last year that one in 20 workers in Alang are HIV positive.

A little more than 20 years ago, Alang was a small poverty-stricken village. Three factors have helped it to become the world's biggest shipbreaking yard.

First, the heavy tides and sloping beaches meant there was no need to build expensive dry docks and piers. Second, environmental and safety regulations that had made shipbreaking unviable in the west were ignored and unenforced in places like Alang. Third was the apparently limitless supply of cheap labour.

But Greenpeace has waged a six-year campaign against perceived abuses, with some notable successes.

In 1998, the US, which once dominated the shipbreaking trade, banned the export of its navy ships to developing countries. It was that order that eight months ago saw the warships towed to Teesside shipbreaking yards in Britain.

Last November, Greenpeace reported how shipowners were flouting international regulations on the subcontinent. Greenpeace found that none of the 145 vessels it surveyed, including the Hellespont Grand, had an inventory of hazardous materials when they arrived at shipbreaking yards.

The environmentalists argue that the rusting hulks landed on Alang contain health hazards such as asbestos, used to insulate pipes, and tributyltin, used as a weather-guard in ship paint.

"These have been proven to be dangerous," Ramapatty Kumar, a Greenpeace spokesman, says. "Our aim is to make someone responsible for such hazards."

Less than 12 miles along the coast from Alang, the ecological price is all too visible. In the village of Gopanath, three generations of fisherman are convinced that the black slick that coats the rocks is the reason for their declining catches.

"I have been fishing for 40 years and when I began you could go half a kilometre from the beach and catch 100kg of big fat fish," says Gushabhai Chudasma, the 70-year-old patriarch of the extended family. "Since Alang started we have had to go further and further out, and we catch smaller and smaller amounts."

Green industry

The industry claims that it has been miscast by environmentalists and human rights activists. Shipbreaking is a green industry, say its supporters, as almost all the reusable materials are recovered. Alang alone produces 2.5m tonnes of steel a year for India's rolling mills.

Everything that could be removed from a ship is sold at Alang: shops and market stands offer diesel generators, lifejackets and kitchen sinks. The most prized items are the ships' bells, which are used in local Hindu temples.

"We do not just break ships up, we recycle them," says Pravin Nagarsheth, president of the Iron Steel Scrap and Shipbreakers Association.

The industry claims that India's growing environmental and safety laws are increasingly prompting many shipowners to find alternative markets for their vessels in shipbreaking yards in Pakistan, Bangladesh and China, where regulations are even more lightly policed.

"We lost the number one slot last year to China," says Mr Nagarsheth. "The problem is that we are increasing the regulatory burden in India, but not in other countries." Both Mr Nagarsheth and Greenpeace agree that the roots of the problem lie with the global nature of the shipping business.

About 40,000 ships ply the oceans, most of them crewed by the world's poor, owned by shadowy offshore companies and flying flags of convenience.

"The only way of ensuring a level playing field is for every shipowner to clean the ships [of toxic materials] before they bring them here," says Mr Nagarsheth.