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By Ranjit Dev Raj, Inter Press Service

Although the issue spills over into other ministries such as health and labour, Marandi's statement was an indication that the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments at the centre and in the west coast states of Maharashtra and Gujarat have no plan to stop the $ 500-million-a-year industry. Marandi based his defence on the fact that the industry brings in about 2.5 million tonnes of high grade steel, and on a study his ministry commissioned through the government-owned, engineering and metallurgy consultancy firm MECON. However, even the MECON study pointed out that water pollutants generated during shipbreaking resulted in changes to water quality and affected marine eco-systems, especially in the inter-tidal zones where the industry operates. The Greenpeace study, titled 'Steel and Toxic Wastes for Asia,' not only nails Marandi's claims to environmental safety but also points out that the business controlled by a nexus of contractors, politicians and bureaucrats is illegal.

Two years ago, India's Supreme Court had ruled that "no import should be made or permitted by any authority or any person of any hazardous waste which is already banned under the Basel Convention or to be banned hereafter." The Basel ban, part of the international Basel Convention on Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes, prohibits the export of hazardous wastes from the industrialised Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries to non-OECD countries.

Said Greenpeace activist and chemical engineer Judit Kanthak: "The Basel Convention bans the export of asbestos and many other items commonly found on the ships we saw at the shipbreaking yards at Alang in Gujarat and in Mumbai." "What first strikes the visitor to Alang and Bombay is the open, careless handling of asbestos without any safeguards - on the ships, the beach, the big bowls carried by women on their heads and in uncontrolled dumps," she said. The Greenpeace team saw asbestos being stripped from the ship 'Columbus New Zealand', previously owned by the German Hamburg- Sued shipping firm, at Alang with workers' bare hands. The dusty material was collected in open bags and offered for sale, it said.

Other internationally banned material found by the Greenpeace team, consisting of Kanthak, Andreas Bernstorff and Nityanand Jayaraman, included heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), policyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAC) tributyl tin oxide (TBTO), chlorides and dioxins. Greenpeace cites an occupational and industrial physician, Dr Frank Hittman, who says that the incidence of cancer expected among the 40,000-odd shipbreaking labourers would be around 25 percent.

The group based its findings on environmental and material samples collected at Alang, Mumbai and the smaller yard of Sosiya in Gujarat and at the Chemieberatung Wartig Gmbh. Laboratory for Development and Analysis at Hamburg. It claimed that while the study provides the only technical and environmental data on the toxic contamination caused by shipbreaking in India, it has implications for the industry in Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, China and Vietnam.

"Along with our activist partners and trade unions, we intend to ensure that the export of ships-for-scrap is no longer used as a loophole to dump toxic wastes on developing countries," said Bernstorff.

"One problem is that while the International Maritime Organisation has regulations concerning virtually all aspects of the shipping industry, it has nothing on what has the most destructive potential - shipbreaking." he said. Added Jayaraman:

"Citizens' groups have raised the issue of hazards with India's environment ministry. But the government has maintained a sphinx-like silence."

The most that has happened so far is the issuance of a set of guidelines last year by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), which merely 'recommended' rejection of old ships with high levels of pollutants defined by the Basel Convention.

Board chairman Dilip Biswas had then said the guidelines would help shipbreaking yards work in an eco-friendly manner and serve as a yardstick for the Gujarat Maritime Board (GMB) and customs authorities to regulate the industry.

But nothing of the kind is in evidence, said Jayaraman. In fact a GMB official, Subodh Kumar, is on record saying recently that there is no fishing activity, vegetation or marine life near Alang.

According to Ravi Agarwal, chief of the Delhi-based environment group 'Srishti', both the CPCB guidelines and the MECON report are nothing but "eyewash".

"The fact is that the mafia-like conditions prevailing at the shipyards prevent the enforcement of any law or safety norm, although on average two workers die at the yards from explosions, fires and falling steel sections every week," Agarwal said.