New Delhi
2 January 2006
The decommissioned aircraft-carrier of the French
Navy, Clemenceau, containing an estimated 500-odd tonnes of asbestos
has left for the shipbreaking yard at Alang in Gujarat despite protests by
activists and organisations, in violation of national (Supreme Court) and
international (Basel Convention) norms.
An international non-governmental organisation, Greenpeace, has alleged
that French authorities have dispatched the end-of-life ship in the name of
a "Sriram Vessel Scrap Limited". It said Clemenceau, which spent five
months on the Mediterranean Sea and another one year at the French
Naval base at Toulon, finally set sail after it found a taker in India.
"The French authorities tried to sell the Clemenceau to Turkey, Greece
and Spain but those countries refused on one ground or the other. It is
now being sent to India in violation of the Supreme Court order banning
the entry of ships unles they are decontaminated and also the Basel
Convention," Mr Ramapati Kumar of Greenpeace told this newspaper.
The Supreme Court passed the relevant order on August 14, 2003. "Not
only that," Mr Kumar observed, "the French authorities misled the
Supreme Court. They promised to decontaminate the ship up to 98 per
cent, which they have not. The Supreme Court Monitoring Committee
should scrap the deal and reconsider its decision of allowing the ship
entry into India."
"In reality, hardly 30 per cent of the ship has been decontaminated," Mr
Kumar said. "A company called Technopure claims to have removed 70
tonnes of asbestos. Another company contracted by the French authorities
cleaned 40 tonnes. According to conservative estimates, there is still 60
to 70 per cent of toxic material including asbestos on board."
Greenpeace and other organisations such as Corporate Accountability
Desk and International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) maintain that
France, which has ratified the Basel Convention, is not supposed to dump
ships for shipbreaking purposes from an OECD (Organisation for
Economic Cooperation and Development) country to a non-OECD country.
The Basel Convention has been ratified by 166 state parties including
India, a non-OECD country.
"The French were never serious about decontaminating the ship," the
NGOs allege and cite the statements made by Technopure, that although
it had offered full decontamination the French authorities opted for partial
decontamination. "The French authorities have lied to the people of
France and India and also lied to the Supreme Court Monitoring
Committee of India," they asserted.
The shipbreaking yards at Alang in Gujarat are the largest in the world
although in terms of volume of business, Bangladesh stands first
worldwide. There are 184 yards at Alang. All the companies engaged in
this industry are privately owned; they work on government land leased
for 10 years and pay government agencies concerned a certain sum. The
steel from the Clemenceau is estimated at eight million Euros (Rs 40
crore.)
// FACTS AND FIGURES //
* Half of the world's ocean-going ships end their sailing lives in India.
* The total number of ships scrapped between 1994 and 2003 is 4,658. Of
these ships 2,640 have been scrapped in India.
* According to the figures of the Gujarat Maritime Board, seven workers
lost their lives due to explosions and fire in 2003. However,
eyewitnesses from a Greenpeace delegation found at least 20 people
dead in two explosions in 2003. Furthermore five big accidents invlvong
deaths happened that year.
(Source: "End of life ships: The human cost of breaking ships"; a
Greenpeace-FIDH report in cooperation with the Bangladesh-based YPSA
(Young Power in Social Action)
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