Chinese competition: Gujarat's Alang, touted as Asia's biggest shipbreaking yard, witnesses 50% fall in business in a year

By A Representative
According to reports from Gujarat's Alang, touted by the state officialdom as Asia's biggest shipbreaking yard, the number of active plots which take up ship recycling in order to extract steel and other economically useful material has fallen by 50 per cent over the last one year. Worse, the number of vessels which beached at Alang for ship recycling dropped to the six-year old of 275, with just about 54 ships reaching the yard over the last three months.
The reason, say knowledgeable sources, is that the shipbreaking industry has lately been badly hit by a flood of cheap Chinese steel, on one hand, and new European Union (EU) environmental rules, which require not to send ships to recycling yards which do not comply with the norms set for workers' safety, on one hand, and environmental cleanliness, on the other.
"The European Commission's intention is said to be not to discourage vessel owners from using facilities outside of the EU but to discourage ship owners from using facilities which have proven to present very real danger to life and the general environment. Five people were killed and 10 injured after an explosion in a chemical tanker being dismantled in Alang last year
The European Commission will reportedly introduce tougher environmental controls some time after December. While not specifically banning beach scrapping, owners of ships registered in EU countries will have to scrap them at approved facilities, a move that could favour countries such as China and Turkey where ships are taken apart in docks.
Despite the fact that China's economy has slowed down, its steel exports soared 51 percent to a record 93.78 million tonnes last year. Even this year, the steel exports have gone up by nearly 30 per cent in the first five months of 2015. In the meanwhile, more modern yards in are coming up in China and Turkey, which are competing "polluting" and "unsafe" Alang and other yards in the South Asian region.
Ships sold to Alang, along with other recycling yards in Pakistan and Bangladesh, till now have controlled about 70 per cent of the market. Most of the ships in these countries, which reach the beach during high tide, are manually pulled by by labourers, mainly migrants, further into the yard.
Equipment, such as radars, engines - and even tables and chairs - is taken off and sold, while the steel from the hull is removed for scrap.
Alang has been providing employment to 60,000 workers, mainly migrants from other parts of India, with thousands more being in the job in spin-off businesses. While once the the 11 km road which takes one to Alang -- controlled by the state regulatory agency, Gujarat Maritime Board -- used to be extremely busy with trucks till a year ago, it is deserted now, with shops displaying everything from crockery to computers taken off the ships struggling to get supplies.
Truck drivers who used to make from five to seven trips a day to Alang do not get more than two calls a day for taking scrap from Alang now. And, with a sharp fall in steel prices, shipowners are getting about $3.6 million less for the 25,000 tonnes of recoverable metal from a typical iron ore or coal carrying ship than what they got a year ago.
The situation is not very different at the shipbreaking yard at Karachi, where the situation has been described as the worst in the last three decades. And the story in Bangladesh is similar. Three years ago there were about 80 yards, now they are down to 25 at Chittagong. Local shipbreakers are quoted as saying that everyone thought prices would improve, but now they are sitting on huge inventories.

Comments

Was Netaji forced to alter face, die in obscurity in USSR in 1975? Was he so meek?

By Rajiv Shah This should sound almost hilarious. Not only did Subhas Chandra Bose not die in a plane crash in Taipei, nor was he the mysterious Gumnami Baba who reportedly passed away on 16 September 1985 in Ayodhya, but we are now told that he actually died in 1975—date unknown—“in oblivion” somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Which city? Moscow? No one seems to know.

Love letters in a lifelong war: Babusha Kohli’s resistance in verse

By Ravi Ranjan* “War does not determine who is right—only who is left.” Bertrand Russell’s words echo hauntingly in our times, and few contemporary Hindi poets embody this truth as profoundly as Babusha Kohli. Emerging from Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, Kohli has carved a unique space in literature by weaving together tenderness, protest, and philosophy across poetry, prose, and cinema. Her work is not merely artistic expression—it is resistance, refuge, and a call for peace.

Swami Vivekananda's views on caste and sexuality were 'painfully' regressive

By Bhaskar Sur* Swami Vivekananda now belongs more to the modern Hindu mythology than reality. It makes a daunting job to discover the real human being who knew unemployment, humiliation of losing a teaching job for 'incompetence', longed in vain for the bliss of a happy conjugal life only to suffer the consequent frustration.

Asbestos contamination in children’s products highlights global oversight gaps

By A Representative A commentary published by the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat (IBAS) has drawn attention to the challenges governments face in responding effectively to global public-health risks. In an article written by Laurie Kazan-Allen and published on March 5, 2026, the author examines how the discovery of asbestos contamination in children’s play products has raised questions about regulatory oversight and international product safety. The article opens by reflecting on lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that governments in several countries were slow to respond to early warning signs of the crisis. Referring to the experience of the United Kingdom, the author writes that delays in implementing protective measures contributed to “232,112 recorded deaths and over a million people suffering from long Covid.” The commentary uses this example to illustrate what it describes as the dangers of underestimating emerging threats. Attention then turns...

Buddhist shrines were 'massively destroyed' by Brahmanical rulers: Historian DN Jha

Nalanda mahavihara By Rajiv Shah Prominent historian DN Jha, an expert in India's ancient and medieval past, in his new book , "Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History", in a sharp critique of "Hindutva ideologues", who look at the ancient period of Indian history as "a golden age marked by social harmony, devoid of any religious violence", has said, "Demolition and desecration of rival religious establishments, and the appropriation of their idols, was not uncommon in India before the advent of Islam".

The kitchen as prison: A feminist elegy for domestic slavery

By Garima Srivastava* Kumar Ambuj stands as one of the most incisive voices in contemporary Hindi poetry. His work, stripped of ornamentation, speaks directly to the lived realities of India’s marginalized—women, the rural poor, and those crushed under invisible forms of violence. His celebrated poem “Women Who Cook” (Khānā Banātī Striyāṃ) is not merely about food preparation; it is a searing indictment of patriarchal domestic structures that reduce women’s existence to endless, unpaid labour.

Echoes of Vietnam and Chile: The devastating cost of the I-A Axis in Iran

By Ram Puniyani The recent joint military actions by Israel and the United States against Iran have been devastating. Like all wars, this conflict is brutal to its core, leaving a trail of human suffering in its wake. The stated pretext for this aggression—the brutality of the Ayatollah Khamenei regime and its nuclear ambitions—clashes sharply with the reality of the diplomatic landscape. Iran had expressed a willingness to remain at the negotiating table, signaling a readiness to concede points emerging from dialogue.

The price of silence: Why Modi won’t follow Shastri, appeal for sacrifice

By Arundhati Dhuru, Sandeep Pandey* In 1965, as India grappled with war and a crippling food crisis, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri faced a United States that used wheat shipments under the PL-480 agreement as a lever to dictate Indian foreign policy. Shastri’s response remains legendary: he appealed to the nation to skip one meal a day. Millions of middle-class households complied, choosing temporary hunger over the sacrifice of national dignity. Today, India faces a modern equivalent in the energy sector, yet the leadership’s response stands in stark contrast to that era of self-reliance.

Authoritarian destruction of the public sphere in Ecuador: Trumpism in action?

By Pilar Troya Fernández The situation in Ecuador under Daniel Noboa's government is one of authoritarianism advancing on several fronts simultaneously to consolidate neoliberalism and total submission to the US international agenda. These are not isolated measures, but rather a coordinated strategy that combines job insecurity, the dismantling of the welfare state, unrestricted access to mining, the continuation of oil exploitation without environmental considerations, the centralization of power through the financial suffocation of local governments, and the systematic criminalization of all forms of opposition and popular organization.

Search This Blog