Resumo de A Ship We Can Refuse

A ship we can refuse

HINDU EDITORIAL
ABSTRACT BY ; srjasfer
It isheartening that the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee has responded firmly and
with sensitivity to the dispatch of the French Nag/s decommissioned aircraft
carrier, Georges Clemenceau, to India
for dismantling. was it right for France
to dispatch a vessel reportedly laden with toxic material when it is a
signatory to the Basel
convention on Movement of Hazardous Wastes? And independent
of what France has done, should
India
allow it in? The committee rightly believes that the ship must not be allowed
to enter India's
waters. Thusfar the debate has been preoccupied with the quantity of asbestos,
banned in 86 countries worldwide including France, on the ship, and the
question bf whether. Warships are covered by the Basel convention. The Basel
convention, signed by most countries but not by the United States,
came about precisely
because developing countries feared they would become the dumping yard
of the
North. As environmental regulations at home made the production, use,
and
disposal of hazardous materials increasingly difficult and expensive,
many
developed countries were, unsurprisingly' inclined to choose the
cheaper option of sending the stuff to countries where wages were lower
and laws relating to
the environment and workers' safety lax. The French government has
clearly
defied the spirit of the convention. But then the Basel
convention gives India
the right to refuse entry to the French warship. Every year around 700 ships are
dismantled, mostly in Asian ship-breaking yards. India hosts one of the largest
of these in Alang Gujarat, and there is copious documentation to show that workers
dismantling ships in Alang labour under horrific conditions and are continuously
exposed to poisonous and hazardous substances without the mandatory protective
gear. The ships being dismantled were built in the 1960s and 1970swhen the use
of asbestos was not banned. In western countries, asbestos has long been
acknowledged to be a deadly workplace killer. The considerable death toll in
the United States and Western Europe from asbestos-related diseases led to a
ban on further use of the material. The European Union banned asbestos as
recently as January 2005. India
has been quite permissive and, to make matters worse, there are no reliable data
on the incidence of asbestos related diseases. What the Government needs to do
is simple. It must value the safety of workers and of the environment higher
than the so-called economic benefits of allowing the ship-breaking industry to
do someone else?s dirty and dangerous work. Ship-breaking is profitablebusiness and the Clemenceau will yield 26,000 tonnes of steel worth crores of
rupees. But the profit will come at the cost of the health of hundreds of
workers and the poisoning of land used to bury tonnes of toxic asbestos. The
next large will reveal to the world the value priorities of the Indian
establishment
.

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