New Delhi: Almost one in every six workers dismantling old boats at India’s Alang shipyard suffers from asbestos poisoning, experts said in a report.
The experts, appointed by India’s Supreme Court to look into conditions at Alang, also found a fatal accident rate six times that of the country’s notoriously unsafe mining industry.
International and local environmental and labour groups have for years urged Indian authorities to sharply curtail or simply stop the work being done at the yard, where old ships are run aground in the shallows just offshore and then dismantled largely by hand.