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On a national level the Government of India has not tried to persuade other ship-breaking countries to force the IMO for a "legal binding mandatory regime".
At the local level, the Gujarat Maritime Board, which is charged with the responsibility of regulating the industry, including the implementation of safety measures, is not doing enough. There is no transparency in the system. Ship breakers are given a free hand to dismantle the ships without observing any safety measures. Even the GMB drafted circular on environmentally sound management for ship recycling dated 31st August 2000 has not been implemented till now. It was dropped by GMB under pressure from ship-breakers. The GMB has clearly not taken the responsibilities for the implementation of rules and regulation, seriously. Rules and regulations are flouted at the cost of human lives.
Ship-breakers do not provide adequate hygienic living conditions. Workers operate under unsafe, un-standardized working conditions, with no proper sanitary and health facilities. They work on a daily-wages basis, and get no provident fund, bonus, overtime benefits etc.
Ship owners and fleet-owning countries do little to fulfill their obligations towards environmentally sound ship-breaking. Instead they export their liabilities to the poorer ship-breaking nations. Most ship-owners are unwilling to spend even a fraction of their profits on making the ships gas free for hot works, a very simple thing to do. They dump toxic and rusted ships in the yard without decontamination. They don't provide inventories of hazardous materials onboard to ship-breakers.
The IMO, despite being an inter-governmental body with the highest powers, has never accepted its responsibility to stop pollution and protect human lives in the ship-breaking countries. Even the recently developed guidelines on ship recycling by IMO put the onus for environmentally sound practices on the ship recycling state, rather than on the ship owners or ship builders.
Greenpeace is opposed to these guidelines because they fail to recognize the Basel convention, which deals with the trans -boundary movement of hazardous waste, and also because the IMO has declared that these are voluntary guidelines.
This means that illegal export of toxic wastes will continue to the developing countries, and only widen the chasm as the "Fat become fatter and the thin become thinner'.
Stakeholders for Solutions
Each of the stakeholders has a vital part to play towards arriving at concrete solutions. They have to work in better coordination to solve this problem of environmentally unsound ship-breaking. Only the creation of a 'level-playing field or legal binding mandatory regime' can solve the problems.
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