The Supreme Court Monitoring Committee on Hazardous Wastes Management on January 6, 2006 decided that the French warship, Clemenceau, should not enter India. This recommendation would be sent to the court in two days.

G. Thyagarajan, chairman, said that in the light of new and additional information about the ship, the committee concluded that "it is not desirable for the ship to enter India's sovereign territory."

The Clemenceau is expected to enter Indian territorial waters in four to six weeks.

The committee, which met in Mumbai, also heard two representatives from the French company, Technopure, contracted to decontaminate the ship. In a 15-minute presentation, Eric Baudon and Jean-Claude Giannino, who flew down to India at their own expense, explained the size of the Clemenceau, its structure and the fact that it had been specially built and that it had a vast amount of cabling containing asbestos. Their company had only partially decontaminated the ship and it still contained at least 500 tonnes of asbestos.

In the light of the conflicting information on the quantity of asbestos, the estimates of which varied from 15 to 500 tonnes, the committee felt that it needed more information. "People have not been transparent in the disclosure of information," Dr. Thyagarajan said. The committee would wait for two weeks before giving its final recommendation to the court.

The committee considered several issues: whether the decision to send the ship to India conformed to the Basel Convention on Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and whether the country should accept the vessel.

Dr. Thyagarajan emphasised that even if the Convention did not specifically mention ships "or aircraft or mules," any movement of hazardous waste in any kind of container constituted a violation. "If India accepts the ship, then India will be seen as abetting [in] a violation of the Basel Convention," he said. "Why should India spend Rs. 40 crore in foreign exchange to buy trouble? Why should we sacrifice our precious soil to bury some other country's junk?"

To a question on the Gujarat Pollution Control Board's position that it was capable of handling the hazardous wastes, Dr. Thyagarajan said: "If a ship comes with 1,00,000 cobras, will we accept it just because some Indians can catch cobras?"

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A ship we can refuse

It is heartening that the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee has responded firmly and with sensitivity to the despatch of the French Navy's decommissioned aircraft carrier, Georges Clemenceau, to India for dismantling. Was it right for France to despatch a vessel reportedly laden with toxic material when it is a signatory to the Basel Convention on Transboundary 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. Thus far the debate has been preoccupied with the quantity of asbestos, banned in 36 countries worldwide including France, on the ship, and the question of 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 1970s when 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 profitable business 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 stage will reveal to the world the value priorities of the Indian establishment.

The Hindu