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Mushrooming on SC stay

Pinaki Roy
The setting up of some more hazardous ship-breaking yards has only increased the threat to life and environment in last nine months, although the High Court ordered shutdown of the yards running without environmental clearance.
Putting the court order in legal tangles, the ship-breaking yard owners continued their activities, leaving 18 killed and scores hurt in 10 accidents during the said period.
New yards are meanwhile mushrooming in Chittagong as the International Maritime Organization has recently announced to phase out over 2,000 old single-hull oil tankers owned by FROM PAGE 1
European Union countries by 2012.
"New ship-scrapping yards are mushrooming because Bangladesh will be the easiest place to scrap those oil tank ers,” says Syeda Rizwana Hasan, executive director of the Bangladesh Environment Lawyers Association (BELA).
Upon a writ filed by BELA, die HC directed the government on March 17 to take several measures including shutting down the shipyards running without environmental clearance in two weeks and not allowing any unclean ships inside Bangladesh territory'.
However, the Supreme Court stayed the HC order as the ship-breaking yard owners association appealed against it.
Against this backdrop, the government didn't take any move to ensure workers' safety or protect the environment. It rather let local influential people to build new shipbreaking yards destroying the "para forest".
According to the Environment Protection Act, 1997, die ship-breaking yards have been identified as category Red (extremely dangerous] running without environmental clearance.
The Department of Environment sources say the number of the yards has shot up to 70 which was only 36 in 2008 as per the government's official report submitted to die court.
But none of the yard owners has obtained environmental clearance certificate since the court's directive, although some of them have applied for it without attaching sufficient documents.
Abdus Sobhan, director, DoE, said, "Over 30 shipbreaking yard industries have applied for environmental clearance following the court order. But none of them had proper papers."
The ship-breaking yards must have ownership of the shipyard land, environment management plan and environment impact assessment report, among other papers, to get the clearance.
Sobhan admitted that the number of ship-breaking yards has increased over the last few months.
He however could not give any officials figure as to how many new ship-breaking yards have been built since issuance of the court directive.
In the same directives, the court also clearly imposed a
bar on any Greenpeace-listed toxic ship's entry into the waters of Bangladesh.
The court ordered the DoE to implement the directives within two weeks from receiving the order and directed the government to form a committee to monitor the implementation process.
Asked about the latest status of the HC order, Syeda Rizwana said the SC stayed only one directive of closing down the ship-breaking yards in two weeks if they don't have environmental clearance.
"So we appealed to the court to implement the other directives like forming the monitoring committee, ensuring pre-cleaning of toxic ships and submitting probe reports of the workers died recently in shipyard accidents," she said.
"But the court has yet to give any directive on it," she added.
Some 30,000 workers are engaged in ship scrapping in Chittagong's Sitakunda, which houses the world's second largest ship-breaking industry afterChina.
At least 250,000 people in the country live off the industry directly and indirectly, according to experts.
Last year 84 vessels were scrapped in Sitakunda. Scrapping a ship takes one month to one and a half months depending on its size.
The recent report of a survey conducted by two internationally reputed organisations, Greenpeace and International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), says on average at least one worker is injured a day and one dies a week.
The report styled "The Human Cost of Breaking Ships" published last December simultaneously from Bangladesh, India and Switzerland says over 1,000 workers died in the last 20 years in Bangladesh's ship-breaking yards. The figures do not include the deaths from diseases caused by toxic fumes and materials workers are exposed to all the time.
Globally some 700 ships are scrapped a year, mainly in five countries -- China, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Vietnam andTurkey
With the global fleet growing fast, from 15,000 ships in the 1960s to 62,000 in 2000, and with the ships built before 1970 being sorted out for decommissioning, the number of ships to be condemned for scrapping will also rise in future.