How a Mudflat Became the World's Ship Graveyard

Alang did not plan to become the place where a third of the world's ships die. It became that because of where the tide is, what labor cost, and a shift in the global economics of scrapping steel. The story of Alang is the story of how the end of the shipping industry got pushed onto one stretch of Gujarat coast.

The Tide That Started It

The Gulf of Khambhat narrows like a funnel on India's west coast, and the water forced up it rises and falls through one of the highest tidal ranges in the world, around 13 meters. A ship can be driven onto the mud at high tide and, hours later, sit completely exposed and dry, accessible to men on foot. No dry dock, no deep-water berth, no heavy shore cranes required to begin. That geography is the precondition for everything that followed.

The yard opened in 1983, founded by N. Sundaresan, with the beaching of the MV Kota Tenjong on 13 February. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, as ship-breaking became uneconomic in the higher-wage, higher-regulation yards of Europe, the United States, Taiwan, and Japan, the work migrated to South Asia, to Alang in India, to Chattogram in Bangladesh, and to Gadani in Pakistan, where tidal beaches and cheap labor made it profitable again. Alang grew into a 14-kilometer line of roughly 183 cutting plots and became the largest of them all.

The Method

The defining image of Alang is a ship run aground at speed, bow-first, as far up the mud as its momentum will carry it. As the tide recedes the hull is stranded, and crews swarm it with oxy-acetylene torches, cutting from the top down. Steel plate is dropped to the ground and dragged off by cranes and gangs to be re-rolled into construction rebar; machinery, fittings, furniture, and fixtures are stripped out for resale in the roadside markets along the Bhavnagar road. The salvage rate is near total. A ship that arrives as a vessel leaves as steel, scrap, and second-hand goods.

It is done by hand, by a workforce on the order of 20,000, most of them migrants from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Odisha who live behind the plots and go home to farm in the monsoon. The economics that made Alang the world leader are inseparable from the cost of that labor.

The Famous Hulls

Because Alang takes the biggest ships, it has ended some of the most storied. The Seawise Giant, the longest ship ever built, was broken up here in December 2009. The Exxon Valdez, infamous for the 1989 Prince William Sound oil spill and by then renamed Oriental Nicety, was scrapped at Alang in August 2012. The arrivals read like a closing chapter for vessels whose names the world already knew.

The Clemenceau and the Question of Who Pays

The case that made Alang globally famous was a ship that never landed. In late 2005 the decommissioned French aircraft carrier Clemenceau, still carrying tonnes of asbestos, was sent toward Alang for scrapping. Protests followed over the export of toxic waste to a developing-world coast, and in January 2006 India's Supreme Court temporarily barred the ship from entering Indian waters. The Clemenceau turned back and was eventually dismantled in Britain.

The affair crystallized the central moral question about Alang and yards like it: a wealthy nation had tried to send its most hazardous hull to a poorer country's beach because that was the cheapest way to be rid of it, and was stopped only by a court. It was the clearest possible statement of how the costs of the shipping industry's death had been distributed, and it put Alang at the center of the international argument under the Basel Convention on hazardous waste.

The Slow Formalization

That pressure has been reshaping the yard. The maritime industry negotiated the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, and after years of delay it entered into force on 26 June 2025. By then 115 of Alang's 128 active plots held compliance certification, the product of Japanese-funded upgrades begun in 2017 that brought impermeable floors, proper cranes, protective equipment, and waste handling to plots that had operated for decades without them. A dedicated hospital opened at Alang in March 2019; before that, the nearest full-service hospital for tens of thousands of workers was 50 kilometers away in Bhavnagar.

Critics are not satisfied. Groups such as the NGO Shipbreaking Platform argue that beaching is inherently unsafe and polluting no matter how a plot is certified, and that the Hong Kong Convention risks laundering the practice rather than ending it. Both readings hold at once: Alang today is measurably safer and cleaner than the Alang of 2005, and it is still a tidal flat where poisoned ships are cut apart by hand.

A Graveyard in Decline

There is a final turn. By late 2025, with fewer ships arriving and many plots sitting idle, the world's largest ship graveyard was being described as a dying industry, undercut on price and slowed by the very downturn in global scrapping it once thrived on. Alang spent forty years as the cheapest place on Earth to kill a ship. It finished certifying itself just as the ships stopped coming.

Back to the full Alang Ship Breaking Yard guide.