Alang, India, stands along the windy edge of the Arabian Sea in Gujarat’s Bhavnagar district, where Ramakant Singh gazes out at a horizon that increasingly looks empty. “In the old days, ships lined up at this yard like buffaloes before a storm,” the 47-year-old reflects. “Now we can count the arrivals on one hand.”
Ramakant works at Alang—the world’s largest ship-breaking complex—where vessels as massive as petroleum tankers and freight ships from Europe and other parts of Asia have historically been dismantled for two decades to fuel livelihoods here.
The Alang coast benefits from a unique tidal regime and a gently sloping beach, which in the 1980s helped establish India’s ship-recycling industry. Ships could be beached and stripped down with relatively low costs, turning Alang into the country’s main hub for turning aging seagoing assets into usable metal and components.
Over the years, more than 8,600 ships weighing roughly 68 million tonnes of light displacement tonnage (LDT) have been scrapped at Alang. This work accounted for about 98 percent of India’s total ship recycling and roughly a third of global volumes. Across the world, an aging fleet of cargo ships, cruise liners, and oil tankers is approaching retirement. Of about 109,000 vessels still in operation, nearly half are over 15 years old, rusting away as their service life ends.
Every year, around 1,800 ships are deemed unfit for sailing and sold for recycling. Owners transfer these vessels to international cash buyers—intermediaries based in major shipping hubs such as Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The buyers then resell the ships to dismantling yards in South Asia, where the final chapter of a ship’s life unfolds.
At Alang, the process begins when ships are hauled ashore at high tide (a practice called beaching). Once grounded, hundreds of workers dismantle the vessels, salvaging steel, pipes, and machinery. Nearly everything on board—cables, cupboards, and more—finds a new life in construction and manufacturing after being sold.
Yet in the last ten years, the stream of ships arriving at Alang has slowed dramatically. Where once a skyline of hulls rose behind the town’s asbestos-roofed houses, today only a few cruise ships and cargo carriers dot the horizon.
“Earlier, there was plenty of work for everyone,” says Chintan Kalthia, who runs one of the few remaining yards. “Now most workers have left. Only when a new ship beaches do a few return. My business is down to about 30–40 percent of what it used to be.”
Data from the Ship Recycling Industries Association of India show that Alang’s peak year was 2011–12, with a record 415 ships dismantled since operations began in 1983. Since then, the yard has faced a steep downturn: of the original 153 plots along the 10-kilometer coastline, only around 20 remain functional, and even those operate at just about 25 percent capacity.
Haresh Parmar, secretary of the Ship Recycling Industries Association (India), explains the downturn has multiple causes. The biggest factor is that shipowners globally are not retiring older vessels as quickly as before. After COVID, freight markets surged, and owners, enjoying high profits, kept ships in service longer rather than sending them for dismantling.
A major contributor to rising freight costs is disruption in global trade. The Israel-Gaza conflict has created security concerns, with Houthis attacking vessels in the Red Sea in solidarity with Palestinians. In response, ships are rerouted away from the Suez Canal to the longer Cape of Good Hope path, pushing up rates and delaying cargo.
Similarly, UNCTAD’s June 2022 analysis found that the Russia-Ukraine war and broader Middle East tensions drove marine fuel costs up by more than 60 percent, increasing operating expenses and slowing shipping. Taken together, these factors have sharply reduced the supply of end-of-life ships heading to Alang.
Parmar notes, “When owners earn well, they don’t scrap their vessels.” That mindset helps explain why the yards sit largely idle.
Compliance and costs also shape Alang’s fortunes.
Since India joined the Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships (HKC) in November 2019, and with the 2019 Recycling of Ships Act, Alang-Sosiya Ship Recycling Yards (ASSRY) upgraded infrastructure, installed pollution controls, lined hazardous waste pits, trained workers, and maintained inventories of toxic vessel materials. As a result, 106 of the ASSRY yards have earned HKC Statements of Compliance (SoC). Sosiya sits adjacent to Alang on Gujarat’s Gulf of Khambhat coast, forming the continuous beach where ship-breaking plots operate.
Meeting these standards came at a cost. Each yard invested roughly $0.56 to $1.2 million to comply, driving up operating expenses just as competition from nearby countries intensified.
Chintan Kalthia likens the HKC regime to a franchise effect: “Imagine a roadside eatery competing with a global burger chain—the chain has stricter rules, cleaner kitchens, safer gear, but you pay more for the sheen. The Hong Kong Convention works much the same way.” His company, RL Kalthia Ship Breaking Private Limited, earned the first HKC compliance certification from ClassNK in 2015. ClassNK is a premier Japanese ship classification society that audits maritime safety and environmental standards.
Yet the higher compliance costs don’t always translate into competitive advantage. “Compliance makes things safer and aligns us with international standards; it gives us an edge only on paper,” says Chetan Patel, another yard owner. “But it also raises costs significantly.”
That makes it harder for Alang’s breakers to offer prices on par with rivals. “When neighboring markets pay more, shipowners go there,” Patel notes.
Other yards in the region are thriving. Bangladesh’s Chattogram and Pakistan’s Gadani offer higher per-LDT rates—about $540–$550 and $525–$530 per LDT, respectively—versus Alang’s $500–$510 per LDT.
Parmar sums up the competitive pressure: “We can’t match Bangladesh and Pakistan without selling at a loss.” The numbers reflect the shift: India decommissioned 166 ships in 2023 but only 124 in 2024, while Turkiye rose to 94 from 50 and Pakistan to 24 from 15.
Alang isn’t just a yard; it’s a broad recycling ecosystem that sustains a local economy. From Trapaj, the last major settlement before Alang, an 11-kilometer road is lined with shops selling everything salvaged from ships—rusted chains, rescue boats, refrigerators, crockery, martini glasses, shipboard gym treadmills, air conditioners, and chandeliers.
“Whatever is on the ship, we own,” Parmar explains. “Before cutting begins, all valuable items are auctioned and reach these stores.”
But as fewer ships arrive, these shops struggle. Ram Vilas runs a ceramic shop selling salvaged dishware by the kilo. “Most of my customers used to be businesses across Gujarat,” he says. “Now the area is quiet; this stretch doesn’t have a fraction of its former footfall. With fewer ships, we don’t have enough stock to sustain our shops.”
The ripple effects reach other industries too. Waste handling, steel reclamation for furnaces and mills, and the production of construction materials like TMT bars depend on a steady flow of scrap. In Bhavnagar, 30 kilometers away, manufacturers like Jigar Patel have felt the pinch. He started his flange-making unit in 2017 to capitalize on Alang’s readily available steel, but the slowdown has forced him to source raw material from distant states, increasing costs and complicating processing.
Most of Alang’s workers are migrants from northern and eastern Indian states, including Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha, and Uttar Pradesh. They come when ships dock and leave when they don’t, returning to nearby towns for work in the interim. The Alang-Sosiya Ship Recycling and General Workers’ Association estimates employment fell from a peak of more than 60,000 to under 15,000.
Ramakant remembers his early years vividly: he arrived at 35 and toiled for seven straight years before the slowdown. Now he only returns when his employer calls. He spends much of his time in Surat, a nearby industrial hub.
Even as safety has improved—training, gear, and orderly procedures have replaced the era of frequent fatalities—the overarching question remains: what is the value of safety when the work itself is sparse? Ramakant looks out at the quiet horizon and acknowledges the truth: the future of Alang hinges on whether new ships arrive to be dismantled, or whether the yard will continue to drift toward obsolescence.
