Gadani Ship-breaking Yard

Gaddani Ship-breaking Yard is located in Gaddani, Lasbela District, Balochistan, Pakistan. It is the location of a thriving ship breaking industry. Ships to be broken are often run aground on the beach under their own power, and gradually cut up. As the weight of the ship lessens, it is dragged further onto the beach until completely scrapped. In common with many other breakers in the region, scrapping ships at Gaddani uses large amounts of local cheap labor with minimal mechanical assistance.

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History

Gaddani Ship-breaking Yard, located 50 km northwest of Karachi, shot to international prominence in the early 1980s as the biggest ship breaking yard anywhere in the world.^{[citation needed]} Ship-breaking had started there much before Pakistan’s independence. But it registered spectacular growth after independence, enabling this industry to enter the club of top ship-breakers in the world by the mid-nineteen-sixties.

In the eighties, the ship-breaking industry provided employment to over 30,000 workers directly, while over one-half of a million people earned their living indirectly, through trade and industries which used ship scrap as raw material.^[1]

Prior to independence, some casual businessmen occasionally used to break a few obsolete ships at Gaddani. However, it was after independence that a group of entrepreneurs made serious efforts to develop this casual trade into a regular industry. Gaddani beach, however, at that time, lacked necessary infrastructure facilities: there were neither roads, nor utilities like electricity, drinking water or any arrangement for providing first aid or medical help to the workers.

Realizing the importance of the ship-breaking industry to the national economy, the government announced, in 1978, a number of measures to give a boost to this industry. These included: recognition of ship-breaking as an industry, declaring Gaddani as a port, reduction in customs duty on ships imported for breaking, provision of telephone connections, increasing the lease period from one year to five years and appointment of an 8-member committee to solve other problems of the industry.

The years between 1969 and 1983 are considered to be the golden period of the ship-breaking industry.^[1] It was during this period that the ship-breaking activities witnessed a boom and this industry left many of its international rivals far behind as far as the total number of ships demolished and the tonnage of ship-scrap handled was concerned.

Competition and future

Today, it is facing an uncertain future partly because of a substantial increase in the international prices of ship scrap and partly due to high import duty. While Gaddani withers, the other countries of the region, like India and Bangladesh, have designs to replace Gaddani if their lower import duty on ship scrap is any indication.^[2]

See also

• Ship breaking
• Gaddani
• Gadani Fish Harbour
• Lasbela District

References

Coordinates: 24°48′N, 60°59′E