FOR almost 40 years Le Clemenceau aircraft carrier was the pride of the French Navy, having been on active duty in war zones from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf. Now its vast rusting hull is creaking across the Arabian Sea into a diplomatic and environmental dispute between France and India.

On Monday the Supreme Court of India must decide whether to allow Le Clemenceau to continue its journey to Alang, home to Asia’s biggest maritime graveyard, or order its return to France.

Le Clemenceau’s fate hangs in the balance after Greenpeace, the environmental campaign group, won a court order in Delhi banning the vessel from entering Indian waters. The dispute has pitched the governments of France and India against environmentalists who claim that Alang is ill-equipped to dismantle a 26,000-tonne vessel loaded with asbestos.

Alang, a run-down port city 300 miles (500km) north of Bombay, is the centre of India’s controversial ship-breaking industry, where residents, wearing little protective clothing and exposed to substances such as arsenic, biocides and toxic lead paints, are paid as little as £2 a day to rip apart ships with primitive acetylene torches and, often, their bare hands.

The French dispute Greenpeace’s accusations, claiming that the most dangerous work of removing 115 tonnes of brittle asbestos was completed before the battleship left its home port of Toulon.

India’s top judges will give their verdict after receiving the recommendations of a specially appointed Environmental Monitoring Commission. However, campaigners fear that their decision will be heavily influenced by the growing military alliance between France and India. France recently won a £1.5 billion contract to supply India with six Scorpène attack submarines.

The Greenpeace case has left Indians bitterly divided. Alang’s ship-breakers see the huge contract to scrap Le Clemenceau in more straightforward terms — it is their only hope of putting food on the table, regardless of the dangers.

In the 1970s ship-breaking was carried out in Europe. But as industrial nations came under pressure to improve environmental standards, and health and safety measures, the costs of scrapping ships shot up, forcing companies out of business.

Today about 90 per cent of the world’s ship-breaking industry is based in four countries — India, Bangladesh, China and Pakistan — that take advantage of less rigorous environmental and safety standards.

In recent years Alang and its neighbouring Sosiya ship-breaking yard have lost dozens of key contracts to Bangladesh, Pakistan and China. Hit by customs and excise duties and other taxes, the yards, which once had 35,000 workers and accounted for 90 per cent of the ships broken in the world, now employ fewer than 10,000.

“If this trend is not reversed then the day is not far when the ship-breakers will be forced to completely close down their business, rendering a large number of people jobless,” said Mukesh Patel, of Shriram Vessel and Scrap, the company that has purchased Le Clemenceau.

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