A Supreme Court-appointed panel has found that the health of around one in six workers in India's biggest shipbreaking yard is suffering due to exposure to asbestos, a newspaper report said on Wednesday. The Indian Express said that the panel found 16 percent of workers in the giant shipbreaking yard of Alang in Gujarat may have asbestosis. The ailment is a chronic inflammatory condition of the lung's tissues caused by heavy exposure to asbestos. It could lead to lung cancer.

"The X-ray examination showed linear shadow on 15 of 94 workers occupationally exposed to asbestos," The Indian Express quoted the report as saying. "These were consistent with asbestosis ... all these were cases of early asbestosis and not associated with pulmonary function abnormalities."

The panel, headed by India's top environment ministry bureaucrat, was set up by the court in February after a long campaign by environmental groups to stop the decommissioned French aircraft carrier, Clemenceau, from being scrapped at Alang. The 27,000-tonne carrier was said to be carrying hundreds of tonnes of asbestos.

Groups like Greenpeace say that Alang does not have the proper facilities to safely scrap ships carrying toxic materials like asbestos and this poses a danger to workers' health. A report by Greenpeace in December said thousands of workers in countries such as India, Pakistan and China had probably died over the past 20 years in accidents or exposure due to toxic waste.

The latest report by the Indian panel calls for sweeping reforms in the working conditions for workers at Alang, a 12-km stretch on India's western coast.

Source: Reuters