Gaddani Ship-breaking Yard

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Gaddani Ship-breaking Yard, is located in Gaddani, Lasbela District, Balochistan, Pakistan.

Gaddani Ship-breaking Yard, located at 50 km north-west from Karachi, shot to international prominence in the early 1980s as the biggest ship-breaking yard anywhere in the world not so long ago. Ship-breaking had started there much before Pakistan’s independence. But it registered a spectacular growth after the independence, enabling this industry to gate-crash into the club of top ship-breakers of the world by the mid-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 scraps as raw material.

Prior to the independence, some casual businessmen occasionally used to break a few obsolete ships at Gaddani. However, it was after the 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 ship-breaking industry for 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. 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-scalp handled was concerned.

Today, it is facing an uncertain future partly because of 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 with their own substitutes if their alacrity to lower import duty on ship scrap is any indication.

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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Coordinates: 24°48′N 60°59′E

Life Cycle of a Navy Ship

Service Life

Ship naming and launching | Ship commissioning | Ship decommissioning

After Decommissioning

Reserve fleet | Scrapping | Recycling | Scuttling or Weapons testing | Museum ship

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