India's Supreme Court ordered a state pollution authority on Monday to report within a month if a controversial Norwegian cruise liner could be dismantled safely or needs to be sent back due to its alleged toxic content. Environmentalists, led by Greenpeace, say the 46,000-tonne ship, the Blue Lady, contains more than 900 tonnes of toxic waste like asbestos, risking the health of poorly equipped workers at the Alang ship-breaking yard in the western state of Gujarat.

In June, the court allowed Blue Lady to enter Indian waters but appointed an expert committee to look into how much toxic waste was on board, before it could be broken. The panel cleared the ship's scrapping. On Monday, the court ordered the Gujarat Pollution Control Board to study both the panel report and a dismantling plan submitted by the ship's purchasers and decide whether it could be scrapped under safeguards.

The court also repeated a warning that work could not start without its permission. "No action will be taken without this court's permission," a two-judge bench said.

In February, the French government recalled the former aircraft carrier Clemenceau, which had been heading for Alang, after a lengthy campaign by Greenpeace, which said the ship carried toxic waste. A Greenpeace report published last year said thousands of workers in the ship-breaking industry in countries such as India, China and Pakistan had probably died over the past two decades in accidents or due to exposure to toxic waste.

Although the court-appointed panel has cleared the Blue Lady ship for dismantling, environmentalists insist that it should be asked to go back as it had entered India "illegally". "The contaminants aboard the ship were not disclosed as required" by international norms, Research Foundation for Science and Technology, a voluntary group which has challenged the ship's entry into Indian waters, told the court.
(Planet Ark, 05/12/2006)
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