The Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce (2024) Vol. 52: (3), 256-340.
Tony George Puthucherril* & Akash Anand Dubey**
For a long time, despite the notorious operating conditions of its ship-recycling yards affecting both human lives and the envi-ronment, India was the epicenter of the shipbreaking industry. Due to judicial activism, the enactment of new rules and regulations, projects for infrastructural improvement and stricter implementa-tion, however, the winds of change have begun blowing over these yards in recent years. The highlight of these changes was India rat-ifying the IMO-sponsored Hong Kong Ship Recycling Convention (HKC) and enacting the Recycling of Ships Act to domesticate the terms of the HKC. India has slowly but surely moved away from traditional shipbreaking practices and adopted a more humane and environment-friendly shipbreaking culture. While these initia-tives should be a cause to attract more obsolete tonnage to India’s shores, the reality has been the opposite. India has been overtaken by Bangladesh, where the ship-breaking conditions remain rudi-mentary and underregulated. Given the deeply entrenched international dimensions of the shipbreaking industry, this paper examines the international law on the subject—which includes the HKC, the Basel Convention and the European Union Ship Recycling Regulation—to understand why India’s experiments to reform ship-recycling practices have yet to yield their desired results. It analyzes India’s recent initiatives against this extant international law and concludes that the incongruence between those legal instruments must be sorted out so they do not veer off course. This remedy will ensure a level playing field where India’s initiatives will be fruitful and, more importantly, lead to greater accountability and transparency that will also help create a sustainable ship-recycling culture.