What Alang Actually Is
Eleven kilometres of tidal beach south of Bhavnagar, and on it, at any given time, somewhere between two hundred and four hundred ships in various stages of coming apart. Tankers, bulk carriers, ferries, container ships, beached deliberately at high tide and then cut from the bow backward by teams working with gas torches. The steel goes to rolling mills in Gujarat and Rajasthan. The furniture, the crockery, the navigation instruments, the life rings, the engine-room gauges, these move to a strip of salvage shops along National Highway 51 that runs parallel to the yard for several kilometres. Alang handles roughly half the world's total ship demolition tonnage in a good year. No other single site comes close.
