Are you able to visit the ship breaking yards in Bangladesh?
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 1 Aug, 2023
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According to considerable media coverage of the ship breaking industry, including the yards near Chittagong, Bangladesh, it is unlikely that you’d be granted access.
Peter Gwin’s National Geographic The Ship-Breakers 2014 report:
I had been warned that it would be difficult to get into Bangladesh’s shipbreaking yards. “It used to be a tourist attraction,” a local man told me. “People would come watch men tear apart ships with their bare hands. But they don’t let in outsiders anymore.” I walked a few miles along the road that parallels the Bay of Bengal, just north of the city of Chittagong, where 80 active shipbreaking yards line an eight-mile stretch of the coast. Each yard was secured behind high fences topped with razor wire. Guards were posted, and signs warned against photography. Outsiders had become especially unwelcome in recent years after an explosion killed several workers, prompting critics to say the owners put profits above safety.
Similarly, Liza Jansen wrote about Visiting the Deadly Shipbreaking Yards of Bangladesh:
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Due to increased international criticism over the years, a curtain has fallen over the industry. It once was a popular tourist attraction, but now visitors are shunned. The only way to get a sense of what the yards look like is by taking the boat of a local fisherman and touring the scene from the seaside[.]
Offbeat Traveler Bart tried and failed to get Inside the World’s Most Secretive Ship-Breaking Yards:
Due to all the bad publicity around ship-breaking I knew that getting a view inside one of the yards would not be easy. It used to be a rather unofficial tourist attraction (for as far as there are even tourists in Bangladesh), but outsiders are not welcome anymore. Nevertheless I went there on my own just to see what the situation was like.
Every yard hard anxiously fenced off their entire operation and so from the outside there was absolutely nothing to see.
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