While labour costs are a fraction of those in Europe, the practice also delegated the problem of disposal of toxic substances such as asbestos, lead-based paint, oil and coolants.

The French industry group Shipbuilders of France says demolition in Europe, where wage rates are 10 times higher than in India, is no longer viable.

But others believe the Clemenceau affair will force Europe to at least clean its obsolete hulks before dismantling overseas.

"Asbestos removal is possible in France, there are firms capable of doing it," said Michel Parigot, spokesman for one of three anti-asbestos groups that with Greenpeace fought the carrier's transfer.

"The question of dismantling ships is another question. One could imagine international agreements regarding demolition," he said.

Alain-Francois Roger, lawyer for the Ban Asbestos group, said the controversy would provide an economic incentive, adding: "A solution will have to be found."

The groups argued the asbestos-ridden warship's sale to a shipbreaking yard in India's Gujarat state contravened the Basel Convention banning rich countries dumping their hazardous waste in developing nations.

French President Jacques Chirac on Wednesday ordered the 265-metre carrier to return home from the Indian Ocean after the country's State Council ordered the ship's transfer be halted.

He also called on Europe to develop its own dismantling capabilities and to establish international standards for ship disposal which would protect workers and the environment.

The same day a Bangladeshi scrap merchant announced he paid 12 million dollars for the French-built SS Norway, a 46-year-old cruise ship crammed with asbestos launched as SS France by the wife of then-president Charles de Gaulle.

Greenpeace says it maintains a watchlist of 50 contaminated vessels that are due for scrapping, including the Pacific Princess, star of "The Love Boat" television series.

Between 300 and 600 ships annually are broken up for scrap worldwide, most of them beached in the ships' graveyards of India and Bangladesh.

The number of vessels reaching the end of their average 30-35-year life span is expected to rise in coming years, compounded by a European ban on single-hull oil tankers in response to the Erika and Prestige sinkings in 1999 and 2002.

Public sector union the General Labour Confederation called on France's warship builder to draw up a strategy for dismantling navy vessels, arguing it had the facilities.

But the navy said it had never undertaken asbestos removal on a large scale and that its docks were not suited.

However, Michel Guyot, the head of a shipyard in Brest, where the Clemenceau is to be berthed after its return to France, said his firm was interested in treating the carrier.

Independent consultant Emmanuel Godillon told AFP he was commissioned by a large French industrial group to draw up plans for a shipbreaking yard.

"The effect of the Clemenceau is to favour the emergence of a demolition network in France," he said, adding that he would also present the project to the national shipbuilders' association.

related report

Shipbreakers Talk Of Personal Crisis As France Shuns Shipyard
Alang, India (AFP) Feb 19 - When Ramkripal Karma heard a mighty French warship was heading for India, he left his farm and embarked on a tortuous two-day journey to the breakers' yards of Alang in search of financial security.

A week after arriving, he learned the Clemenceau was heading back home. If Karma hadn't already spent most of his savings on travel, he would have done the same.

On Saturday, a day before President Jacques Chirac arrives in India for an official visit, Karma will join workers at Alang, who had hoped for one of the 400 jobs from the year-long demolition job, and urge Chirac to rethink.

Chirac ordered the decommissioned and asbestos-lined 22,400-tonne ship back on Wednesday after fierce opposition from environmentalists who accused France of toxic dumping on developing countries.

But think of me, says Karma. He left his two young sons, aged five and eight, and wife in rural Uttar Pradesh where he was a subsistence farmer to "earn money to pay for a house and an education for my sons".

He joined 15 other hopeful young men on the journey from his village for what he thought would be the relative riches on India's west coast where the ship was destined to be broken up for scrap.

He spent 36 hours standing, crammed in a railway carriage, and on two long bus journeys before he passed the sign: "Gujarat Shipbreakers Association welcomes you" on the edge of Alang's once thriving shipbreaking zone.

Nine days later, Karma, 38, is still to earn a rupee. "I feel so bad," says Karma. "I never thought this would happen. When I heard about the ship going back, my dreams just disappeared.

"Now I fear for the future. If I lived a short distance away I would have gone immediately but we are talking about big money to get home, about 800 rupees (18 dollars)."

It is not the French government that attracts the ire of shipyard workers but Greenpeace and other environmental groups who fought against the Clemenceau's break-up in India.

Workers say they are furious the battle was partly fought in their name to stop what the French claim would have provided one quarter of the work at Alang.

Many are from rural Uttar Pradesh, where, like Karma, they earn little or nothing from farming and hoped to earn at least 50 rupees a day working in the labour-intensive yards of Alang.

Asif Khan -- a 10-year veteran of Alang -- has seen it all before and has the scars to prove it.

During his five years in the shipyards he gained 50 rupees a day but lost the top of one finger to a spinning gear wheel he was trying to strip from a ship.

He also has an ugly scar on his shoulder, where the skin was punctured by a cast-iron stanchion.

But he says he was happy enough until the work ran out for him in 2001. After a spell in the scrapyards that flank the road to Alang, he used savings to buy a snack stall.

He earns enough to live on albeit with one meal a day rather than the two he could afford when working in the yards.

Like Karma, he is 38, a native of Uttar Pradesh, and also has two sons -- although at 17 and 14, Aslam and Akram are older and jobless in Alang.

So what will he do? The Muslim shopkeeper shrugs. "It's in the hands of Allah. Even the big, big fellows can't do anything, so what will I do? I leave it to Allah."

Other workers tell of rising tensions between former colleagues as the estimated 4,000 remaining men from the tens of thousands who once worked in the yards fight for the few available jobs.

Just outside the restricted zone that is the heartland of the shipbreakers, three men run after a tractor that is hauling a load of rusting metal tubes to a nearby scrapyard.

They are each paid 10 rupees each for an hour's work manhandling them off the back of the trailer into a scrapyard. It is the only money that Ganga Singh, 40, thinks he will earn after a day of touring the yards for work.

"It's like there's one job and 10 people are going for it so it will come to a fight," Singh says standing close to a sign on a fence reading "Greenpeace Go Back".

"It's all about strength and who has the muscle power," he says. He has been in Alang for 10 years, another father-of-two from Uttar Pradesh, his torn shirt filthy from work.

"I thought I would make lots of money in a short period but it's all changed. They should have allowed that ship in."

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