KARACHI, Nov 9: The arrival of a small vessel at the Gaddani ship-breaking yard's plot 45 on Tuesday was a whiff of fresh air for some of the workers whose livelihood depends solely on activity in the ship-breaking area.

But the 700-ton ship is not large enough to provide employment opportunities to the over 7,000 workers whose fortunes are tied to the ship-breaking industry.

A visit to the area would show that hardly four or five of the 127 yards have any semblance of work under way on them. This slump in the industry keeps the many factories in the city's industrial areas dead silent.

It is a grave loss to the nation as well as to industrialists. Many factory-owners have turned to other businesses by using their premises and infrastructure. But the loss is felt more severely by those workers who specialize in this industry alone.

Pir Mohammad, once a contractor in a hardware factory, was a little lucky that he had a driver's licence and after waiting for a long time for the revival of the industry found a job as driver.

Ghazi Khan, a crane-operator from Swat working on Plot 127, said he worked elsewhere when there was no work here. But the contractor called him to work when a vessel arrived. "Here I manage to earn around Rs15,000 a month. But much of the year we have to wait for it."

Ghulam Rasul is, however, facing a lot of difficulty in finding a job as he lives in a nearby goth and does not know any work other than that of a gas cutter.

A few watchmen are, however, retained throughout the year for obvious reason.

Most skilled and unskilled workers are from the small villages in the Hub area. They are the worst sufferers as they have nowhere to go. Workers from other parts of the county - Sindh, Punjab and the NWFP - fan out to seek work wherever they can find it.

One of the last significant ships torn to pieces was Ghazvin, an oil tanker that arrived at the yard No 127 in late July. This 17,000 tonners took more than two months in its cleansing and dismantling.

According to ship-breaker Abdul Ghani, on all the yards the total material is about 30,000 tons while in this season usually there is about 200,000 tons of material for scrap.

In all, there are 127 plots. A yard may have one to four plots. Earlier when the ship-breaking industry was booming, more plots were planned to be developed. But now a pall of gloom hangs over the area and there is no chance that the existing plots will work to capacity in the near future.

The absence of activity on the ship-breaking area is apparently caused by high prices of the ships available for scrap in the market. Coupled with other problems, such as duty hassle on the vessels, the local ship-breakers find the business the least attractive. Ship-breakers say that the price of such ships was earlier about $150 per ton, which has now crossed the $400 figure.

Last year the ship-breakers saw a rejuvenation of the local industry as they produced a total of 900,000 tons of scrap. One of the big ships was a French oil-tanker, which alone contributed 75,000 tons to the total output.

The major ship-breaking countries are China, India, Turkey, Bangladesh and Pakistan. They compete with one another when there is a vessel available in the international market.

China needs about 250 million tons of iron to keep its factories going. Much of its needs are met from domestic resources, but it still has to buy a lot from the international market. So does India, whose factories are in annual need of about 80 million tons of iron.