The scale is massive. Take a look at the satellite view here: https://www.google.com/maps/search/chittagong+ship+breaking+yard/@22.452986,91.7189956,3407m/data

The scale is massive. Take a look at the satellite view here: https://www.google.com/maps/search/chittagong+ship+breaking+yard/@22.452986,91.7189956,3407m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/search/chittagong+ship+breaking+... You can scroll up and down the coast to see how many ships are beached and being dismantled. If you check the scale of the map, you'll see that these are big ships. And most of the breaking is done manually, using torches and sledgehammers. This requires lots of manual labor. So if you consider the massive scale of the shipbreaking happening here, combined with how labour intensive the process is, that 200,000 figure starts to make sense.