For India's garbage pickers, a miserable and dangerous job made worse by extreme heat

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As many as 4 million people in India scratch out a living searching through landfills for anything they can sell.

The putrid smell of burning garbage wafts for miles from the landfill on the outskirts of Jammu in a potentially toxic miasma fed by the plastics, industrial, medical and other waste generated by a city of some 740,000 people. But a handful of waste pickers ignore both the fumes and suffocating heat to sort through the rubbish, seeking anything they can sell to earn at best the equivalent of $4 a day. “If we don’t do this, we don’t get any food to eat,' said 65-year-old Usmaan Shekh.

Chaturvedi, who has worked with waste pickers for more than two decades, said extreme heat has added new risks to waste pickers who are already victims of social discrimination and appalling work conditions. “It’s been a terrible, terrible, terrible year,” she said. “They already expect to suffer from the heat and that gives them a lot of anxiety, because they don’t know if they’ll make it, if they’ll survive' the summer.

 

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