‘They don’t know if they’ll survive’: The Indian garbage pickers working through extreme heat
For millions of Indians, the extreme heat of the summer makes their daily lives even harder.
The putrid smell of burning rubbish wafts for miles from the landfill on the outskirts of the Indian city of Jammu – a potentially toxic miasma fed by the waste generated by some 740,000 people.
Some citizens, though, have no choice but to ignore both the fumes and suffocating heat to sort through the rubbish. They’re forced to try to find anything at all of value to sell in order to earn, at best, the equivalent of €3.70 a day.
“If we don’t do this, we don’t get any food to eat,” 65-year-old Usmaan Shekh explains. “We try to take a break for a few minutes when it gets too hot, but mostly we just continue till we can’t.”
