India's ragpickers: A miserable and dangerous job made worse by extreme heat
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«If we don't do this, we don't get any food to eat,» said 65-year-old Usmaan Shekh. «We try to take a break for a few minutes when it gets too hot, but mostly we just continue till we can't.»
Shekh and his family are among the estimated 1.5 to 4 million people who scratch out a living searching through India's waste — and climate change is making a hazardous job more dangerous than ever. In Jammu, a northern Indian city in the Himalayan foothills, temperatures this summer have regularly topped 43 degrees Celsius (about 110 Fahrenheit).
At least one person who died in northern India's recent heat wave was identified as a garbage picker.
The landfills themselves seethe internally as garbage decomposes, and the rising heat of summer speeds and intensifies the process. That increases emissions of gases such as methane and carbon dioxide that are dangerous to breathe. And almost all landfill fires come in summer, experts say, and can burn for days.
At the Jammu landfill, small fires dotted the massive pile, sending up plumes of smoke as two men hauled a frayed tarp loaded with garbage on the day Associated Press journalists visited. A 6-year-old boy clutched an armful of plastic sandals. As other pickers occasionally sheltered from the heat, birds wheeled overhead, occasionally touched down in their own search for scraps.
India generates at least 62 million tons of
