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. “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.

        • GiveMemes@jlai.luEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          No. It’s a sentence fragment. It makes no sense and leaves out the end of the thought

          • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            0·
            3 days ago

            For India’s garbage pickers, a miserable and dangerous job [is] made worse by extreme heat

            That’s a full thought. I probably would have kept the “is” but headlines often drop small words.

            • GiveMemes@jlai.luEnglish
              0·
              3 days ago

              They don’t often drop the only verb of the sentence, rendering it nonsensical.

              And also is this actually a common practice? Like, would it be a normal headline to write:

              “The forge workers standing up human rights”

              Rather than

              “The forge workers standing up for human rights” ??

              No, Clearly not, as the former makes no goddamn sense. Similar to the title in question. I don’t get why you’re defending this poor practice tho. It doesn’t even make sense for it to be a non English speaker that wrote it making a translation issue because one of the earliest things you learn in English, French, Spanish, etc is that a sentence needs a verb to function.

              • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                0·
                3 days ago

                Some words can be dropped, some can’t. Language isn’t consistent. Especially for headlines, they practically have their own rules.

                No offense intended by this question at all, but are you a native English speaker?

                Nominal sentence

                Nominal sentences in English are relatively uncommon, but may be found in non-finite embedded clauses such as the one in “I consider John intelligent”, where to be is omitted from John to be intelligent.

                They can also be found in newspaper headlines, such as “Jones Winner” where the intended meaning is with the copular verb, “Jones is the Winner”.[9]

                Other examples are proverbs (“More haste, less speed”); requests (“Scalpel!”); and statements of existence (“Fire in the hole!”), which are often warnings.