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.

  • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    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.

    • GiveMemes@jlai.luEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      “Since the definition of a sentence in Standard English is a construction consisting of a subject noun phrase and a predicate verb phrase, by definition, the answer is that you can’t have a verbless sentence, even short ones: Ice melts, Ducks quack, Winter sucks, etc.— a main verb has to be there.”

      https://www.evansville.edu/writingcenter/downloads/sentence-parts.pdf

      Fragments can still convey a complete thought without being a sentence: eg “Go!”, “Scalpel!”, “So far, so good.”, etc.

      https://www.niu.edu/writingtutorial/punctuation/sentence-fragments.shtml

      https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/mechanics/sentence_fragments.html

      https://www.grammarly.com/blog/mistake-of-the-month-sentence-fragments/

      The title in question was especially bad as it didn’t make sense due to the omitted verb, but still had the structure of a standard sentence, making it even harder to interpret. I am a native English speaker which is why I remember every grammar lesson from pre-k through college saying that a sentence needs to have both a subject and a verb. Sometimes, the subject is implied, like in an imperative sentence, but that’s the exception, not the rule.

      And I’m not trying to be a total stickler abt grammar just for the sake of it, but because it is actively poisoning readability and we shouldn’t be rewarding it whether malicious as another commenter had suggested or just out of laziness. There’s no effect that the writer here is achieving by cutting the words the were cut.

      I’ll also add that that wikipedia article uses that ‘Jones Winner’ thing, but it would be much less ambiguous to just say ‘Jones Wins’ and so you shoud pretty much always use the second. If this headline wanted to eliminate unnecessary words to minimize wordcount or something, they could easily have taken out their superfluous adjectives rather than the verb which severely hindered readability.