NEW DELHI: On a scorching May afternoon last year, a ragpicker in Delhi’s Ghazipur area collapsed from heat exhaustion.
“The family rushed him to the hospital,” says Majida Begum, a sanitation worker who witnessed it. “But he was declared dead on arrival. They had no proof that he died due to heat, so they were not given any compensation.”
His death was never officially counted, just one of the countless lives lost in India’s intensifying heatwaves that go unrecorded and uncompensated.
