A worker quenches his thirst in Punjab state, May 19, 2022. SAJJAD HUSSAIN / AFP
The men lie under a banyan tree, the only place protected from the sun. It is 10:30 am and the thermometer in Delhi is already showing 41 °C on Thursday, May 19. They have just spent four hours picking vegetables in the fields on the banks of the Yamuna, the river that flows alongside the Indian capital. The carts are overflowing with cucumbers, ladyfingers, bitter gourd and other cabbage or courgettes, which they will sell in the Delhi neighborhood.
They are migrants from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Rajasthan who have settled with their families on land they have not owned for thirty or forty years. The banks of the Yamuna, flood plains, are home to 9,300 farming and gardening families, more than 46,700 people living in dire need, in bamboo huts, without electricity, without access to water, drinkable, without a paved road, in the middle of no man’s land criss-crossed by high-voltage power lines, the pillars of subway bridges or street crossings. A kind of underworld, almost invisible.
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The Delhi government distributes drinking water to them by tanker truck. The yellow color extracted from the ground is contaminated with heavy metals and other pollutants; it’s only good for washing clothes and…watering vegetables.
unsuitable habitats
The heatwave that has swept through northern India since March 11 has hurt their production; usually they earn 8,000 rupees (98 euros) in good months. Men, women, children suffer from abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, but they do not complain, almost surprised that they are asked about the heat wave. “It’s a lot warmer this year. But that doesn’t change anything for us. We have nowhere else to go. There is no work in the village,” explains a farmer.
The huts have no window, only a central opening. The thatched roof is covered with a plastic sheet. It is an indoor oven and there is no electricity to run a fan.
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A woman returns from her property carrying a heavy bowl of gourds on her head that she intends to sell. Guna Devi earns 200 rupees a day (2.40 euros). She sublets her property. If she doesn’t sell on the same day, she gives her vegetables to the cows. In a day they rot under the heat.
On Sunday May 15, the Indian capital of more than 20 million people recorded a historic record of 49.2ºC in the wards of poor neighborhoods where there are few trees and very dense development. An intolerable blast furnace suffered by the populace in unsuitable habitats. Elsewhere in the megalopolis it was 46.7 °C. For two months the air has been hot, dry and dusty. At night, the thermometer no longer falls below 31°C.
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