New Delhi, India – “My right eye swells up in the heat, so I stopped going to the landfill last year,” says 38-year-old Sofia Begum, wiping her watering eyes. Begum married at the age of 13, and for more than 25 years, she and her husband have picked through mountains of rubbish at Delhi’s Ghazipur landfill, scavenging for recyclable waste they can sell to scrap dealers.
Dressed in a ragged, green and yellow kurta, and sitting on a chair in a narrow lane in the middle of the slum settlement where she lives beside the dump site, Begum explains that she came into contact with medical waste in 2022, which infected her eye.
