Five Years After Covid, Jyoti Yadav on the Grief and Failure India Never Reckoned With

Five years after India's COVID-19 lockdown sent millions of migrant workers walking, cycling and hitching their way home, journalist Jyoti Yadav has published "Faith and Fury," a book built from years of ground reporting across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar during the pandemic. In conversation with Nous Podcast, Yadav laid out what her reporting found: a state that undercounted its dead, a caste hierarchy that did the invisible work of disposing of bodies, and a migrant workforce whose lives, five years on, have not meaningfully recovered.

Faith carried people; fury consumed them

Yadav's title captures a duality she says she watched play out simultaneously on India's highways. Faith, in her telling, showed up in unexpected places: migrant workers refusing to abandon their bicycles even when offered space in trucks and buses, because a bicycle was the one reliable means of getting home; a woman in Gopalganj, herself dependent on government rations, running a roadside langar to feed passing migrants from her own household's supplies; farmers along the Rampur-Bareilly stretch handing out buttermilk and water to workers who had been turned back 25-30 kilometers by highway police checkpoints and forced to retrace the distance on foot. "When the government's entire system was collapsing," she said, "it was fellow human beings helping each other."

Fury was the other half of the same picture — anger she says was visible across every class but the ruling elite, whether it took the form of oxygen shortages, or the chaos of the Shramik trains meant to carry migrants home. She cites a Punjabi family given four hours' notice before a train departure, dragging their belongings through a 12-13 hour journey without food or water during peak heat-wave season. Her publishers ultimately steered the book away from using "COVID" in its title, worried readers were fatigued with pandemic narratives five years on — settling instead on "Faith and Fury" as capturing something more durable than the disease itself.

A state that never counted its own failure

Asked whether India's government has been held accountable for the migrant exodus, Yadav is unambiguous: no meaningful reckoning has occurred, at either the compensation or the data level. She points to Bablu Paswan, from a remote village in Madhubani district near the India-Nepal border, who paid ₹4,000 for a truck ride home during the first wave and walked through a night to finish the journey. Four years on, Paswan is poorer than before — still carrying pandemic-era debt, still earning the same ₹500 daily wage loading plywood in Surat that he earned in 2019, despite years of inflation, and thrown back into joblessness and another cramped, overcrowded train ride home during a more recent cooking-gas price crisis. When Yadav checked with state labour departments in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — the two states that send the most migrant workers elsewhere in India — she found no reliable internal data on how many workers left or returned after the first wave. "If a single reporter can go to a panchayat and pull that number," she said, "the state has the machinery and the means to do it too — but they haven't."

Counting the dead the government wouldn't count

Some of Yadav's most consequential reporting involved manually tallying deaths at cremation grounds in Lucknow to expose a gap between official hospital fatality figures and the true toll — a story that became one of the first to publicly document India's COVID undercounting. The undercount, she found, existed because government tallies only captured deaths that occurred inside hospitals, while many patients died at home or in transit, with COVID-positive test results sometimes arriving only after death. The reporting required her, an inexperienced first-time visitor to a cremation ground, to sit for hours through the peak of a heat wave, layered in masks and asking grieving families whether their relative had died of COVID — an experience she describes as deeply upsetting but necessary, since without a comparable data set, gathered directly from cremation sites, no one could hold municipal commissioners or health departments accountable for the gap between what hospitals reported and what was actually happening.

The guilt of the empty seat

Yadav describes one encounter from an early first-wave assignment crossing Uttar Pradesh that has stayed with her: driving past long processions of migrants on foot — elderly people, toddlers being carried, women bearing loads — with one open seat in her own vehicle, and being unable to decide who among an entire road of equally desperate people most deserved it. Every time she stopped to interview someone and then drove on, she says, their eyes followed the car. She and her colleague began looking away rather than meet their gaze, uncertain how to reconcile being a journalist gathering information with being a human being watching suffering she was not positioned to relieve. "It was traumatic," she said, "and more traumatic for the migrants than for us — but we've tucked that memory away somewhere."

Reporting alone, as a woman, on empty highways

Yadav also spoke candidly about the specific risks of reporting as a lone woman during lockdown, when police attention was diverted almost entirely to COVID management — guarding patients, staffing hospitals, deployed at oxygen plants — leaving highways and back roads without the law-enforcement presence reporters would ordinarily expect. She recalls her most frightening moment in Araria, Bihar, while reporting on COVID orphans, when two young men who she later learned were likely under the influence of drugs approached her; and a separate assignment where a washed-out road forced her to complete a 12-kilometer stretch to a remote village on the back of a stranger's motorbike, with no way to verify who he was. In hindsight, she believes news organizations sending solo female reporters into such conditions should have taken more precautions — tracking routes, arranging check-ins — but at the time, as a young reporter, she felt driven to prove she could do the assignment despite the risk of harassment. "I just took it one day at a time," she said.

The girl who carried her father home, and what came after

Yadav followed up for years with the subjects of her original reporting, including Jyoti Kumari, the teenager who became known nationally as the "girl from Bihar" after cycling her injured father roughly 1,200 kilometers to Darbhanga over eight days. At the time, Kumari drew praise from figures ranging from Ivanka Trump to Bihar's own ministers — Tejashwi Yadav and Chirag Paswan both pledged to fund her education, and a filmmaker announced plans for a biopic. By the time Yadav caught up with her again in 2024, none of it had materialized: Kumari's father had died of a stroke in 2021, she was living with an extended family member rather than in her own home, she had never enrolled in the college education she had told Yadav she wanted, and the promised film appeared to have quietly died along with its funding. The one durable change in her life, Yadav notes, was a somewhat improved house — funded by the attention her story generated, not by any of the institutional promises made to her. "If this is the situation of someone who received a presidential-level of attention and a national award," Yadav said, "you can only imagine what happened to the millions of others whose suffering was never seen at all."

The Dom community's uncredited labor

One of the book's sharpest arguments concerns caste. Yadav describes visiting cremation sites like Varanasi's Manikarnika Ghat and Patna's Bans Ghat, where members of the Dom community — traditionally assigned by caste hierarchy to handle cremation — worked in stretches as long as 40 hours, "eating, sleeping and walking among the dead," without adequate protective equipment because, as one worker told her, standard-issue COVID kits designed for office workers in air-conditioned settings would have caused them to collapse in the heat. Some were beaten by police for lacking essential-worker passes, even though they were performing exactly that role; families of the deceased frequently would not cross into the cremation ground itself, watching from a boundary and often leaving before rites were complete, leaving Dom workers — and in some cases the priests who had fled and only later returned — to perform last rites for bodies their own relatives had, in effect, abandoned. When Patna's Dom community was invited to a subsequent Independence Day event to be honored for their pandemic work, Yadav says they were seated but ultimately sent home without any actual honor. "If any other caste or class had done this kind of work," she said, "we would acknowledge it constantly. We never gave the Dom community that acknowledgment."

Religious gatherings, official caution, and a widow's confusion

Yadav also addressed the politically fraught question of how religious gatherings contributed to COVID's spread — declining to single out any one event as a definitive "super-spreader," while noting that Holi melas across north India, the Haridwar Kumbh gathering, and the Tablighi Jamaat congregation in Delhi all coincided with clear transmission risk. She argues the Tablighi Jamaat received disproportionate scrutiny and blame compared to Hindu religious gatherings of similar scale and risk, partly because administrations were generally reluctant to impose curfews on religious assembly of any kind — she cites one district collector in Bihar who imposed a curfew on a local mela only to have the order reversed from above. She illustrates the human cost of mixed government messaging through Madhu, a COVID widow in Patna whose family attended a wedding on April 28, days before Bihar's official lockdown began on May 4 — a decision that ultimately cost her husband his life. "If the government itself hadn't locked down yet," Madhu told her, "how was I, an uneducated woman, supposed to know how seriously to take it?"

No caste or religion was blamed on the ground — but conspiracy theories filled the vacuum

While terms like "Corona Jihad" circulated heavily on social media and in prime-time television debates, Yadav says she rarely encountered that specific communal framing in her ground reporting across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, though she noted it was aggressively present in Delhi's National Capital Region. Instead, she found regional folk theories filling the gap left by inconsistent government communication: in Haryana, a belief that COVID was a "Chinese virus" deliberately unleashed; in parts of Uttar Pradesh, denial that any virus existed at all, alongside suspicion that vaccination was a government scheme in disguise; in Bihar, similar denial persisting until someone's own relative died. Some of the most marginalized communities she covered, including the Musahar community and the Dom community itself, developed a belief that they possessed unusually strong immunity, since so few recorded pandemic deaths were counted among them — a belief Yadav attributes less to actual immunity than to the same undercounting she had documented elsewhere.

"I do not have the confidence to say we are better prepared"

Asked whether India is now better prepared for a future pandemic, Yadav pointed to two distinct failures the pandemic exposed: the migrant exodus and the collapse of healthcare infrastructure. On the first, she notes that the same dynamics she documented in 2020 — workers fleeing industrial hubs like Surat, facing joblessness and police batons — recurred in miniature during the recent Middle East conflict-driven disruptions, suggesting little structural change. On the second, she points to India's ongoing rush to build AIIMS-style medical colleges and infrastructure in every state — including a well-built facility in Madhepura she profiles in her book — without matching investment in doctors, nursing staff, ward attendants or lab technicians to actually staff them. "If they haven't worked in that direction," she said, "I don't have the confidence to say we're better prepared than during the COVID years."

A reporter's own reckoning

Yadav contracted suspected COVID symptoms herself during the second wave while reporting alone from Lucknow — unable to find a working oximeter anywhere in the city, panicking over a seven-day wait for test results, and eventually testing negative after a CT scan in Varanasi, though she remains unsure whether she was infected and recovered on her own. She describes losing weight and going without proper meals throughout her coverage, and says she has never sought professional mental-health support for what she witnessed, though she now recommends it to any young reporter covering disasters, wars or pandemics. Some stories, including that of a mother named Kalyani Agrahari, remain difficult for her to revisit even now. Her closing message to younger journalists was pointed: ground reporting on minority-targeted violence and marginalized communities is disappearing from Indian newsrooms and independent media alike, she said, not for lack of willing reporters but for lack of institutional investment — an absence she lays at the feet of editors and media owners unwilling to fund the resource-intensive, unglamorous work of being present when it matters.