The Cremation Workers Covid Forgot to Thank

A book five years in the making

Journalist Jyoti Yadav began reporting on India's Covid-19 migrant exodus during the first wave of 2020, when a publisher first approached her about turning her dispatches into a book. The project kept getting overtaken by events: a second wave arrived before the manuscript could progress, and Yadav found herself extending the work instead, following the same migrant workers and families across roughly three or four more years to track what the pandemic had actually done to their lives. She made her last round of follow-up visits in 2024, edited through 2025, and the book, "Faith and Fury," finally appeared this year. Her publisher pushed to drop "Covid" from the title entirely, she says, sensing pandemic fatigue among readers — "everywhere I went, people said they didn't want to hear about corona anymore."

The title's two halves describe two things she kept encountering on the road. "Faith" covers moments like the migrant workers who refused to abandon their bicycles even when offered a lift by truck or bus — for many, Yadav says, a bicycle was their only reliable means of mobility, and letting go of it felt like giving up the one thing certain to get them home. It also covers a woman she met running a roadside langar at the Uttar Pradesh–Bihar border who was herself dependent on government rations, yet showed up to feed passing workers anyway; and villagers near Rampur and Bareilly who handed out buttermilk and water to migrants forced by police barricades to walk an extra 25–30 kilometres. "Fury" is what she found running underneath nearly every class she encountered except the ruling elite — rage at the oxygen shortages, at the chaos of the Shramik trains, and at cases like a Punjab family given four hours' notice before a 12–13 hour train journey with no food or water, during peak heatwave conditions.

A failure with no accounting

Yadav is blunt about the central argument of her reporting: the migrant exodus was a failure of the state, and five years on, she sees no meaningful accountability for it. She points to Bablu Paswan, from a remote village on the India–Nepal border in Madhubani district, who paid ₹4,000 to travel part of the way home by truck during the first wave, walked the rest through the night, and was quarantined in a government school. Years later, he remains poorer than before, still carrying pandemic-era debt, and was thrown out of work again during the recent cooking-gas subsidy crisis — forced into the same crowded trains, "packed like livestock," that defined 2020.

When Yadav tried to check whether state labour departments in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar — the two states that send the most migrant labour outward — had even collected internal data on how many workers left and returned after the first wave, she found nothing reliable. "Without a solid data set, how are you going to frame policy?" she asks. If a single reporter could gather migration figures from a panchayat, she argues, state governments with far greater resources could have done the same and simply didn't. The daily wage for the workers she has followed since 2019 has stayed frozen at roughly ₹500 even as inflation has climbed steadily through 2026 — a stagnation she reads as evidence that no real investigation or correction ever followed.

Counting the dead by counting the pyres

Much of Yadav's most consequential reporting involved establishing, empirically, that India's official Covid death counts were undercounted — work she pursued by visiting crematoria and burial grounds directly and comparing what she saw there against municipal health bulletins, which tracked only deaths that occurred inside hospitals. Many patients, she found, never reached a hospital at all, or received a positive test result only after they had already died — deaths the official count simply never captured. Her early story on undercounted deaths, filed from Lucknow, was among the first to expose the scale of the gap using numbers rather than anecdote alone. She says she faced no institutional pressure from her employer to suppress the figures; if anything, her editor pushed her to substantiate the "gap" she suspected with hard data precisely because lived testimony alone was too easy for authorities to dismiss.

The reporting itself was gruelling. Beyond her single prior experience attending a funeral, Yadav had no history of spending time at cremation grounds, and she did so during peak heatwave conditions, layering N95 and surgical masks against a virus whose transmission routes seemed to change by the week. Sitting at burning ghats and asking grieving families whether their relative's death had been Covid-related was, she says plainly, "not a good experience" — but it was there that the mechanics of the undercount became visible firsthand.

The guilt of an empty seat

One of the book's most personal passages describes a moment on the road out of Lucknow, travelling with a colleague and driver, passing long columns of migrant workers on foot — elderly people in their sixties, toddlers being carried, women bearing heavy loads. When the crew stopped to interview people, most families spoke openly about their exhaustion and their journeys. But Yadav describes the discomfort of climbing back into a vehicle with an unused seat while the same people continued walking, their eyes following the car as it pulled away. At one point, a group directly asked if the car could take just one person. Deciding who among a crowd of equally desperate people was "most" needy, she says, became close to impossible — every person had a sick relative, an infant, or an elderly parent that made them count. Journalists are also engaged in surveillance and data-gathering, not relief work, she notes, and taking on relief functions carried its own risk: reporters at the time faced accusations of spreading the virus themselves simply by getting close to migrants for interviews.

Reporting alone, as a woman

Yadav also details the particular hazards of covering the exodus as a solo woman reporter. Normal safety precautions — sharing live location with family, avoiding travel after dark — became harder to maintain because police, who would ordinarily provide some ambient security at checkpoints, had been redeployed almost entirely to Covid management: guarding hospitals, patrolling oxygen plants, enforcing red-zone lockdowns. That left deserted roads with essentially no law-enforcement presence. She recalls a reporting trip to Araria in Bihar, covering Covid orphans, where a washed-out road forced her to travel the final leg by motorbike with an unverified local escort for roughly 12 kilometres — an experience she says she spent praying through, replaying viral videos of gender-based violence in her head the entire way. She completed her coverage through to when Covid case numbers finally declined, but says in hindsight, news organizations sending solo women reporters into such conditions should have taken far more precaution than they did.

What became of the "Girl of Bihar"

Yadav revisited one of the pandemic's most famous individual stories: Jyoti Kumari, dubbed the "Girl of Bihar" for cycling her injured father roughly 700 kilometres to Darbhanga over seven or eight days during the first lockdown. At the time, Kumari became a national symbol of resilience — praised by figures including Ivanka Trump, courted by Bihar politicians including Tejashwi Yadav and Chirag Paswan, who promised to fund her education, and approached by a filmmaker who announced plans for a biopic. By the time Yadav caught up with her again in 2024, however, Kumari's father had died of a heart attack in 2021 (unrelated to Covid), the promised film had never materialized, and Kumari herself had never enrolled in the college education she had hoped for and that ministers had publicly promised to support — the ministers in question having since lost their portfolios in Bihar's shifting governments. The one durable change in her circumstances was a new house, built with money from the media attention itself. "If someone this visible, this celebrated, ends up back in obscurity," Yadav says, "you can only imagine what happened to the millions who never had a spotlight at all."

The Dom community's uncredited labour

Perhaps the sharpest thread in Yadav's reporting concerns caste — specifically the Dom community, traditionally assigned the work of cremation in Hindu ritual practice. During the pandemic's worst stretches, Dom workers in Varanasi and Patna worked 40-hour stretches without rest, living, eating and sleeping among the dead, often performing final rites for bodies that families themselves refused to approach, watching instead from a distance amid stigma and fear of infection. Electric crematoria frequently broke down under the volume and heat, shifting the burden onto wood-pyre cremation performed largely by Dom labourers. They received no protective equipment — one worker told Yadav that the standard-issue Covid PPE kits were unusable in their conditions, "made for people sitting in air conditioning" — and some were beaten by police for leaving their settlements to buy food, because their work was never classified as an "essential service" entitled to a movement pass.

Yadav argues this labour was almost entirely absent from the national "Covid hero" narrative that centred doctors, bureaucrats and politicians — a narrative, she notes, that reflects whose caste and class position gets written as heroism in the first place. Some alternative outlets and a BHU research paper did document the Dom community's role, she says, but mainstream coverage largely ignored it; Patna's Dom workers were nominally "felicitated" at an Independence Day event that year but seated without any real honour attached. "If any other caste or class had done this work," she says, "we would acknowledge it completely differently."

Superspreaders, unevenly scrutinized

Yadav is careful in the book to avoid singling out any one religious gathering as uniquely responsible for spreading the virus, noting that Holi melas across north India, the Kumbh-adjacent crowds at Haridwar, political rallies, and UP's local body elections all created comparable risk during the same period — even as the Tablighi Jamaat congregation in Delhi drew disproportionate media scrutiny and blame. She traces one wedding "superspreader" event in Patna through Madhu, a Covid widow whose family attended a wedding on April 28, just days before Bihar's government imposed a lockdown on May 4 — timing Madhu says left her, as she put it, with no way to have known how seriously to treat the virus, since the government's own actions signalled it wasn't yet urgent.

As for the explicitly communal language that circulated around the pandemic — terms like "Covid jihad" — Yadav says she encountered it prominently in social media and prime-time television debate, and saw it surface aggressively in Delhi's National Capital Region specifically, but did not find it dominant in her ground reporting across Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where local explanations for the virus varied instead by region: a "Chinese virus" theory in Haryana, government-conspiracy theories about vaccination in parts of UP, and — among some Dom and Musahar community members Yadav interviewed — a belief that their own low Covid mortality reflected superior immunity, since "this was something that only happened to the rich."

The cost of witnessing

Yadav is candid about the reporting's personal toll: she was visibly malnourished in photographs from the period, dehydrated from hours in triple-layered masks, and contracted Covid herself during the first wave in December before what she suspected was a possible reinfection in Lucknow during the second — a scare that sent her hunting for an unavailable oximeter across the city before a CT scan in Varanasi came back negative. She took a fifteen-day break after returning to Delhi and has since deliberately avoided revisiting certain stories, particularly that of Kalyani Agrahari, saying she still finds herself pulled back into the trauma of that period when she does. She recommends young reporters covering disasters, conflict or pandemics actively seek professional psychological support — support she never sought herself but wishes she had — and closes with a broader concern that Indian newsrooms are investing less, not more, in the kind of resource-intensive ground reporting that surfaced stories like the Dom community's uncredited labour in the first place, particularly on minority-focused violence that she says now struggles to find sustained coverage even in independent media.