Faith and Fury : COVID Dispatches from India’s Hinterland

Faith and Fury is an immense reporting achievement. Jyoti Yadav gives us a riveting chronicle of the unremitting tragedy that COVID was and the resilience that also sometimes accompanied it.

On the morning of 7 May 2020, young journalist Jyoti Yadav set out to cover the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and the migrant exodus that began once the country went into lockdown. She travelled on the highway and passing through small towns and villages, she documented the migrant crisis and the breakdown of India’s healthcare infrastructure, battling frequent exhaustion, bouts of sickness, troll abuse, searing heat, abysmal sanitation, unreliable statistics and official resistance to truth-telling. Interviewing hundreds of people on the road, in the local administrations, staff in hospitals, crematoria, families of victims, she did numerous stories which later received awards for fearless journalism. She set out again when the far deadlier Second Wave struck, collecting data, which exposed the undercounting of deaths by the state governments.