Documenting the Pandemic

Book review in The India Forum

Published on June 23, 2026 

Link: https://www.theindiaforum.in/book-reviews/documenting-pandemic

Documenting Lost Time: Reports from a Recent Pandemic
Edited by Nalini Rajan
Orient BlackSwan, 2026

The Covid-19 global pandemic, which stretched three years from 11 March 2020 to 5 May 2023, has left behind questions that still await answers, scars that have yet to heal, and fears that cannot be easily dispelled. The concoction of misinformation, inadequate and unreliable information, and medical interventions falling well short of needs left behind not just disease and death, but also trauma and fear that have not entirely disappeared.

Official claims were exposed as gross underestimations when images of half-submerged corpses on the banks of the Ganga appeared, along with stories by independent media.

Capturing all of this is not an easy task. The book under review attempts to document what it calls “lost time” through 17 essays that cover the journey of the pandemic through India.

Edited volumes are often uneven, as is this one. However, it contains individual essays that together provide useful information and perspectives as we look back on the Covid-19 pandemic.

The most comprehensive is “The Virus and the Viral: The Use and Abuse of Information During the Pandemic” by senior journalist Pamela Philipose. She divides the different kinds of fake news that circulated over that time into three categories: first, the narrative controlled and propagated by the government; second, the communal propaganda in the initial months; and third, the way such information was used for profit, both monetary and political.

The government’s control of information was an extension of what the Narendra Modi government has attempted to do on many issues. To achieve this, the government not only found ways to reach out and persuade mainstream media to accept the official narrative but also centralised the source of information for the media. 

The strategy worked. For instance, mainstream media did not question the official figures put out by the government on the extent of the spread of the infection or the death toll. Official claims were exposed as gross underestimations when images of half-submerged corpses on the banks of the Ganga appeared, along with stories by independent media. Despite this, the government continues to claim that the death toll was lower than estimated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other international bodies.

Similarly, in the initial days after the sudden lockdown declared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 23 March, the government was in denial about the impact on ordinary people. This was exemplified by the mass exodus of migrant workers from the cities. Those images of workers walking, crammed into trains and buses, and finding any means of transportation remain seared in our memories, thanks to photographs, real-life accounts, and films.

Despite this, as Philipose reports, the government remained in denial. Even when the photograph of an infant trying to wake up his dead mother went viral, the Press Information Bureau did a “fact check” claiming that the woman had died due to pre-existing health issues.

The lowest point in media coverage must surely be the way it reported on the meeting of the Tablighi Jamaat in New Delhi.

Meanwhile, the Solicitor General of India told the Supreme Court that on 30 March—a day when roads, trains, buses, and all forms of transport were bursting with people rushing back to their villages—not a single migrant worker was on the road. He also claimed the government was providing food and shelter to “about 23 lakh people”. Incidentally, the same Solicitor General referred to journalists as “prophets of doom” and “vultures” when the government approached the Supreme Court to pass an order preventing media from publishing any news about the pandemic without first clearing it with the government.

The lowest point in media coverage must surely be the way it reported on the meeting of the Tablighi Jamaat in New Delhi. Philipose, as well as Vikas Pathak in a separate essay, document how the false narrative that the virus was spread by followers of the Jamaat was amplified by mainstream media. As Philipose rightly points out, people fell for this misinformation partly because they did not understand the way the virus spread, but also because “communal forces were able to exploit fear, ignorance, and pre-existing prejudices to scapegoat an entire community”.

Another important essay is by retired Madras High Court judge, Justice K. Chandru. He lays out the ways in which the government used laws such as the Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897, passed in colonial times to deal with the bubonic plague in Bombay.

Writing specifically about Tamil Nadu, Justice Chandru notes how the state government added Covid-19 to the list of notified diseases recognised by the Public Health Act. Under this law, public health officers could act to control the disease and set up a system whereby public hospitals and local authorities would come under a single authority. Private hospitals and medical practitioners could also be brought in by the state government.

Implementation of this system was affected by the suddenness of the lockdown. It gave the police powers to stop movement of vehicles and people. In just four months after the lockdown, he notes, the police had booked 5.6 lakh traffic violations.

Such powers with the police also resulted in violence against the poor, especially migrant workers fleeing cities, or daily wage earners who had no option but to venture out.

Justice Chandru also notes the impact of the lockdown on the functioning of the courts. He writes, “The courts became virtual arbitrators of disputes between the beneficiaries and the government. Judges started advising the government on how to better manage the unfolding situation.”

An important reminder in Justice Chandru’s essay is on how state governments used the pandemic to tighten labour laws when “hundreds of thousands of people were losing jobs owing to the closure of commercial enterprises”. When 10 central labour unions drew the attention of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to this, the government backtracked. He also draws our attention to the inadequacies in the Inter-State Migrant Workers Act of 1979 in the face of the pandemic’s impact on migrant workers.

One wishes that there had been a chapter looking at India’s public healthcare system and how and why it virtually fell apart during the pandemic.

While there has been a good deal written on the scientific and medical aspects of the pandemic, it is still something that needs constant reminders and reiterations. The misinformation spread during those years has not vanished and is bound to resurface if another global health crisis appears.

In this collection, T.V. Venkateswaran, a science writer and founder editor of India Science Wire, does a competent compilation of the journey of Covid-19 from China’s Wuhan district to the rest of the world. His essay was written in 2020, when the pandemic had just begun. As we know, the spread of the virus continued unabated and turned more virulent. Although he touches on the vaccines, the writer does not elaborate on the controversy surrounding them. Still, in a short chapter, he has assembled the credible information that emerged about the virus—a handy reference for anyone wanting to pursue this further.

One wishes that there had been a chapter looking at India’s public healthcare system and how and why it virtually fell apart during the pandemic. This meant that the majority, who cannot afford private health care, had to scramble for help, or just quietly give in to the disease, unattended and uncounted. The increasing privatisation of health care is a concern when a country where many people are poor must grapple with a health emergency like the Covid-19 pandemic.

The three long years when the pandemic tore through India ought to have prompted a closer look at the inadequacies of our health care system, an acknowledgement of the extensive costs of unthinking and unplanned responses of the government—such as the sudden and arbitrary lockdown—and the dangers of official and unofficial policies that target one community at times of such distress.

None of this has happened. Instead, “lockdown” has now been incorporated into all our languages. This became evident when the US and Israel-led war on Iran began on 28 February 2026. Within days, rumours of a “lockdown” led to an exodus—albeit smaller—of migrant workers from our cities.

Labour: Indian media’s blind spot

 Written By Invitation in The Migration Story

Link: https://www.themigrationstory.com/post/labour-indian-media-s-blind-spot

Five years ago, India came to standstill.  Not because it wanted to but because it was told that it had to. That this was the only way to check the spread of a deadly virus that was already raging around the world.

The national lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 24, 2020, at 8 pm on television, did little to assuage the growing anxiety about the spread of the Corona virus.  Instead, it will be remembered for forcing our poorest, most vulnerable and hard-working citizens to flee our cities and make their weary way back to their homes thousands of kilometres away from their places of work.  

The four hours’ notice for a national lockdown led to a panic, especially amongst the urban poor. For them a lockdown meant not safety but the loss of jobs as all work stopped. So, they picked up their belonging and left the city -- by train, truck, bus, or even on foot.

The images representing this exodus from our cities five years ago, of an estimated 10 million people, ought to have woken us up to the reality of informality, of the existence of the virtually invisible men and women who build, and service our cities. But did it? 

To what extent has mainstream media been responsible for moving the focus away from this reality once the millions forced to leave their jobs and their homes stopped moving? Do we know how many survived, how many came back, did they find work again, have they recovered from the financial loss they must have incurred?

I would suggest that the main reason mainstream media in India covered the “great exodus” from our cities is because it was a spectacle that could not be ignored.  And it was taking place within easy reach of where media houses are located, in the metro cities, in state capitals.  It was one of the rare occasions where the poor and working class made it to the front pages of newspapers and on television screens.  

If, as in the past, mainstream media houses had continued the tradition of having a “labour” beat, we would have known the answer to these questions. 

A part of reporting on labour was news about trade unions.  Today, many of them have downsized or virtually disappeared. Even if they exist, media rarely gives space for their views. This has contributed to the invisibility of working-class problems including those that face the informal sector. 

Also, covering “labour” included reports on closures of factories, strikes by workers like the textile strike in Mumbai, unsafe work conditions, and the precarity faced by the growing sector of informal and unorganised workers.  Today, such stories are rare although the ground reality remains the same.

Looking back at those two years, 2020 post the lockdown, and 2021 when a new, and more virulent strain of the virus hit the country, a study of what grabbed media attention and what was ignored tells us a great deal about the state of the Indian media.

Remember that in the years preceding the pandemic, mainstream media in India had decided that it was better to promote the narrative set by the government rather than question it. Much of mainstream media had already set aside a basic journalistic norm – that even as you report what the government says, your job is to try and independently verify the facts and separate fact from fiction.

Also, six hours before Modi announced the lockdown, he had summoned over 20 prominent media owners and editors.  According to this report by Sagar in Caravan magazine, “The prime minister’s website reported that the journalists committed to ‘work on the suggestions of the prime minister to publish inspiring and positive stories’ about COVID-19.”

Once the lockdown was announced, the images of millions of poor people leaving cities in a panic, dragging their meagre belongings, carrying small children, helping the elderly to walk with them certainly did not constitute a “positive” story. But this was a story that even the most pro-government media simply could not ignore. And so, despite themselves, and the suggestion by the prime minister that they focus on “positive stories”, mainstream Indian media did report it.

But once the stream of displaced migrants thinned out, so did the media focus.

In fact, within days of the lockdown, mainstream media and particularly television news became obsessed with a manufactured controversy. 

Perhaps one of the most shaming episodes as far India’s mainstream media is concerned is the way it played a role in spreading Islamophobia in the early days of the outbreak of the pandemic by suggesting that the surge in Covid cases was due to a gathering in New Delhi of the Tablighi Jamaat.

As this piece in Article-14 points out, until March 29, the media focused on the exodus of migrant workers from our cities.  On that day, there was news of a spike in Covid cases.  Within three days, official statements suggested that the spike was linked to the Tablighi Jamaat gathering in New Delhi that included many followers who had travelled to India from other countries.

This was the signal that sent some sections of mainstream media into overdrive with terms like “corona bomb” and “superspreader maulana” being liberally used. 

Even if the Islamophobia eventually died down, the seeds of hate and suspicion that already existed were further nourished by this shameful media campaign. 

Although the lockdown finally ended in May 2020 after several extensions, the suffering of those who had been forced to flee certainly did not.  But their stories were not top of the news anymore as the migrants had disappeared into their villages. And mainstream media concedes some space to rural India only if there is a disaster. 

A few newspapers did report on the discrimination migrants faced when they returned to their homes as they were seen as carriers of the virus.  But after that, there was little by of follow up reports on how people survived without an income for so many months. Such stories are not dramatic like the exodus or heart-rending like the image of the child pulling at a blanket that covered his dead mother on the railway platform in Muzaffarpur. 

Unfortunately for the government, and fortunately for people, some of this information did come out, through reporting by independent news platforms.  It is here that we read stories of the events post the initial exodus.

In fact, if there is one lesson to be learnt from the coverage of the pandemic by mainstream media in 2020 and 2021 it is this: that even if they choose to ignore the reality, the real news will find its way thanks to independent media as well as social media.  

The more virulent strain of the virus that hit India in 2021 brought with it another set of challenges for the media.  For instance, this article in Scroll tells us about the telling gap between official figures of Covid deaths in Gujarat and the reality. The facts became known because some media houses did what journalists are supposed to do: Verify and double check the authenticity of official figures. Local newspapers sent reporters out to crematoria to check how many bodies were being cremated each day. The numbers were very different from the official data.

The gap between fact and fiction was even greater in Uttar Pradesh where the Yogi Adityanath government continued to claim that the situation was under control.  Yet here again, reports such as this in Newslaundry exposed the substantial discrepancy between official claims and the reality. 

This kind of coverup of actual data, especially in UP, was finally exposed when the gruesome images of shallow graves on the banks of the Ganga emerged as well as stories about overworked crematoria that could not deal with the flood of deaths.  

Among them, was Hindi newspaper Dainik Bhaskar which stood out with its front page photos of burning pyres and investigations that put a hole through official claims on death counts. Its coverage drew praise not just from other media organisations but it also won awards.

The tragic stories of poor families who had to abandon their loved ones on the banks of rivers because they could not afford the costs of cremation were a stark testimony to the deadliness of the second surge of Covid, but also of the mismanagement by governments.  There was no “positive” spin that could be given to this story. 

As for the back story that was not followed up in adequate detail by mainstream media, Supriya Sharma rightly points out in her piece in Scroll: “If the lockdown last year came down as a hammer, this year, it feels like a thousand cuts. Obscured by the dramatic and distressing images of death in the second wave of the pandemic, a slow drip of distress is going unnoticed, not just by the government, but even by other citizens, leaving the urban poor to fend for themselves.”

It is only because India has independent news platforms that we saw some reports on this “slow drip of distress”. Such stories ought to be part of routine journalism, not an exception. 

Yet over time, the space for such stories, the time and investment that is needed to investigate and write them, has virtually disappeared.  Instead, for mainstream, it is news that sells their “product” that trumps all other criteria. And how poor people survive, or rather do not, is not a selling proposition

It is now five years since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in India.  The questions that arose then are still relevant. Have the conditions under which the millions employed in precarious and uncertain jobs, who formed part of that exodus, improved? If not, why not?