About the Book

AN EYE-OPENING REMINDER OF THE PANDEMIC THAT CHANGED INDIA AND THE WORLD.
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.
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.

About the Author

Jyoti Yadav is an award-winning journalist. Known for her fearless ground reporting at ThePrint, she has established herself as a long-form writer-reporter, capturing, over the past decade, social shifts that lurk unnoticed beneath ‘breaking news’ cycles. She is a chronicler of life in rural and small-town India at a time when journalism has shifted its focus to big cities and metropolitan urbanism.
Born and brought up in a village in Haryana, she fought her way out of the state’s patriarchal setup to reach the National Capital, becoming the first person in her agrarian family to go to university and pursue postgraduate studies.
In 2020–21, she was one of the few journalists to cover the migrant exodus, the deadly second wave, and the pandemic’s far-reaching impact on the hinterland in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
For her work, she has been awarded many national and international honours, including the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Award 2020, Journalist of the Year 2023 by the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Young Journalist of the Year Award 2022 by the Thomson Foundation, the Statesman Award for Rural Reporting 2023, True Story Award 2024, International Press Institute (IPI) Award 2022, and the UN Laadli Media Award for three consecutive years.