4 ideas
They assumed no trains were running, and a goods train killed sixteen of them. The rotis they had packed for the journey lay scattered along the rails, and that image came to stand for the exodus: people so far outside the state's field of vision that its own infrastructure killed them.
Dutt argues that the March 2020 lockdown was announced with about four hours' notice and was designed for households with savings, space and a fixed address. It therefore turned a public-health measure into a transfer of risk onto daily-wage migrants. Overnight they lost income, food and shelter at the same time, and walking hundreds of kilometres home became their only rational option. A policy that protects the median citizen can manufacture a crisis for those the planners never modelled.
India's informal migrant workers built, cleaned and delivered for its cities while remaining statistically and politically unseen. They appeared in national consciousness only once they left en masse on highways. Their invisibility was structural, not accidental: no registries, portable benefits or urban belonging tied them to the places they sustained. That is why the state had no mechanism to reach them when the crisis hit.
When Dutt's father died of Covid during the 2021 second wave, after the family struggled with hospital care, she crossed from witnessing the catastrophe to living inside it. Her personal loss exposed that the second wave had dissolved class insulation: money and connections could not reliably buy oxygen, beds or ambulances. Read this way, the observer's detachment is a privilege that a large enough disaster revokes, and the reporting changes once the chronicler is also a mourner.