On April 16 this year, the front page of the
Dainik Bhaskar newspaper, the largest circulated daily in the country, carried a haunting image that would define India’s deadly second wave of COVID-19. It was a photograph of multiple burning pyres in the city of Bhopal.
On May 14,
Dainik Bhaskar published another haunting photo, This one showed corpses floating in the river Ganga, and the headline said ‘Ganga is ashamed’. The story said some 2000 bodies could be found.
Throughout the pandemic’s second wave, the media group did some of the most hard hitting stories on the COVID-19 crisis, from lack of oxygen in hospitals to the under reporting of the dead. They had dispatched over 40 reporting teams across 12 states. One of their editors, Om Gaur, recently wrote an oped for