This story forms part of The Wire’s series, “Breathless,” which revisits the impact of the second wave of COVID-19 in India.
Karnataka/Siwan (Bihar) /Mumbai (Maharashtra): Each time 18-year-old Neha* looks at her mobile, it is a fleeting opportunity for her to be in her parent’s company again. The home screen lights up to reveal a collage: individual portraits of her father and mother as they smile shyly at the camera; a family photo featuring a much younger Neha; an image of her from when she was a toddler. The photographs are punctuated by chunks of inspirational texts reminding her to be resilient. The wallpaper is a catalogue of memories and losses.
Neha remembers waking up to her mother’s freshly-brewed coffee as its heady aroma wafted through their home in Karnataka. She reminisces about how her father, a businessman who dealt in dairy products, checked in on her constantly, always by her side. Theirs was a happy household. Then came the second wave of the pandemic.
Towards the end of April 2021, Neha’s mother, who was in her mid-50s, was admitted to the hospital when her heart ailments flared up. There, she tested positive for COVID-19. Meanwhile, her father, who was in his early-60s, contracted the virus too. Neha and he isolated themselves in their house, taking care of each other. But his condition rapidly deteriorated.
At around midnight on May 2, Neha grew alarmed by her father’s increasingly ragged breath. Their landlord, who lived upstairs, ran a fleet of four ambulances. “I immediately called him,” she recalled. “We got my father in and drove towards the nearest hospital.”
The first hospital they went to was overwhelmed with patients. The next one didn’t have a bed either. They moved on to another. And another. They visited 11 hospitals in all. With each rejection, a knot in Neha’s stomach tightened, her panic intensified. She contacted the state helpline for COVID-19 patients. They kept telling her to wait for ten minutes. Those ten minutes stretched on for hours. At four am, they called to say they had found a vacant bed. “Give me the bed instead, so that I can die there,” she responded in rage. It was too late. Neha’s father had passed away in the ambulance. She felt like the world around her had collapsed. She couldn’t breathe.
Neha couldn’t even mourn her father’s loss in its fullness. Over the next two weeks, she had to pretend he was alive to protect her ailing mother. “Her condition was weak,” Neha recalled. “The doctors told me to not tell her anything that she would find difficult to accept.” When she sought the landlord’s advice, he concurred.
“Something bad is happening here,” Neha’s mother, terrified by the continuing deaths at the hospital, told her over the phone. She wanted her daughter and her husband to take her back home. Neha comforted her mother, cajoling her to stay on until she recovered.
At 2 am on May 15, a text message arrived on Neha’s father’s phone. It was from a representative at the hospital. It said that the hospital had tried its best, but they couldn’t save her mother. A volunteer who was assisting COVID-19 patients and their families recalled being at the hospital when Neha went there. According to them, the authorities refused to release the body of Neha’s mother until the 16-year-old cleared pending dues: about Rs 25,000. Eventually, a group of volunteers helped make the payment.
A year later, searching for catharsis, Neha wrote a poem, excerpted below:
“Dad, I wish I could wake up and see you standing there
Then I could know that it was just a nightmare.
I go back to those days where I could hold your hand
As I grew older I got a friend
Now it all came to an end…
Mom, oh my heart aches so
I would love to have you back and never let go…
If love alone could save then there would
Be no sentence as death in your life.”
The demise of her parents forced Neha to change homes thrice. She contemplated suicide. She found herself in the middle of an ugly property dispute. She had to contend with the possibility that she might be adopted. Crisis upon crisis forced her to grow wise beyond her years. She learnt how to protect herself from the adults she was meant to trust.
“I sometimes hope it is all a lie and the nightmare will soon be over,” Neha told The Wire. “My parents were my first heroes and teachers…I am still grieving.”
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According to official figures, Neha is one in over 10,000 children who lost both their parents during the pandemic. Government data reflects that over 1.5 lakh children lost either one or both their parents through this time. The numbers are likely far higher. A study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimated that 19 lakh children in India lost either one or both of their parents between March 2020 and October 2021. (The government dismissed the study as “sophisticated trickery”.)
Four years since COVID-19 first struck India in March 2020, life has assumed a veneer of normalcy. Schools and colleges have reopened. Offices have resumed. Masks have all but disappeared from public spaces. But the children who lost their parents during the pandemic continue to reckon with their traumatic pasts, even as they navigate the financial insecurity and vulnerability of their present.
Central and state schemes to provide these children with support have had some success, but it is far from enough. Take, for instance, the PM CARES for Children scheme, which was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May 2021 for children who had lost both their parents, their surviving parent, or their legal guardians to COVID-19. The scheme is meant to offer them financial support through a monthly stipend till they turn 18, as well as a lump sum amount of Rs ten lakh, which they can access when they are 23 years old. It also provides support for accommodation, health insurance cover and assistance with education.
So far, the applications of 4,532 children have been approved of the 9,331 received. That is a little over 40% of the 10,386 children who lost their parents according to official estimates.
These are the numbers that are known. The children of those whose deaths went unaccounted for during the pandemic would likely be ineligible. Not that eligibility is any guarantee. As The Wire found in two cases in Bihar and Maharashtra, children who qualified for the programme were still unable to access it, either because they didn’t have the requisite information or because of red tape.
Many grapple with serious mental-health issues with little to no systemic help. “Children who have lost both their parents struggle with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder; it needs sustained support,” Dr Prashant Chakkarwar, a psychiatrist based in Yavatmal in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, said. The second wave was a time in which many gaps in the healthcare system “were exacerbated”, Dr Sylvia Karpagam, a Bengaluru-based public health doctor, pointed out. “And mental health was already a big gap.” Karpagam said that people who lost their parents also experienced a huge amount of guilt.
Apart from the health insurance, most government schemes at both the Central and state level did not appear to have any specific provisions to ensure the mental well-being of these children, especially once the pandemic receded. As the journalist Oishika Neogi noted in a story for Article 14, “While there are central and state helplines that a caregiver or well-wisher may contact to seek help for a child, there is little engagement with such children in their existing communities and environments, such as anganwadis and schools.”
In Maharashtra, for instance, Chakkarwar pointed out, when the pandemic began, the state government initiated toll-free numbers to provide emotional support for people who were in distress, and also tied up with civil society groups. “I was personally involved in one of the projects in Vidarbha,” he said. “But then the situation came under control and the government neglected it…it didn’t go anywhere in terms of a state-wide project once the numbers came down.”
This was not an aberration. A government official from Karnataka told The Wire that the child protection services in the state were severely under-staffed at the peak of the pandemic. According to the official, there was “no mechanism to actively help with mental health for children who lost their parents”. The closest thing to an intervention, the official said, was a child helpline handled by two-three professionals from the Bengaluru-based National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences. “They received a lot of calls and were tele-counselling children,” the official recalled, “But that was also not enough.”
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The days following her parents’ deaths were a blur for Neha.
Everyone seemed to have an opinion on everything — her parents’ funerals, their banking matters, her future. Help, scant to begin with, was often conditional. Her pain felt invisible. When people told her, “I am there, reach out,” the pithy assurances rang hollow. She lived with her father’s relatives for a week. Then, she moved in with an extended family member from her mother’s side. It was a tense time.
Neha’s landlord and his wife accompanied her to the municipal administration’s office so that she could collect her parent’s death certificates. There, government officials apprised her of the schemes she could apply for. Soon after, she was introduced to a child protection officer as well.
Under the Chief Minister’s Bala Seva Yojane in Karnataka, or the Chief Minister’s Scheme for the Protection of Children, those who lost their parents to COVID-19 were to receive Rs 3,500 per month until they became adults, along with a laptop. As the next of kin to two patients who lost their lives to COVID-19, Neha was also entitled to compensation of Rs 50,000 from the State Disaster Response Fund for each of her parents.
Neha received the device and the amounts — the stipend under the state scheme for the children stopped after she turned 18 in late 2023. Under the State Disaster Response Fund, one payment of Rs 50,000 was credited to her relative’s account because she was told that the amounts due to her for the deaths of both her parents could not be given to the same account. She had limited access to the funds. She said that the extended family member she lived with exerted a near-total control over her finances.
While her application under the PM CARES for children scheme appeared to have been processed — someone from the post office in her area of residence had called Neha to ask her to convert her account to that of an adult. She was still unclear on its details. “They told me to get in touch with the police officer attached to the account,” she said. “I have no clue who that is. The paperwork has been overwhelming, but I will figure it out.”
Neha moved out of her extended family member’s house within a year, soon after she concluded her first year at pre-university college.“I didn’t feel like I belonged there,” she said, “I wanted my parents. I wanted a home.” The pre-university college she had enrolled in had a dormitory, which she was able to access, initially at a reduced price, and then for free. But her loneliness continued to eat at her; her academic performance plummeted.
Conflict over money besieged Neha from several quarters. She had no space to grieve. Her landlord recalled feeling uncomfortable when one set of Neha’s relatives incessantly asked him whether he knew about her father’s savings, his will, and what he had, or not, left Neha. The landlord also said that some of Neha’s extended family members went to the house soon after her parents’ demise, collected their jewellery and cash, and left. None of this ever reached Neha, she told The Wire.
Neha’s father did not leave a will. This meant that his money and property would be bequeathed to her. However, soon after he died, she said, relatives from his side of the family started persuading her to sign away her rights to a house he owned in another state. The volunteer from the hospital recalled witnessing Neha’s relatives with some documents that they seemed to be coercing her to sign there — even as she was shell-shocked from the death of her mother. The landlord recounted a similar incident in her parent’s home. “It really bothered me,” he said. “I told her not to sign anything.”
The relatives changed tack. They claimed that Neha was adopted, and because of this, she didn’t have any legal right to her father’s property. “I don’t know how to put my feelings into words,” Neha said of the revelation. Her parents had never told her anything of this sort, but nobody gave her a “clear no” when she asked her other family members. “I don’t know what to believe because I have a birth certificate,” she said.
Neha didn’t intend to go back to her father’s house in the other state. “But that is not the point. My father worked hard to build that home,” she told The Wire. She stood her ground. Her relatives threatened her with a legal case.
In early 2022, Neha reached her breaking point. She frequently had panic attacks. Now, she struggled with thoughts of suicide. In one instance, she inflicted bodily harm on herself. In another, she consumed a poisonous substance. She was scared. What if it was wrong for her to take her own life, she recalled thinking. What if there was a purpose for her to find? Something shifted.
A few days after the second incident, she reached out to a counsellor she had seen speak about mental health in the classrooms at her college. The counsellor helped Neha articulate her emotions in healthy ways, and empowered her with methods she could use to ground herself. Neha’s anxiety didn’t disappear in a flash. But she started “showing up for myself”.
“How can I tell you?
What it’s been like for me.
I am haunted, I am broken in this pandemic,
By the things you can’t see.
I am tired of pretending,
My heart hammers in my chest.
I say things so comfortable
But my soul finds no rest.”
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More than 2,000 kilometres away from Neha, three siblings in Bihar struggled to make ends meet. Bereft of any significant financial support from the state or Central government, two of them were forced to abandon their education.
In the first week October 2020, Virendra*, a resident of a village in Siwan, felt breathless. Virendra was from the Nonia community, which is classified under the Extremely Backward Class category in Bihar. He eked out a living by selling the vegetables he grew in his backyard. His three children, Abhishek*, Akhilesh* and Shubhangi* — who were then 16, 15 and 10 years old respectively — rushed him to the government hospital in the district headquarters, about 30 kilometres away.
During the peak of the pandemic’s first wave in India, it was evident that Bihar’s lumbering public health infrastructure had reached the point of implosion. The state’s pace of testing was among the most sluggish in the country, even as it recorded a meteoric rise in COVID-19 cases. Those who did get tested struggled to find spaces in hospitals for treatment or to isolate. Regional inequalities deepened existing gaps.
When Virendra fell sick, the first wave of COVID-19 had begun to recede. Bihar was gearing up for its state elections, which were to commence from October 28. Through this time, health activists and workers claimed, the number of infections in the state were being suppressed for electoral gains.
Virendra seemed to get better after he received treatment at the hospital in Siwan. Relieved, his children took him back home to the village. But he took a turn for the worse overnight.
The children did not want to take any chances. Their mother, Shanti Devi, had passed away in 2016, when she was 34 years old. Although none of them articulated their fears to each other then, they were all gripped by the same dread. The spectre of losing their one remaining parent loomed large. “The Siwan hospital did not have much facilities,” Akhilesh recalled, “So when his condition deteriorated, we thought to take him to a hospital in Lucknow.”
Much to their relief, the King George Medical University in Lucknow had a bed.
Abhishek set off for the seven-hour-long journey with his father and two uncles in an ambulance. Their family members pitched in to pay for the transport. Virendra was admitted as soon as they reached, and the staff put him on a ventilator. Abhishek and his uncles spent their nights in the hospital compound. “There were hundreds of families with us who were staying like that,” Abhishek recalled, “There were cries all over the hospital due to the deaths of patients. We were also scared.” But as Virendra showed signs of improving, the family allowed itself to be hopeful. “We thought the worst was behind us,” Akhilesh said.
It wasn’t. On October 5, 2020, Virendra breathed his last. He was just 41 years old.
His children were traumatised by the sudden loss. The death of their father disrupted their ability to function. “For a couple of months, we could not resume our studies. Our days passed thinking about how we would survive without a guardian,” Abhishek recalled. In time, they began the difficult work of rebuilding their lives. They knew they had to fend for themselves now.
When Virendra was alive, he never asked his children to sell vegetables with him. “I wanted to do my own business and my father supported me,” Abhishek told The Wire, “But after his death, we had to take over our father’s work.”
The kids got back to school. Since they were studying in a government institution, “there was not much pressure of attendance,” Abhishek said. “So, we studied at home.” It was difficult to manage both work and academics at the same time. Both the brothers appeared directly for their matriculation exam and cleared it. They knew they would have to drop out after. They wanted to make sure their little sister could pursue her dreams.
After their results, Abhishek and Akhilesh wondered about the possibilities of an alternate future, but they had little choice in the matter. “We want to get back to college, but there is no financial backing to support three people’s educational fees,” Abhishek said. Shubhangi missed her father’s reassuring presence, she was very close to him. “I haven’t decided a career path yet, but I know I want to continue my education.”
All three siblings received a monthly stipend of Rs 1,500 through a state government scheme for orphaned children in Bihar. The two brothers stopped receiving the compensation after they turned 18. They also applied for the PM CARES scheme, and they said that their bank accounts had been opened at the post office under the programme. “But whenever we go to the district office, they don’t tell us if there is any money in that account,” Abhishek told The Wire.
During the pandemic, the state government Bihar announced a compensation of Rs four lakh to the immediate family members of patients who lost their lives to COVID-19. The money could take a huge weight off the siblings’ shoulders. Instead, their application was mired in red tape stretching across two states.
Government officials in Bihar told the children that the money ought to come from Uttar Pradesh because Virendra died in Lucknow. Authorities in Uttar Pradesh claimed the funds were to be released by the government in Bihar since that is where Virendra resided. When The Wire reached out to a government official, he reiterated that since Virendra had died in Uttar Pradesh, his children’s application for the compensation had been rejected.
Eventually, the children gave up. Their relatives tried to help, but they also had their own lives to lead. The siblings, who were all minors when their father died, were “consumed by the burden of living on our own,” Abhishek recalled, “So we thought there is no point in running from pillar to post for compensation and wasting time.”
Meanwhile, daily necessities morphed into luxuries. “When our father was around, we didn’t have to worry about food,” Shubhangi told The Wire. “My brothers look out for me, but we now have to think before consuming our meals. We don’t know if there will be one the next day.”
For the bewildered kids, it is just one more lament among many: “Why did the hospitals have to be so crowded at the time?” Abhishek asked.
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In the densely-populated slum community of Yerawada in Maharashtra’s Pune district, 38-year-old Shishir* had given up on endless paperwork too. He was resigned to the fact that his two adolescent nephews would get no support from the state. “The case isn’t straightforward,” he said.
Shailesh* and Vinit* lost their father in 2017 to a deteriorating liver when they were 11 and seven years old, respectively. Two years later, their mother died of a heart attack. Both the parents were in their mid-30s at the time of their demise.
The children’s grandmother, Parvati*, stepped into look after them. She managed expenses with her late husband’s government pension of Rs 10,000. In April 2021, she contracted COVID-19. Her condition worsened almost immediately.
“We couldn’t find a hospital for hours,” Shishir recalled. Parvati died in the casualty ward of Pune’s largest state-run facility, Sassoon General Hospital, awaiting treatment. She was 75 years old. “COVID-19 patients were crammed in one room. Some of them were squirming on the floor,” Shishir told The Wire.
With Parvati’s demise, the children lost their only guardian. Schemes such as the PM CARES for children were intended to help in cases such as theirs. But the two boys had not received a penny so far.
According to government data from March 2022, over 700 children lost their parents to COVID-19 in Maharashtra — the only states that recorded more orphaned children were Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. In June 2021, the Maharashtra government set-up task forces and dispatched representatives to the state’s 35 districts so that they could locate children who had been orphaned because of the pandemic and identify their financial, educational and emotional needs.
A slew of measures followed. Through the State Disaster Response Fund, the next of kin of COVID-19 patients who died in Maharashtra were meant to get Rs 50,000. The state government also announced that it would give every child who had lost both parents Rs five lakh, in the form of fixed deposits made through their accounts.
No state mechanisms reached Shishir’s nephews despite their family’s repeated attempts to make sure they got the compensation that was due to them. According to a study by the Maharashtra office of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, these schemes were plagued by issues of faulty implementation. “There were discrepancies in providing benefits under a variety of schemes to such children as proof of COVID-19 mortality in the form of death certificates was required,” the study noted. It added that nearly half of the District Child Protection Units in the state “mentioned the difficulties faced in procuring certificates and documents for orphans.”
“I have been looking after the kids and providing emotional support,” Shishir told The Wire. He was worried about the children picking up alcohol or smoking, as he had seen other young kids in the area do. “I have made sure they don’t get addicted to bad habits and focus on their studies,” he said. There was only so much he could do. He had lost his job as an office boy during the pandemic. “We need some financial support too, if the kids are to fulfil their dreams,” Shishir said. For the time being, the family was making do with the government pension of Rs 16,000 that his father drew.
Shailesh, 18 years old now, is currently in the second year of an undergraduate course in business administration at the SNBP College in Pimpri-Chinchwad. He wanted to pursue a Masters in Business Administration after, so that he could land a job in finance or start his own business. But his aspirations were blunted by his circumstances. “My college fees are Rs 35,000 and my brother’s fees are Rs 8,000,” Shailesh said. “If at least our education is taken care of, it would be a huge relief.”
Shailesh had vague memories from his childhood, of his father toiling at odd jobs so that he could run the household. “I remember how difficult it was for him,” he said. “I don’t want to do that. I want to look after my brother.” Vinit, Shailesh’s reticent younger brother, had just entered his last year in school. “As an older brother, I feel responsible for him,” Shailesh said.
The siblings were still reconciling with the demise of their grandmother. “It hasn’t been easy to recover,” Shailesh said. The fissures in their familial world had left them disoriented. “We lost three people in six years. But I must be strong to protect my brother. He looks up to me,” Shailesh told The Wire. Staying focused on the goals ahead — their education and their careers — was the only antidote that seemed to work.
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Neha was looking ahead too. She was pursuing a degree in commerce at a university in Karnataka. With the support of her child protection officer, she moved to another hostel, where she could stay until she graduated. An IT company was helping her meet her accommodation expenses through its corporate social responsibility fund.
With each passing day, Neha mined reserves of strength she hadn’t known existed. She had survived, she reminded herself. The deaths of her parents, the onslaught of her extended family members, the rootlessness of having no place to call home. There was no reason she couldn’t survive whatever else the future held too. “I have learnt to be independent,” she told The Wire. “I can live anywhere, I can get things done on my own.”
She spent time at orphanages and homes for the elderly whenever she could. She felt a connection with children and adults there.
The idea of serving her country held immense appeal for Neha. She believed that the defence forces would be a natural fit. “Until the media makes martyred soldiers big heroes, nobody knows about their struggles or their sacrifices,” she said. She once dreamt of being a fighter pilot, but her weak eyesight posed a challenge. She adjusted her plans accordingly. A career as an accountant in the military seemed pragmatic.
The financial aid that Neha received from different government schemes helped her steer the course of her life with a certain degree of agency. But the modalities of these programmes were often difficult to navigate. She wished that systemic structures existed for children like her to cope with their mental-health struggles.
Whenever she went to government offices, Neha braced herself for the inevitability of being referred to as a “COVID orphan”. The phrase reduced her identity to the tragedy she had endured. “It is not a great feeling to be called that,” she said.
The bad days hadn’t disappeared. At the hostel Neha stayed in for instance, she felt that people tended to look down on her because she didn’t pay her fees on her own — any complaints she attempted to register over the facilities with the authorities there often fell on deaf ears. It was as though her right to ask questions was dependent on her financial privilege.
Neha struggled with crippling anxiety when she thought of where she would stay after she finished college. “The fear and the uncertainty is overwhelming at times,” she said.
“It broke my heart to lose you,
But you didn’t go alone,
For part of me went with you,
The day God took you home.”
In moments like these, she turned to a note she kept in close proximity. “God brings us difficulties to bring out the best in us.”
*Names have been changed for anonymity.
Sachi, Umesh Kumar Ray and Parth M.N. are independent journalists based in Karnataka, Bihar and Maharashtra, respectively.