It’s said that the eyes are the mirrors of the soul. And the neglected soul of India’s migrants was reflected in the photographs that emerged in their crisis during the lockdown, which, lest you have forgotten, is still an unresolved problem. In some of them, the subjects stare straight back at the camera. It isn’t a defiant gaze. Nor is it that of a sufferer. Instead, it’s the listless look of people who know that they have miles to go before they sleep. If anything, the eyes convey surprise — and sometimes even happiness — at a photographer breaking down the wall of anonymity that this country has built around them.

Neha Vaddadi recognised that. The graphic designer was recently working with Hyderabad Urban Lab (HUL), a research organisation in the southern city, on a project that involved looking into the issue of jobless labourers moving back home during the pandemic. The photographs are what struck her. "There is something about those images," Vaddadi says, adding that they show how the authorities deal with the migrant population as mere statistics. "We have this almost nebulous concept of them. But these are individuals. I saw children, mothers, pregnant women, old men, young men and people with disabilities who have — in whatever capacity — built their lives in the urban sphere. But we have anonymised them, we don’t look at them as people with stories," the 30-year-old says.