In November 2021, The Reporters' Collective team travelled to Rajasthan to report on the second wave of COVID-19. We found that many families were grappling with procedures to apply for compensation announced for families of people who died of Covid-19. Most families did not have the primary document needed for compensation -- an official document that showed that Covid-19 infection had caused the death. There was also news that states were rejecting applications based on flimsy technical errors. And many states approved more compensation applications than their official Covid-19 death toll, suggesting underreporting of Covid-19 deaths. All of these, led The Reporters' Collective to undertake an extensive data-gathering exercise to find how many families who had lost their loved ones to Covid-19 had received the compensation. With the help of SAFAR, RTIs were filed with state authorities to find out the number of compensation applications received, applications approved and rejected. Besides this, we filed RTIs to find how the grievance redressal mechanism was working in states for people who had difficulty applying for compensation. All the information from the RTIs, along with official documents on the procedures of different states to grant compensation, is now hosted on the Covid-19 Compensation Tracker page on The Wall of Grief
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