Ramaswami: In a recent interview to NDTV, P. Sainath made a telling remark: “How often is it for us, as people in India, especially in times of a grave crisis, to be deeply affected from those at the margins losing their lives, but remain hardly affected otherwise by the conditions of their state of living.” After four weeks of a nationwide blanket lockdown, this terse remark by one of India’s most prominent voices sums up both the states’ and the elites’ collective torpid response to the plight of the most vulnerable. While the mainstream media has reported the inhumane condition of the daily wage, migrant workers as they were rendered jobless and homeless by the lockdown announcement, little attention has gone to another vulnerable group of worker, constituting the largest share of workforce participation in rural India