Climate disinformation in India: Subverting Indigenous Peoples’ rights

This report addresses the intersection of climate disinformation and its impact on indigenous peoples by showing how climate disinformation undermines their ability to amplify their voices, articulate the challenges they face and identify effective solutions.

Indigenous Peoples in India, officially designated as Scheduled Tribes and comprising 8.6% of the population, are legally protected due to historical marginalisation. However, industrial development–focused government policies and business-oriented laws increasingly undermine these protections, particularly through land appropriation that threatens Indigenous livelihoods dependent on ancestral lands and natural resources.

Despite resistance from Indigenous communities, authorities and corporations often circumvent safeguards, using media and digitally amplified climate disinformation to justify extractive projects and obscure the erosion of Indigenous rights. India’s media digitisation since the late 2000s has further enabled the spread of climate disinformation. These distorted narratives on climate change and deforestation protect extractive projects, reinforce structural biases, legitimise violations of Indigenous Peoples’ rights, and deepen systemic inequalities.

The report unpacks the information disorder to identify the specific forms of climate disinformation and their corresponding impact on IPs’ agency to protect their natural environment in India.

To support this, the report identifies four forms of climate disinformation circulating in the media landscape in India, shows that the deliberate circulation of climate disinformation subverts IPs’ rights in five critical ways and outlines a set of recommendations for actions. 

IMS co-authored the report with the Asia Centre.