Climate disinformation in India is being used to sideline Indigenous consent and legitimize land dispossession, transforming climate policy into a human rights issue, according to a new report.
The report, Climate Disinformation in India: Subverting Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, was released by Asia Centre and International Media Support.
It found that distorted environmental narratives are systematically deployed by state and corporate actors to justify extractive development while weakening legal protections for Indigenous Peoples, officially designated as Scheduled Tribes.
Indigenous communities make up 8.6% of India’s population, or about 104 million people, and live across more than 11% of the country’s land area, much of it forested.
Although Indian law guarantees protections such as the right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) under the Forest Rights Act and other legislation, the report said these safeguards are routinely bypassed through misleading climate narratives.
“Climate disinformation is aiding the subversion of Indigenous Peoples’ (IPs) rights in India,” the report said, describing how false and selective information is used to prioritize industrial development while marginalizing Indigenous voices from environmental decision-making .
The study identified four dominant forms of climate disinformation circulating in India’s media and policy landscape: one-sided environmental reporting, the promotion of false climate solutions, attributing environmental disasters to climate change to deflect accountability, and denialism or suppression of scientific evidence. Together, these narratives present extractive projects as climate action while obscuring displacement, biodiversity loss, and governance failures.
One of the report’s central findings is the erosion of FPIC. By circulating distorted or incomplete information, authorities effectively exclude Indigenous communities from decisions affecting their ancestral lands, allowing mining, infrastructure, and energy projects to proceed without meaningful consent.
False climate solutions play a key role in this process. The report documented how afforestation drives, compensatory plantations, and green credit schemes are framed as environmental progress despite replacing biodiverse forests, restricting Indigenous land access, and undermining traditional livelihoods.
“The media’s celebration of numerical targets like trees planted or funds allocated is a classic distraction technique,” an Indigenous civil society representative interviewed for the study said. “It reduces a complex ecological and social crisis to a simple, state-sponsored PR victory, effectively erasing the voices of displaced communities and the evidence of ecological failure from the public discourse.”
The report also found that environmental disasters are frequently blamed on global climate change while ignoring the role of governance failures, unsafe infrastructure, or environmentally destructive development projects.
This framing, the authors said, allows authorities to evade responsibility for harms affecting Indigenous territories.
In some cases, misleading environmental data has been used in judicial and administrative processes, contributing to forced evictions and what the report describes as the “deterritorialisation” of Indigenous communities.
These actions are often accompanied by legal harassment, intimidation, and physical violence against Indigenous leaders and environmental defenders.
“If the central government has every right to do anything they want … we will be left with nothing,” one Indigenous rights advocate said. “They don’t look at the people who are living in the periphery who are using river resources, land resources every day for survival.”
The report situated these developments within India’s rapidly digitizing media environment, where government-aligned narratives dominate mainstream and social platforms, while Indigenous-language media remain under-resourced and marginalized.
This imbalance, the authors warned, leaves Indigenous communities particularly vulnerable to disinformation tailored to local contexts.
By reframing extractive development as climate action, the report said, climate disinformation enables the erosion of Indigenous rights while shielding decision-makers from accountability.
“Above all, India must not only refrain from subverting the rights of IPs but must actively affirm and safeguard them as a core legal and ethical obligation,” the report said.
The study is part of a regional research series examining the impact of climate disinformation on Indigenous Peoples across Asia, including Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand.
