Bearing the Brunt: The Impact of Government Responses to COVID-19 on Indigenous Peoples in India

This report documents how government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have not only failed to alleviate the impact of COVID-19 on India’s Indigenous Peoples, but made their often already desperate situation even worse. To make matters worse, the government used the temporary paralysis of the country as an attempt to undermine existing environmental safeguards and laws protecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples and other marginalised sectors, ostensibly in order to help the country recover from the economic impact of the pandemic and to strengthen India’s self-reliance. This report has been produced not just in order to inform, but also to help identify what is needed to ensure that India’s COVID-19 response respects human rights, and in particular the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and that it helps in addressing the global climate crisis and in protecting the environment.