The Issue
Why India's disinformation crisis cannot be solved by regulation or censorship alone, and why building individual reasoning capacity is the most durable response.
The scale of the problem
Misinformation and disinformation are no longer fringe phenomena. They are structural features of how information moves in the digital age. No country is immune, but the consequences vary considerably in severity. In India, the spread of false information has contributed directly to communal violence, mob lynchings, health crises, and widespread financial fraud. During the COVID-19 pandemic, medical misinformation cost lives that did not need to be lost.
India has been among the most severely affected countries. The explosive growth of internet access and social media, combined with declining trust in established media institutions, has created conditions in which false narratives travel faster and farther than corrections. The volume of content produced daily vastly exceeds what any regulatory or moderation system can meaningfully review.
Platform incentives favour engagement over accuracy. Content that provokes strong reactions spreads further, regardless of whether it is true.
This structural feature of digital platforms is compounded by deliberate strategy. Disinformation is frequently produced and amplified by actors with resources and reach, making it qualitatively different from the ordinary spread of rumour and error. And it does not respect borders: content produced in one location can seed panic or violence elsewhere within hours.
Why the standard responses have not worked
The two most commonly proposed solutions are state regulation and platform-level content moderation. Both have demonstrated significant limits. Regulation is slow to draft, contested in implementation, and prone to misuse by the very authorities it is meant to constrain. When governments acquire broad powers to define and remove "false" information, those powers tend to be applied selectively, and often against legitimate dissent rather than genuine misinformation.
Content moderation by platforms removes some harmful material but cannot keep pace with the scale of production. It also creates a different set of problems when it suppresses legitimate speech, as it frequently does. And both regulation and moderation fail entirely when disinformation originates from a position of authority, because the institutions designed to provide accountability become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
More fundamentally, both approaches are reactive. They respond to misinformation after it has already been produced and after it has already spread. They do nothing to reduce susceptibility in the population, and therefore do nothing to reduce demand for false narratives.
The case for building individual reasoning capacity
A more durable response works on the demand side rather than the supply side. If people are equipped to evaluate claims critically, to distinguish strong evidence from weak, and to recognise techniques used to mislead, false narratives are less likely to spread or take hold, regardless of their source or scale.
This is not a new idea. The institutional incentives in most educational systems push toward measurable, examinable knowledge rather than transferable reasoning skills. Critical thinking, precisely because it is harder to assess and harder to attribute to any single subject, tends to be the first thing cut when curricula are tightened. A systematic, evidence-based approach to doing this in schools has been absent.
The TNCT project was designed to fill that gap: not through a vague commitment to "critical thinking across subjects," but through a standalone, co-curricular programme with a clearly defined curriculum, trained teachers, and a rigorous evaluation design.