Internews has been supporting efforts to build a healthy media and information environment in India since 2018. Committed to empower people and communities with trustworthy, high-quality information they need to make informed decisions, we tackle the problem of misinformation – that has plagued the media ecosystem in the country for several years now.

Our fact-checking training program, launched in 2018 with the support of the Google News Initiative and run in collaboration with local partners, trained over 15,000 journalists and journalism students and resulted in the launch of many fact-checking initiatives in the country. More recently in 2020, as the world battled an ‘infodemic’, Internews launched a news and information literacy program that helps new internet users in smaller cities and rural areas of India assess online information better and identify hoaxes. The program – FactShala – brought together a core team of 250 journalists, media faculty members, non profit workers and community leaders from across India who have so far organized over 500 sessions for at least 25,000 people.

Internews in India also supported a Mobile Journalism training program for 100 professional journalists and citizen journalists to strengthen their ability to cover stories of their choice using their mobile phones and provide impartial and objective reporting.