NGOs

Non-governmental organizations became a serious force in India not long after Independence, and the reason is a specific argument Gandhi lost. He proposed dissolving the Indian National Congress into a public-service organization once its political work was done, a body of people who would serve the country without governing it. The proposal was rejected within weeks of his death. The impulse behind it didn’t disappear: many of his followers went on to found voluntary organizations that worked alongside government programs in rural development, education, and cooperative credit.

That first wave was constructive and largely cooperative with the state. A second, in the 1960s, was neither. It formed around groups working directly with the poor, the landless, and tribal communities, often in areas the state’s own programs weren’t reaching, and often in open conflict with local power. By the 1980s, the government had begun formally identifying roles for NGOs in national planning, including renewable energy, family welfare, water management, disaster preparedness, and rural development.

A third wave followed liberalization in 1991, as the state withdrew from service delivery and foreign funding rose to fill the gap. This is the period that produced both the large professionalized development organizations and the rights-based movements that ran against them, among them the campaign that began with MKSS in rural Rajasthan, where villagers demanded to see the muster rolls and bills for public works in their own names, and ended in the Right to Information Act of 2005. That’s the single most consequential thing the Indian voluntary sector has done, and it started with people reading receipts out loud in a village square.

Through all three waves, one tension held: the more an organization relies on government or foreign money, the less freedom it has to set its own priorities. That tension now has a specific legal name. The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, introduced in 1976 during the Emergency, overhauled in 2010, and significantly amended in 2020, governs whether an Indian organization may receive funds from abroad. The 2020 amendment barred registered organizations from transferring foreign funds to other organizations, disrupting the intermediary model on which most grassroots work depended, and required all foreign receipts to pass through a single designated bank branch in Delhi. Tens of thousands of registrations have lapsed or been canceled since, including at several of the largest and most established organizations in the country.

Supporters describe FCRA as a normal exercise of sovereign control over foreign influence in domestic politics, of a kind many countries maintain. Critics describe its application as selective and note that cancellations have fallen disproportionately on organizations doing human rights, environmental, and religious-minority work. Both observations can be true at once, and largely are.

Further reading: Aruna Roy, The RTI Story: Power to the People (2018). Rob Jenkins and Anne Marie Goetz on the MKSS campaign.