Last week, the media reported that the bank accounts of 30 non-Government
organisations had been frozen. Seventy NGOs had been barred from getting foreign
funds. This information was provided by Minister of State for Home M
Ramachandran in a written reply in the Lok Sabha. He also revealed that 35 NGOs
had been placed in the ‘prior permission’ category,24 cases referred to the CBI
and seven to State police. This was in response to a question whether the
Government had received complaints about some organisations using foreign funds
against the nation’s interests. To those who have closely been following reports
of hawala transactions, and terror and subversion funding being routed through
myriad NGOs and shell companies, this number may appear too meagre to
believe.
There are numerous foreign-funded NGOs purportedly engaged in welfare work
and there are other altruistic NGOs that raise finances locally. The former are
in the news for the wrong reasons after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh averred
that activists’ protests against the Kudankulam nuclear project were being
financed by sources in the United States and the Scandinavian countries. The
comment provoked BJP national secretary P Muralidhar Rao to demand that the
Centre release a white paper on such funding being used against national
interests. The Union Home Ministry’s annual report on foreign contributions has
also been recently cited to support the charge that insurgency in tribal areas
in the North-eastern States, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh
is being fuelled by funds from abroad.
The Home Ministry’s report apparently states that 2,325 foreign-funded NGOs
are registered in Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, which are
hotbeds of Maoist violence. Between 2009 and 2010, these NGOs received an
estimated `600 crore. In the North-east, 516 NGOs received `251 crore; 465 NGOs
in Jharkhand got `160 crore from abroad; in Chhattisgarh, the amount was `65
crore; and `143 crore in Madhya Pradesh , all in 2009-2010. Hundreds of crores
of rupees are being injected into Odisha to alter its religious profile.
This raises concerns about why the Home Ministry looked the other way, until
it was pushed into a corner by repeated acts of Islamist terror in cities,
Maoist violence and North-east militancy. It is only when Opposition leaders
raised the heat on the Congress-led ruling coalition’s colossal failure to block
terror channels by clamping down on sources of funding that some action was
initiated. However, those who fear that there is a global conspiracy to
balkanise India, just as the Soviet Union was, want that The Foreign
Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, be scrapped altogether. This will quash at
its source the menace of foreign funds for potentially subversive activities
such as evangelism, civil liberties, tribal uplift, poverty alleviation and the
like.
In December 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated into 15 smaller units,
independent countries. Before this happened, the ground for the break-up was
prepared by lakhs of of human rights activists and NGOs, recipients of foreign
funds, who untiringly propagated glasnost and perestroika — openness and
transparency in Government, and economic and political reforms, a campaign that
culminated in the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Ethnic insurgency in
constituent units contributed to the collapse. The West predictably hailed the
events as a triumph of democracy. It marked the end of the Cold War between the
US and the then USSR, leaving just the US-led power axis as a super power, and
gave the transnational companies access to huge untapped markets and large
natural resources.
The Government appears to have woken up rather late to the perils of
unmonitored foreign funding. The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act came into
being in 1976, to monitor foreign funds for voluntary organisations: money
coming in as well as going out of the country. It was repealed when the 2010 Act
was passed, coming into effect from May 1, 2011. Foreign Contribution
(Regulation) Rules, 2011, framed under section 48 of FCRA, 2010 also came into
effect at the same time. The new Act was touted as an improvement on the old
one, with more stringent provisions being laid down to prevent misuse of such
funds. However, if subversion and militancy continue unabated, the demand to
scrap the act should be accepted. This will block channels of foreign
funding.
For, those who wish to work for others’ uplift will do so by depending on
local contributions or their own resources. ‘Mountain man’ Dashrath Manjhi
single-handedly chiselled a one km-long, 16 ft-wide road through a hill in
Bihar’s Gaya district so that people of his village did not have to travel
around to reach Wazirganj, the nearest town. This arduous work, finished in
1982, took 22 years. A 50km distance was reduced to eight km by one man. And in
Delhi, Nand Prakash Thareja, aged 87, has singlehandedly been providing succour
to hundreds of persons since he retired as a senior bank officer in December
1985.
He began by first raising funds for altruistic bodies via the unique method
of garnering contributions from the thousands who consulted him daily for
guidance on the basis of astrology, palmistry and numerology. Since August 1996,
his own trust has channelised the funds so raised every month to needy students,
widows, indigent aged and other charities.
It has also turned a municipal park into a sylvan escape for residents, with
an overhead water tank for everyone. The trust has spent over `2.6 crore till
date, and wants to built a free hospital for the poor. But he still struggles
for funds and has to depend on his resources.
These two successes owe to the power of individual initiative and not foreign
funds.
