New Delhi, July 13 (PTI): The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) website, which is run by the Union home ministry, has had certain information about hundreds of NGOs that were registered with the government erased.
Some important information has been taken off the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) website of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). This includes a list of NGOs whose licenses have been taken away and the annual reports of NGOs.
The MHA wouldn’t say anything about this, but officials said it was done because the information wasn’t “necessary” for the public to know.
The FCRA website is where extensive information on NGOs with licenses, NGOs with prior approval to receive foreign contributions, NGOs with revoked licenses, NGOs with licenses that are presumed to have expired, and NGOs’ yearly reports are kept.
The website currently only provides general information on these indexes. The list of these NGOs has been taken down, so there is no way to get their annual reports.
“We have eliminated any information that we felt was unneeded or not beneficial.” The MHA official said that the aggregate statistics on the number of NGOs that have lost their licenses and the number of NGOs that have submitted yearly returns have been kept the same.
In addition, information on the quarterly accounting of foreign contributions that NGOs receive has also been deleted. But sources say that this is in line with the changes that the Ministry made to the FCRA guidelines earlier this month.
In an effort to “reduce the compliance burden on NGOs,” the Ministry announced a number of amendments to the FCRA regulations on July 1. Changes to Rule 13, which is concerned with “disclosure of receipt of foreign contributions,” were among them. The government removed the rule’s provision (b). “A person receiving foreign contributions in a quarter of the financial year shall place details of foreign contributions received on its official website or on a website as specified by the Central government within 15 days following the last day of the quarter in which they have been received, clearly indicating details of donors, the amount received, and date of receipt,” the clause read.
This, according to several NGOs, was a “weird” development. While it won’t affect how NGOs operate, it appears to be an attempt to reduce openness in how the FCRA section operates. The head of an NGO who did not want to be named in this article said that the Ministry should make things more open while the CBI is looking into claims of corruption in the FCRA division.
The MHA had turned down Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity’s request to renew its FCRA license on December 25. The MHA did not specify what the “adverse inputs” were, but stated that the decision was made based on them. An earlier accusation made by certain BJP officials was that the NGO was involved in religious conversion. An argument about politics broke out as the opposition criticized the administration for picking on a nonprofit organization. Later, the authorities gave the NGO’s license a second chance.
The license for Oxfam India was not renewed in January, and the license for the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative was just taken away.
