On Christmas day in 2021, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said that it had cancelled the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) licence of the Missionaries of Charity, a global Christian NGO, after receiving “adverse inputs”.

Although the “adverse inputs” were not defined, the Missionaries of Charity later addressed the concerns of the home ministry and the government restored their FCRA registration.

Since the Missionaries of Charity was founded by the Nobel prize winner and Bharat Ratna Mother Teresa, the actions of the home ministry attracted a lot of attention worldwide.

The government was sending a clear message that all NGOs receiving foreign funds would be scrutinised carefully and the prestige, fame, or recognition of an NGO did not matter.
Along with the Missionaries of Charity, the FCRA registrations of other organisations, including prestigious educational institutions, such as the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and the Jawaharlal Nehru University, were also suspended.

Following a brief suspension and some clarifications, the registrations of these NGOs were restored.

Thousands of others have not been as privileged and have not escaped a growing crackdown on them by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Effects Of The Crackdown

To empirically study the effects of the crackdown, I scraped data for a five-year period from 2016 to 2021 from the FCRA portal, which previously published information about NGOs receiving foreign funds, including many details, such as the annual returns and the sources of funds.

The government stopped making such information available from 2022, which is why my analysis is limited to data until that year.

A summary of the main findings:

– Over the five year period (2016-21) the number of both non-Christian and Christian NGOs with FCRA registrations declined, non-Christian NGOs falling by about 30%, from 16,000 to 11,200, and Christian NGOs falling about 18%, from 3,800 to 3,100.




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