Fifty years of amendments, one direction of travel: how the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act became the instrument through which the Indian state removes the organisations that hold it to account.

By Varna Sri Raman

I have spent more than twenty years in and around civil society organisations. My first fieldwork was in a cramped NGO office in a district town, the kind of place that ran on a combination of Ford Foundation money, two overworked programme officers, and a conviction that someone had to do this. I have watched organisations grow from single-room operations into ones that set national benchmarks for how we understand malnutrition, or violence against women, or bonded labour. I have also watched those same organisations go quiet, then go dark. The equipment is still in place. The staff quietly absorbed elsewhere or scattered. The work stopped.

Oxfam India is the most publicly visible casualty. By January 2024, an organisation that had run one of the country's largest COVID-19 responses — setting up oxygen plants and ventilators across sixteen states at the height of the second wave — was telling the Delhi High Court that its operations had been "virtually forced to halt entirely." Its staff had been reduced from 251 to 15. All its offices except Delhi were closed. Over sixty-two crore rupees sitting in its designated FCRA bank account were inaccessible. The reserves it had left totalled one crore and fifty-four lakhs.

This essay is about how that happened. It is about the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act — the law that governs whether Indian civil society organisations can receive money from outside India — its fifty-year legislative history, the escalating tightening of each amendment, and the new bill introduced in the Lok Sabha on March 25, 2026, which would allow the government to seize and dispose of the assets of organisations whose registration ceases.

It is also about a question the government never answers: if not foreign funding, then what? What does the domestic landscape of giving actually look like, and does it come anywhere near replacing what FCRA destroys?

Where FCRA came from: paranoia as legislation

The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 1976, was enacted during the Emergency. Presidential assent came on March 31, 1976, eleven months after Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency rule on June 25, 1975.

The law's intellectual prehistory begins in the late 1960s, when the CIA's practice of funding Cold War-era civil society organisations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America had become a documented political embarrassment. In 1969, the then Home Minister raised in both Houses of Parliament the suspicion that American money was flowing to Indian trade unions and student bodies. After the 1971 general elections, allegations surfaced that the CIA had funded some opposition candidates, leading to parliamentary debate about introducing a new law.

The concerns were not invented — American intelligence activity in the region was real, and Gandhi's suspicions about Nixon and Kissinger's hostility to India were well-founded. Gary J. Bass's 2013 book The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide — a Pulitzer Prize finalist drawing on declassified White House tapes — documents in meticulous detail how Nixon and Kissinger actively supported Pakistan's military dictatorship during the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, and how deeply both men loathed Gandhi and India. The geopolitical antagonism was entirely genuine. The question was what legislation it justified.

What Gandhi built from that legitimate concern was something considerably broader. The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on December 24, 1973, referred to a sixty-member Joint Parliamentary Committee, and reported on January 6, 1976. When the Rajya Sabha debated it on March 9, 1976, the term "CIA" was mentioned at least 30 times by various legislators, and "Lockheed Martin" — the American defence corporation then embroiled in a global bribery scandal — came up at least 6 times. The context was a Parliament stripped of most of its effective opposition: leaders had been arrested or were in hiding under Emergency provisions.

As documented by Open Magazine and ICNL's legislative history, the law was aimed specifically at opposition leaders such as George Fernandes and Subramanian Swamy, who were believed to be receiving political and financial support from Western powers to resist the authoritarian Emergency regime. The law's categories of absolutely prohibited recipients are illuminating: election candidates, newspaper editors, cartoonists, judges, and government servants. The specific mention of cartoonists — Gandhi was stung by R.K. Laxman and Abu Abraham — should, as Open Magazine noted, "be hint enough of the establishment's paranoia."

The 1976 Act was structured in three tiers. Certain categories faced total prohibition on foreign contributions—organisations of a political nature needed prior government approval. Cultural, economic, educational, religious, and social organisations had merely to notify the Central Government of what they received. Crucially, there was no mandatory registration requirement for NGOs — only post-receipt intimation. This meant the 1976 Act was primarily a law regulating political parties and journalists, not an NGO law.

That changed in 1984. When Sikh separatism peaked, and Gandhi launched Operation Blue Star, she promulgated a further ordinance in October 1984 restricting FCRA further. After her assassination that October and Rajiv Gandhi's landslide victory in December 1984, the new government regularised the ordinance into law in early January 1985. That 1985 amendment substituted Section 6, requiring all civil society organisations to register with the Central Government before accepting foreign contributions — transforming FCRA from a Cold War-era political control instrument into a comprehensive NGO regulatory regime. This is the actual founding moment of FCRA as an NGO law. The 1976 Act, born out of opposition to an autocratic Emergency, became the template; the 1985 amendment made every Indian NGO receiving foreign money a subject of Home Ministry surveillance.

FCRA 2010: the UPA government's comprehensive rewrite

The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, replaced the 1976 Act in its entirety. The UPA government introduced the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Bill, 2006 in the Rajya Sabha on December 18, 2006, referred it to the Standing Committee on Home Affairs chaired by Sushma Swaraj, received the committee's report in October 2008, and passed the final Act through both Houses in August 2010 — the Rajya Sabha on August 19 and the Lok Sabha on August 27 — receiving Presidential assent on September 26, 2010. It came into effect on May 1, 2011.

The stated purpose was modernisation — the 1976 Act was over three decades old — but as PRS Legislative Research observed at the time, the bill targeted only the voluntary sector and only foreign funding, which together constituted less than one per cent of gross foreign inflows into India. The real drivers included FATF peer-review pressure on terrorism-financing controls and a political instinct, shared across party lines, that foreign-funded civil society needed tighter accountability.

The 2010 Act introduced registration validity of five years with mandatory renewal (previously permanent), a fifty per cent cap on administrative expenses, new suspension and cancellation powers, tighter restrictions on transferring foreign contributions between organisations — though inter-NGO transfer to registered entities was still permitted — and mandatory disclosure for organisations receiving over one crore rupees annually. According to a PIB notification, the salient features also included mandatory online filing of annual returns, certified by a chartered accountant, and a 30-day window for banks to report foreign remittances. All existing registrations under the 1976 Act were deemed valid for five years from May 1, 2011, setting the stage for the mass non-renewal crisis of 2022.

The bill passed with bipartisan support. The BJP's Sushma Swaraj chaired the Standing Committee. Neither major party has ever substantively opposed FCRA tightening. This pattern makes Congress's current protests about the 2026 bill somewhat ironic, though the asset seizure provision represents a qualitative escalation beyond anything the UPA contemplated.

FCRA Amendment 2020: the law as an instrument of elimination

The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2020 was introduced in the Lok Sabha on September 20, 2020 — a Sunday — by Home Minister Amit Shah, during the COVID-shortened Monsoon Session. It cleared the Lok Sabha on September 21, the Rajya Sabha on September 23, received Presidential assent on September 28, and came into force on September 29. From introduction to enforcement: nine days. It was not referred to any Standing Committee. In the Rajya Sabha, the opposition had staged a walkout over the Farm Bills when the amendment was called for a vote.

Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi warned in the Lok Sabha: "Political dissent will be stopped with this Bill." The Voluntary Action Network India (VANI) called it "a death blow to the development relief, scientific research and community support work of the NGO community."

Five provisions from the 2020 amendment deserve detailed attention because their operational consequences have been severe and largely underreported.

The sub-granting ban rewrote Section 7 to prohibit absolutely the transfer of foreign contributions from any organisation to any other person, including other FCRA-registered organisations. The old provision had allowed transfers between registered entities. The new provision destroyed the hub-and-spoke architecture fundamental to Indian civil society, where larger national organisations with established international donor relationships received funds and disbursed them to grassroots partners who did the actual fieldwork. As Avinash Kumar, former head of Amnesty India, told Context/TRF, funding for grassroots organisations was completely "choked." Small organisations without direct international donor relationships lost access to foreign funding overnight. The International Commission of Jurists documented this as the single most damaging provision.

The administrative cost cap was reduced from 50% to 20%. Under FCRA rules, "administrative expenses" include salaries, travel, professional fees, and executive committee remuneration — in other words, the people who do the work. For advocacy, research, and rights-based organisations, where staff capacity is the programme, this cap makes operations structurally incoherent. Sattva Consulting's analysis noted that it would be practically impossible for many organisations, especially smaller ones, to keep administrative costs below this threshold while maintaining operational functionality.

The mandatory State Bank of India, Sansad Marg, New Delhi account requirement (Sections 12(1A) and 17(1)) required that all foreign contributions enter India through a single designated account at a specific branch of a specific bank in central Delhi. Organisations in Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Lakshadweep, or remote Chhattisgarh must manage this account before they can utilise any foreign funds locally. The Supreme Court upheld this provision because "some inconvenience" is an insufficient basis for a constitutional challenge.

The Aadhaar-based KYC requirement (Section 12A) mandated that all office-bearers, directors, and key functionaries furnish Aadhaar details. The Court subsequently read this down to permit passports as an alternative.

Expanded suspension and restriction powers increased the maximum suspension period from 180 to 360 days. They imposed restrictions based on a "summary inquiry" — replacing the prior standard of being "found guilty" with the much lower bar of "reason to believe." An organisation can be effectively incapacitated for a year on the basis of unverified suspicion, without the need for charges or findings.

The numbers: what the 2020 amendment produced

The aggregate data is stark. MHA parliamentary data puts the cumulative figure of cancelled FCRA registrations since 1976 at 20,701 NGOs. The International Commission of Jurists puts the number of cancellations since 2014 alone at over 19,000. In the three-year window of 2019-2021, 1,811 certificates were cancelled, according to MoS Home Nityanand Rai's December 2022 statement to the Lok Sabha.

The single most dramatic event occurred on January 1, 2022. Of 18,778 organisations whose licences were expiring, 5,789 had not applied for renewal, and 179 were denied renewal — approximately 6,000 organisations losing FCRA status in a single day. Active registrations dropped from 22,762 to 16,829 overnight. By April 2024, only 16,242 organisations held active FCRA licences, compared to an estimated 41,844 at the 2012 peak.

The government's framing — that organisations "failed to apply for renewal" — elides what the application process had become under the 2020 amendment's new requirements. The SBI New Delhi account mandate, Aadhaar KYC, revised administrative cost structures, and sub-granting prohibition all had compliance deadlines that coincided with renewal windows. Many organisations did not apply because they could not afford the compliance burden. As Mukta Naik of the Centre for Policy Research told Context/TRF, the NGO sector was filled with uncertainty about what might be considered "subversive," and organisations were tending toward government-backed projects as a result.

Oxfam India applied for FCRA renewal in April 2021. MHA rejected the renewal in December 2022 without providing specific grounds. The Income Tax department revoked Oxfam's tax-exempt status in October 2023. The CBI filed a chargesheet in January 2025. As the Delhi High Court submission documented, the organisation ran "Mission Sanjeevani" during the COVID second wave — one of the most substantial NGO relief operations in the country's history — before being reduced from 251 staff to 15, its sixty-two crore rupees inaccessible, its programme work shuttered.

Amnesty International India had its bank accounts frozen by the Enforcement Directorate on September 10, 2020, and shut all Indian operations on September 29. The Enforcement Directorate subsequently attached 17.66 crore rupees of Amnesty properties.

Missionaries of Charity were denied FCRA renewal on Christmas Day 2021. Thirteen days later, on January 7, 2022, after the UK Parliament debated the matter, the registration was restored. The speed of restoration was as instructive as the revocation.

Other organisations whose registrations have been cancelled or not renewed include Greenpeace India (September 2015), Lawyers Collective (founded by Senior Advocates Indira Jaising and Anand Grover), Centre for Policy Research (January 2024 — cancelled after MHA alleged it diverted foreign donations to fund "protests against developmental projects"), World Vision India (January 2024), CARE India (suspended 2023), and Compassion International. CBI raided Harsh Mander's Centre for Equity Studies in February 2024. Amnesty International documents the sectoral pattern: organisations working on Dalits, religious minorities, and Adivasis have been "particularly vulnerable."

The Supreme Court in Noel Harper: what the judiciary chose not to examine

The constitutional challenge to the 2020 amendments was decided on April 8, 2022, in Noel Harper & Ors. v. Union of India & Anr. by a three-judge bench of Justices A.M. Khanwilkar, Dinesh Maheshwari, and C.T. Ravikumar. The bench upheld all the 2020 amendments unanimously, with only the modest modification that Indian nationals could use passports as an alternative to Aadhaar.

The Court's reasoning rested on a threshold characterisation: "Receiving foreign donation cannot be an absolute or even a vested right." On this foundation, it declined to conduct any proportionality analysis, accepted the government's claims about national security without scrutiny, and treated the SBI mandate's operational burden on remote organisations as mere "inconvenience."

Constitutional law scholar Gautam Bhatia's critique — titled "Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted" — argued the Court reframed the inquiry to avoid testing whether the amendments disproportionately burdened the freedom of association under Article 19(1)(c). The ICNL's analysis of the Noel Harper judgment documented what international human rights law requires for restricting freedom of association: restrictions must be prescribed by law, necessary in a democratic society, and proportionate to a legitimate aim. The Court tested only the first of these.

The FCRA Amendment Bill 2026: from restriction to expropriation

The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026, was introduced in the Lok Sabha on March 25, 2026, by MoS Home Nityanand Rai. It passed introduction by voice vote over opposition objections and is pending detailed debate. This is a standalone amendment bill, not a Finance Bill provision — contrary to some initial coverage.

The centrepiece is a new Chapter IIIA establishing a "Designated Authority" with the power to take possession of, manage, and dispose of all foreign contributions and assets created from foreign contributions when an organisation's FCRA registration is cancelled, surrendered, or ceases for any reason. Under the proposed Section 16A, the authority may transfer assets to "any ministry, department, authority or agency of the central government or of a state government or any local authority," or sell assets, with the proceeds credited to the Consolidated Fund of India. Even assets that are only partly funded by foreign contributions — built from a mixture of domestic and foreign funds — fall within this capture.

This is categorically different from anything FCRA has done before. Earlier amendments regulated how foreign contributions could be received and spent. The 2026 bill authorises the state to acquire what those contributions built. Supreme Court lawyer Prasanna S. called Section 16A "an expropriating provision" where "the government becomes a proprietor rather than a trustee."

A second provision introduces "deemed cessation" of registration (proposed Section 14B): FCRA registration is automatically treated as having ceased if an organisation fails to apply for renewal before expiry, or its renewal application is rejected, or its certificate expires without renewal. Combined with MHA's documented pattern of delayed renewal processing — Oxfam applied in April 2021 and did not receive a rejection until December 2022, eighteen months later — this creates a mechanism by which government administrative delay can trigger asset seizure without any finding of wrongdoing.

Congress MP Manish Tewari raised five specific constitutional objections: excessive delegation of essential legislative functions; violation of Article 300A (right to property) through arbitrary property disposal; concentration of adjudicatory and executive powers in the same authority; violation of Article 19(1)(c) through disproportionate asset capture; and fundamental constitutional infirmity. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India called the bill "dangerous and alarming" and "contrary to principles of natural justice." TMC MP Pratima Mondal called it "draconian," citing its concentration of "disproportionate authority in the executive, weakening institutional checks and federal balance."

The domestic alternative argument: why CSR and Indian giving cannot replace FCRA

Whenever civil society raises the consequences of FCRA's tightening, the implicit government response is that domestic sources should suffice for legitimate organisations. This argument requires examination, because the numbers do not support it.

India's mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility framework — Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013, which requires companies above specified thresholds to spend 2% of their average three-year net profits on CSR activities — is the most visible domestic alternative. Total CSR spending reached approximately ₹29,987 crore in FY2022-23, rising from ₹26,580 crore the previous year. This sounds substantial until you examine what it actually funds.

Over 75% of CSR spending in India is concentrated in three sectors: education, health, and rural development. Education alone accounts for 33-44% of total CSR expenditure. Within these categories, the preference is strongly for infrastructure: building schools, hospitals, toilets, and water facilities. The preference makes sense from a corporate risk management perspective — infrastructure is visible, auditable, photogenic, and unlikely to be controversial. Alliance Magazine's January 2026 analysis documented explicitly what is absent: "Causes like human rights, disability, social justice, or underfunded communities and geographies — previously traditionally funded by foreign sources — remain largely out of corporate philanthropy's focus." A Wire article on FCRA and NGO funding made the same point: CSR funds are "mostly used to promote the interest of the company and its promoters" and to "project a positive image to counter any negative aspects of the company's functioning."

This is structural, not incidental. A corporation that funds an organisation documenting labour violations in its supply chain, or a watchdog that files RTIs against its industry, is funding its own accountability mechanism. No compliance officer in India recommends this allocation to the CSR committee. Rights-based work, advocacy, research on state failure, legal aid, and accountability journalism are precisely the kinds of activities CSR money structurally cannot and will not fund. The Bridgespan Group has documented separately that India's wealthiest Giving Pledge signatories are falling short of their stated commitments — giving at a rate of 0.16% of net worth annually, compared with the 1.2% average among comparable US donors.

The scale comparison is equally telling. Total foreign contributions to Indian NGOs, even in years before the 2020 amendment's effect was fully felt, ran to ₹16,000–22,000 crore annually. Total CSR spending — across all categories, including infrastructure — runs to ₹30,000 crore, the great majority of which goes to education and health infrastructure.

The subset of CSR that funds the work civil society organisations do — advocacy, research, legal aid, rights monitoring, community organising — is not separately reported by MCA, but is demonstrably small. When the Bain India Philanthropy Report 2024 noted that private philanthropy grew to INR 1.2 lakh crore in FY2023, it also noted that the public sector accounts for 95% of all social sector spending, and that India falls 4.7% short of NITI Aayog's annual social funding target even at current levels.

Individual charitable giving in India is not a gap-filler either. Sattva Consulting's research found that 90% of everyday giving is informal — cash and kind to community members, domestic workers, people experiencing homelessness, and religious institutions — and does not reach formal civil society organisations at all.

Formal individual giving amounts to just 0.24% of GDP, compared to 2% in the United States. The reasons are partly structural — India's household savings rate and disposable income profile are different — but also partly cultural: as Indiana University's Global Philanthropy Index found, a trust deficit in Indian charitable institutions deters formal giving, with over 50% of surveyed givers citing a lack of transparency as a deterrent.

The argument that domestic sources can substitute for FCRA funding is therefore not just empirically weak — it misunderstands the purposes of the two funding streams. Foreign institutional funding has historically been disproportionately directed toward rights-based work, accountability mechanisms, and research on state failure, precisely because these are the activities that domestic philanthropy — constrained by regulatory compliance culture, reputational risk aversion, and the structurally coercive nature of mandatory CSR — cannot fund.

The government's claim that legitimate organisations need not worry about FCRA restrictions because domestic sources are available implicitly defines "legitimate" as "not doing the work that challenges power." That is not a regulatory framework. It is a definition of a permissible civil society.

What development economics tells us about all of this

The development economics literature on civil society organisations has reached conclusions that the government's FCRA framing systematically ignores.

CSOs occupy a structural position in development that governments cannot simply absorb. They combine proximity to marginalised communities, low-cost information gathering, accountability to beneficiaries rather than bureaucratic principals, and the organisational flexibility to iterate and adapt that formal government delivery struggles to replicate. The World Bank's 2025 citizen engagement framework documents that development interventions proceeding without meaningful civil society engagement are "unlikely to meet local needs, threaten long-term sustainability, and increase risk." This is not an ideological position — it is a conclusion from fifty years of comparative development experience.

What do the organisations that foreign funding sustains actually do? Jan Sahas, which retains its FCRA registration, achieved an eighty-six per cent complaint-to-FIR conversion rate in Madhya Pradesh for rape survivors — compared to the national average of 24.2 per cent. It helped 46,000 women leave manual scavenging and freed 6,800 women from bonded labour. No state government programme has produced comparable outcomes on caste-based occupational violence, because these programmes require precisely the community trust that government agencies structurally cannot build with populations their own officials have historically exploited.

Navsarjan Trust, Gujarat's oldest Dalit rights organisation, is the cleaner illustration of what cancellation actually costs. Founded in 1989 by Martin Macwan — a 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award recipient — it operated across more than 3,000 villages, employed 92 staff, and ran three schools for 102 Dalit and tribal children. Its 2010 "Understanding Untouchability" survey, conducted across 1,589 villages and 14 districts in partnership with the RFK Centre for Justice and Human Rights, documented 98 distinct forms of caste discrimination and found that 90.8% of Gujarat's villages barred Dalits from entering temples.

The report demolished the "Gujarat model" narrative at the height of its political currency. The MHA cancelled Navsarjan's FCRA licence in December 2016 — five months after granting a renewal it then rescinded, claiming the renewal had been issued "inadvertently." Eighty of 92 employees were laid off immediately. The three schools were threatened with closure. Today the organisation's website is non-functional, and the infrastructure of three decades across 3,000 villages is gone.

Naandi Foundation served over one billion meals through its midday meal programme and produced the HUNGaMA survey — the most granular district-level child malnutrition data India has had. A Nature Communications study found that children born to mothers with full mid-day meal exposure showed a +0.40 standard deviation improvement in height-for-age z-score across a generation.

The international comparison sharpens the analysis. Russia's 2012 "foreign agents" law resulted in a third of all Russian NGOs closing within two years. Memorial was dissolved. Hungary's 2017 NGO Transparency Law was struck down by the EU Court of Justice in 2020, which recognised the right to access funding as a substantive element of freedom of association. Ethiopia's 2009 Charities and Societies Proclamation banned human rights and governance work by any CSO receiving more than 10 per cent of its funding from foreign sources. When Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed repealed most of these restrictions in 2019, thousands of new CSOs formed within two years. India's 2026 bill, with asset-seizure provisions, would create recovery costs substantially higher than those Ethiopia ever faced.

At the aggregate level, CIVICUS's 2024 findings show that only 40 countries, representing 3.2 per cent of the world population, have open civic space. India is rated "Repressed." The V-Dem Democracy Report classifies India as an Electoral Autocracy for the sixth consecutive year, with its level of liberal democracy at the level last recorded in 1975, during the Emergency under which FCRA was created.

What is happening, named plainly

There is a pattern across these amendments worth naming with precision, because the government's framing of FCRA as an accountability measure continues to have traction.

The 1976 Act was about political party funding and Cold War foreign influence. The 1985 amendment made it an NGO law. The 2010 rewrite made it a tighter NGO law with registration renewal requirements. The 2020 amendment cut the sub-granting network that enabled the ecosystem to function, capped administrative costs at levels that render serious operations unviable, forced all funds through a single Delhi bank account, and created suspension powers requiring no finding of wrongdoing. The 2026 bill proposes to seize the physical and financial assets of organisations once they lose registration — including when that loss results from the government's own delayed processing.

Each successive amendment has extended the zone of government discretion and reduced the zone of operational autonomy. Cancellation is discretionary. Suspension is available on "reason to believe." Renewal refusal requires no stated reason. The 2026 bill would add asset seizure to this toolkit.

The organisations most systematically targeted — Oxfam India, Amnesty International India, Lawyers Collective, Centre for Equity Studies, Greenpeace India, Centre for Policy Research, World Vision India — are, with marginal exceptions, organisations whose work produced evidence of state failure, or that represented marginalised populations in Court, or that documented inequality, environmental damage, or human rights violations. The administrative mechanism is FCRA. The pattern is selection.

Three UN Special Rapporteurs called for FCRA's repeal in 2016, stating they were "alarmed that FCRA provisions are being used more and more to silence organisations." Special Rapporteur Maina Kiai found FCRA "not in conformity with international law." UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet said in October 2020 that FCRA was "indeed actually being used to deter or punish NGOs for human rights reporting and advocacy that the authorities perceive as critical." The Indian government has not responded substantively to any of these assessments.

What can be done

The starting point is the 2020 amendment. The sub-granting ban has no defensible rationale for accountability — it simply destroyed the funding architecture of thousands of organisations operating legally and effectively. Restoring the ability to transfer foreign contributions between FCRA-registered entities, with reporting requirements, would entail no additional accountability costs and would substantially restore the ecosystem's operational capacity.

The administrative cost cap of twenty per cent should be revised or eliminated. The existing requirement for chartered accountant-certified annual returns already creates detailed accountability for how funds are spent. A blanket cap that makes it structurally impossible to pay staff adequately is not accountability — it is incapacitation.

The SBI Sansad Marg mandate should be repealed. There is no accountability rationale for routing all foreign contributions through a single branch of a single bank in Delhi. The provision adds compliance burden without adding oversight value.

Renewal processing should be subject to a statutory timeline with a deemed renewal if the government fails to act within the period. The current architecture — in which the government can delay processing indefinitely while an organisation operates in legal uncertainty — is an instrument of extrajudicial organisational destruction with no parallel in comparable democracies.

The 2026 bill should not become law. The asset seizure provision in the proposed Section 16A is constitutionally flawed under Article 300A and structurally incompatible with the maintenance of an independent civil society. That organisations are already becoming cautious about what they build and what evidence they generate — because that infrastructure may eventually be seized — is a chilling effect with concrete costs to welfare delivery, accountability, and the quality of information available to citizens and policymakers. Congress's demand for referral to a Standing Committee or Joint Parliamentary Committee is, at a minimum, the procedural floor. The 2020 amendment was passed in nine days without committee scrutiny; the damage is documented. The 2026 bill requires far more careful parliamentary attention.

The accounting

I keep coming back to Oxfam India. Sixty-two crore rupees, inaccessible in a designated account. Staff reduced from two hundred and fifty-one to fifteen. The Inequality Report — data built over years — produced by an organisation that is now, functionally, a skeleton. The field programmes on poverty, on gender, on caste-based discrimination: stopped.

The government's framing is that this is about accountability and about preventing the "foreign hand" from influencing Indian society. But the hand that built the oxygen plants during the COVID second wave, the hand that documented that the richest one per cent holds forty per cent of the wealth, the hand that ran the district-level nutrition surveys and the bonded labour interventions — that is the hand being removed.

India's civil society is not a luxury that a developing country can regulate to near extinction and replace with equivalent government delivery. The substitution does not exist. The mandatory CSR funds, skewed as they are toward infrastructure and reputational philanthropy, will not fund the Jan Sahas intervention that secures bonded labourers' freedom. The informal individual giving that flows to temples and community networks will not fund the Centre for Policy Research's governance research. The government knows this. Which is why this architecture, built amendment by amendment since 1976, produces precisely the outcome it is designed to produce: a civil society that builds schools and hospitals, that photographs smiling beneficiaries in branded T-shirts, that does not ask who is responsible for what went wrong.

FCRA, from its Emergency origins to its 2026 iteration, has always been about that preference. The law has never been about preventing actual foreign interference in Indian governance — there is no evidence that the organisations targeted posed any such threat. It has been about making an organised civil voice, funded from whatever source, progressively harder to sustain.

I have worked in civil society long enough to watch the cycle: an organisation builds trust, produces evidence, challenges a policy or a pattern of state failure, and then finds its foreign contribution registration queried, suspended, or revoked. The work stops. The people who built it dispersed. The communities they worked with are left with the state they had before — the one that was not reaching them.

The 2026 Amendment Bill is not a new development in this trajectory. It is its logical conclusion.

Varna is a development economist and writes at policygrounds.press

Further Reading

On FCRA's legislative history and legal architecture

ICNL Briefer on the 2020 FCRA Amendments (July 2021)

International Commission of Jurists, "India's Foreign Contribution Regulation Act: A Tool to Silence Indian Civil Society" (December 2020)

PRS Legislative Research, The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Bill, 2006

Gautam Bhatia, "Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted: The Supreme Court's FCRA Judgment" (April 2022)

ICNL, Analysis of the Noel Harper Supreme Court Judgment

On specific organisations and the cancellation wave

Oxfam India, FCRA Renewal Denied (official press release)

Newslaundry, "Operations Forced to Halt Entirely: Oxfam Tells Delhi HC" (January 2024)

Context/TRF, "Empty Beds, Lost Jobs: The Price of India's Crackdown on NGO Funds" (July 2024)

Business Standard, "Why 20,701 NGOs Lost Their FCRA Licences Since 1976" (April 2024)

On the 2026 Amendment Bill

The Print, "' Designated Authority', Takeover Clause: What FCRA Amendment Bill Means for NGOs" (March 2026)

The Print, "Undue Interference in Functioning of Minority Institutions: Apex Catholic Body on FCRA Bill" (March 2026)

Madhyamam, "FCRA Amendment Bill Suffers from Constitutional Flaws: Manish Tewari" (March 2026)

On CSR and India's domestic philanthropic landscape

Alliance Magazine, "Legislation Can Unlock Resources, But It Cannot Define Purpose: India's CSR Journey" (January 2026)

Bain & Company, India Philanthropy Report 2024

IDR/Sattva, "The Largest Study on India's Everyday Giving Market"

Bridgespan Group, "The Future of Domestic Philanthropy in India"

On civic space and international comparisons

CIVICUS Monitor, India country page

UN OHCHR, "UN Rights Experts Urge India to Repeal Law Restricting NGO Access to Foreign Funding" (June 2016)

Human Rights Watch, "India: Laws Misused to Crack Down on Peaceful Dissent" (February 2024)

Human Rights Watch, "Ethiopia: New Law Ratchets Up Repression" (January 2009)

In the context of 1971 and the Cold War in India

Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (2013, Vintage Books)

On civil society and development outcomes

IDR, "FCRA: The Background, The Myths, and The Facts"

Jan Sahas — programme evidence and outcomes

Centre for Global Development, "The World Bank's Civic Test" (March 2025)

Factly, "Trends in Foreign Donations Received Under FCRA"