By Aravindan Rajaram
As per official data in 2015, India had 31 lakh registered Non-Government Organizations (NGOs). That’s roughly one NGO per 420 people!
What are the roles of NGOs? The work done by NGOs should ideally be done by the government or greatly minimized. If the government does its duty, it will make the job of NGOs redundant or minimal. If the NGOs do their job properly, they will make themselves redundant!
The Majority of NGOs don’t work to make themselves redundant – based on my involvement in improving health and education for the disadvantaged. Why is it?
The nature of NGOs’ work is reflective of the founder’s intent and understanding of social issues. The nature of work is a big spectrum – as mentioned below. At one end of the spectrum, they do easy, shallow, charity-based, short term work, leading to low impact. The other end is about hard, in-depth, rights-based, long term work, making a high impact.
Examples:
1)
- Left** end of the spectrum: Donate money to children in government hospitals.
- Middle: Make healthcare accessible to the disadvantaged people by creating a network of volunteers, who are the bridge between poor patients and empathetic doctors
- Right: Pressurize the government to make healthcare policy changes to provide better care and make sure the changes work effectively.
2)
- Left: Provide lunch to the inmates of the orphanage on special occasions like birthdays.
- Right: Question the role of orphanages when the number of prospective adoptive parents outweigh the number of orphans in India. Advocate streamlining of the adoption process.
3)
- Left: Give low-cost water purifiers to slums/villages.
- Right: Make the government work on restoration of water bodies, zero mixing of industrial waste and afforestation.
My friend once asked a simple question at a volunteer meeting in Bangalore: “If our room is getting filled with water, should we mop the floor or close the tap?”. So, where should the well-meaning individuals start?
Should they straight away go to the right end of the spectrum? Though that is the ideal scenario, it may not be practical for everyone. It depends on the individual personality and the perspective about the socio-political issues.
Not everyone has the endurance to fight for the rights the hard way – like Medha Patkar who has been fighting for social justice since 1984! It’s indeed a hard grind!
As the social issues in India are a complex interconnected web, the work done at different stages of the spectrum by various people can complement one another. Individuals may start from the left side; but, must get their perspective wider and move towards the right, as far as they can!
** Right and Left are not to be confused with ideologies. They refer to the ends of the spectrum.
vijay
October 20, 2022
Aravindan, since these depend a lot on volunteer contributions for their existence is there a way to filter them out or rank them on transparency(how they use their funds) and accomplishments? Out of 31 lakh(to put in perspective we have 1 cop for every 1000) NGOs how would you rank them in some way? For instance, are the popular ones like Akshayapatra, GiveIndia, Helpage really outperforming other lesser known NGPs or are they just promoting themselves better?
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Prakash Alagarsamy
October 21, 2022
Great post. Would love to know more about your specific experience. My favourite story is about jeroo billimoria. Founder of childline. She said” we are not a charity organization. Beacuse even if we exist for 5000 years Notting will happen. We are rights based” Instead of money she asked for help based on their specialization like asking tcs to set up a website to streamline data etc. That said I do only left spectrum based work.
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Aravindan R
October 21, 2022
Thank you BR!
@Prakash: I’m fortunate to have met lot of inspirational people. In the last five years as founder of DoctorNet India (http://doctornetindia.org), a healthcare non profit making access to health better for the disadvantaged. And, prior to that, as volunteer in the education field.
@Vijay: That’s an interesting but hard question! The ranking is hard because people are doing interventions being at the different places in the spectrum. Even in the same place in the spectrum, each one may have their own objectives and outcome. Also, the outcome may be qualitative and not always quantitative.
For example, there are no comparable metrics between an organization working on preventive health compared to the one working on curative health. Relatively, the ones closer to the right end are more effective than that are farther.
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vijay
October 22, 2022
Aravindan, not asking about the effectiveness of NGOs but about the genuineness of them, how they use my funds and so on..there have been complaints against some of them in the past, so I thought there should be a site (like say Glasdoor for corporate experience) that kind of reviews/documents the NGOs and how professional they are..
for instance, I have been annoyed at all the Milaap ads before youtube videos where they show somebody breaking down and crying for 2 min s to make you sympathize and that sort of stuff. After some time starts making you wonder if they are even staging it..
Also how do smaller/lesser known NGOs tide through tough times financially, like the last 2 years?
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Vikram s
October 22, 2022
as someone who has been working on the donor side of matters for almost 9 years. here are a few points I would like to place-
1. NGOs exist because the state machinery churns at its own slow pace, what needs to reach the deserving from the schemes doesn’t do so always.
2. in comparison to a for-profit, it is more difficult for an NGO to exist and even more difficult for an NGO to thrive and do well. and I mean this in the regulatory sense.
3. just as there exist unscrupulous businesses there are many opportunistic outfits dressed as NGOs. this comes up in news (example- 500 NGOs shut down due to xyz issues). and many of us latch on to this as a worldview.
4. the mere existence of unscrupulous businesses doesn’t make us suspicious of all businesses. likewise, it has to be for NGOs as well. this whole tarring all NGOs with the same brush takes away so much from all the good work being done by so many credible NGOs.
5. as a lay person, if one were to get interested in this space, one can identify a cause that resonates and go about identifying an organization that is credible (a few criteria to consider- make a visit, meet the team, if possible look up their registration status, annual reports etc) and then look at supporting the organization.
6. broadly there are organizations working on one or many of these- Seva, Sangathan, Sangharsh. Seva is about providing services (eg., provide evening classes for children out of school, providing Healthcare, providing meals, running a home for abandoned elders). Sangathan is about collectivizing people or communities (for eg, forming groups of women so that they can work collectively for their issues). Sangharsh is about taking up issues that might mean taking up contrarian stands vis-a-vis the prevailing govt stand.
7. typically NGOs would have their 80g, 12aa and Darpan portal (govt portal) registration in place. many also would have an fcra registration. these can be looked at to get a sense of the entity.
8. coming to online ads, it’s based on how ads are served for a product I might have viewed. some of these ads might leave us despondent, sad or plain annoyed. this applies to business ads also which might leave us annoyed, uncomfortable etc.
9. the pandemic has been very very tough on most NGOs, it has impacted their ability to continue and expand their work. many have had to reduce their footprint. smaller organizations have had it very difficult.
10. personally, anything a lay person can do to support a cause is to be encouraged (donate money, give time through volunteering, help them in specif areas of expertise such as websites etc)
11. many of us are fond of asking ‘ out of the one rupee i donate, i would like most of it to go to the end beneficiary ‘. while that is good to do, another point to keep in mind is that the employees at an NGO also need to make a living (maybe not at the same level as that of a person working in a for-profit). there is a difference between charity and working in the development sector.
I stop here else I might go on and on 🙂
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vijay
October 22, 2022
Vikram, this is not about tarring all NGOs or anything but there should be a quick way for a commoner to know the genuiness of a NGO or the kind of work they have do before contributing.
Even to check out a movie you read reviews from trusted sources. It doesnt matter that if a part of proceeds goes towards salaries and all that, thats obvious and well understood. But what if the money is lying unspent or worse completely being channeled for other things that escape our notice ? There are numerous sites for ranking or reviewing businesses/products and hence they can be quickly weeded out. Plus I can evaluate the product myself after buying it and post a review myself if needed. But here, I had to rely on just good faith and nothing else for the past many years. In fact presence of such a rigorous evaluation system or a independent ranking system would only enhance the reputation of NGOs doing good work, in the absence of which this suspicious look what you are talking about would only increase.
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Vikram s
October 22, 2022
I understand what you say Vijay. hence my attempt to list out a few ways to recognize NGOs worthy of one’s support. didn’t mean to negate what you say, I was pointing out the way the scales tilt against NGOs.
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Aravindan R
October 22, 2022
Vikram, Thanks for the detailed response to Vijay, specifically points 5 and 6 🙂
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vijay
October 22, 2022
As a rough first-pass filter I found the link below maintained by Govt of India where some of the NGOs are listed and supposedly dubious ones are blocked. Maybe worth checking out, I tried a few I have donated to and they were listed there.
https://ngodarpan.gov.in/index.php/search/
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Vikram s
October 22, 2022
Yes Vijay that’s a good starting point
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Bala
October 23, 2022
Nice article. This brings me to a question that has been bugging me for sometime. Jaggi Vasudev and his followers keep saying save soil, rally for rivers, cauvery calling etc. I usually assume that these are scams. But, if somebody had to really do something for these causes, and if that lies in the right end of the spectrum as discussed in this post, that would look very similar to what jaggi and Co have been doing, i think. So, has anyone looked in to these, and does anyone know if jaggi is really doing something, if not, where is he going wrong?
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Aravindan R
October 27, 2022
@Bala,
In general, I’m not a fan of Mr. JV 🙂
I’m not qualified enough in environmentalism, to comment on the specifics. From the little I know, looks like the methodology and credibility are questionable.
Sharing few arguments for and against their programs 🙂
http://ishaoutreach.org has the details about why their activities are great.
Few arguments against:
https://agrowingculture.medium.com/save-soil-won-t-save-us-89c12344c262
https://thewire.in/environment/jaggi-vasudev-rally-for-rivers-isha-foundation-cauvery-riverbank-sand-mining
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Satin labels
December 28, 2023
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