G. Sudharshan lives with his wife, Renuka, and his children, aged 8 and 5, in a half-built rental house on the outskirts of the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. He drives an auto rickshaw—a motorized version of a pulled rickshaw—while his wife works as a domestic helper in a nearby upscale neighborhood.
To supplement the family’s meager earnings, Sudharshan often also picks up work at construction sites. Despite the financial hardship, a local church-run organization offered their children free schooling starting in 2022, which anchored the family to life in the metropolis. They were happy with the quality of the education and the community the school provided.
Yet since the school began collecting fees in September, the couple has been considering moving back to their ancestral village, located 370 kilometers from Hyderabad. The ministry began charging fees after the government suspended its license to receive foreign funds last year, freezing its bank accounts. Of the school’s 300 students, nearly 120 from the poor neighborhood dropped out.
“We cannot afford English education from a private school in the city,” Sudharshan told CT. “With this added burden, we can no longer think of living in the city.”
The cancellation, suspension, or lapse of these licenses under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) has forced many charities to either fully shut down or significantly scale down their operations. This has effectively snatched away the little developmental aid that millions of families, like Sudharshan’s, have relied on.
Enacted in the 1970s, the law regulates funds from abroad and how they are spent to prevent foreign interference in domestic politics. In the past two decades, India’s parliament has made multiple amendments to the FCRA, increasing the compliance burden and administrative scrutiny on charities.
In March, lawmakers drafted a new amendment which would allow the government to take permanent control of the foreign contributions and assets of any organization that doesn’t have a FCRA license. Once the government takes over a group’s property, officials can transfer it to any of its departments or sell it in the open market. Furthermore, organizations cannot challenge the decision in the courts.
“This is a straightforward loot and theft of the Christian institutions and their properties through a legal amendment of a bill,” said archbishop Joseph Dsouza, president of the All-India Christian Council and primate of the Good Shepherd Church of India. “If this law is passed, this will be the legalized loot of the Indian Christian community and the global Christian community.”
Since the Hindu nationalist government assumed power in 2014, the government has canceled or refused to renew more than 20,000 FCRA licenses, blocking organizations from receiving overseas funding. More than 10,000 Christian groups—including the Evangelical Fellowship of India, Church Auxiliary for Social Action, World Vision India, and Compassion International—have lost their FCRA licenses since 2011, amplifying allegations that the government has weaponized the law against the Christian community.
Donations from abroad have long sustained India’s nonprofit sector, supporting education, healthcare, and livelihoods in communities where state delivery is either absent or uneven due to corruption or poor management.
The latest bill, which is currently under consideration in the Parliament, is the final piece in the larger conspiracy “to grab Christian institutions of the nation by stealth,” Dsouza claims, after years of canceling and suspending FCRA licenses for reasons ranging from procedural lapses and tax filing errors to allegations of “anti-national” activity.
According to the changes made in the last decade, FCRA organizations must route their funds from abroad through a designated State Bank of India main branch in New Delhi, creating massive administrative hurdles for regional nonprofits. The government also reduced the amount of foreign funding for overhead and management from 50 percent to 20 percent, hurting day-to-day operations. Nonprofits are also now barred from transferring foreign funds to other unregistered organizations, crippling grassroots-level work.
In 2017, Compassion International lost its FCRA license and left India, ending support to 589 churches and a total of 147,000 babies, children, young adults, and mothers across the country.
With foreign funding hard to come by, many Christian charities have mortgaged or rented their premises to build self-sustaining models in recent years. Yet with the new amendment allowing the government to take away its properties, the nonprofits will lose more funding, likely forcing them to shut down.
The government has been clear about the real objective behind the FCRA changes. Countering the opposition’s charges that the bill is “dangerous,” a federal minister said that it is “indeed dangerous” for those who engage in forced religious conversion using foreign contributions.
Several church leaders and Christian organizations have appealed to the government to roll back the changes.
“The issues raised are of a serious nature and, if left unaddressed, may have far-reaching implications for institutions that have long served the nation’s most vulnerable communities,” said Vijayesh Lal, general secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India. “Christian institutions are committed to these principles not only as a matter of law, but as a matter of faith and responsibility.”
The Catholic Bishops Conference of India called the bill a “threat to constitutional rights, civil society autonomy, and the Church’s longstanding social-service mission,” according to a report.
Beyond legal complexities, the consequences of FCRA changes are already being felt in hospitals, schools, community groups, and development programs across the country.
Krishna, a development professional who previously worked for a large Christian charity, lost his job three years ago along with 1,800 others after the organization he worked for lost its FCRA license. (CT agreed to use only his first name due to concerns that speaking out about the issue could cost him job prospects.) Programs in 22 Indian states came to an abrupt end. Years later, he says he is still waiting for his unpaid salary and other allowances.
“With tightening of FCRA rules, my hope of receiving full and final settlement keeps fading,” Krishna said.
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