Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in India - “May their tribe increase”: Some reflections

 A. Srinivas Rao

A few days back an old student called up to inform me that he was starting an NGO and I wasn’t sure whether to commend him or dissuade him. NGOs are complex and fragile ecosystems, with a fascinating and combustible mix of ideas, ideals, and great people and sometimes a hubris born of virtue & self sacrifice. I have often found among their ranks a strange mix of people who are inspiring and humbling as well as those profoundly sensitive and profoundly delusional. It is this often contradictory and protean image that makes them so difficult an organisational species to understand and grasp with any certainty.

India had 3.3 million NGOs in 2009 reported the Indian Express July 7^th 2010 quoting a Government commissioned study, that gives us a questionable distinction of having the largest number of NGOs in the world. In other words, India had according to this study one NGO for every 400 people in the country; a fertile breeding ground in more ways than one. That is more than what we can count for in access to schools and health centres. The figures provoke wonder and to some derision, like the recent census data that India has more mobiles than toilets (and according to World Bank poor sanitation costing the exchequer 54 billion USD or 6% of its GDP mainly through pre-mature death Hindustan Times Dec 21^st 2010). However India hasn’t followed Bangladesh where the NGOs have taken up most economic activity unlike a healthy private sector and created huge NGO corporations like the BRAC, Grameen etc; which contests the very idea of an NGO as a space within civil society that stands independent of government and the market as the third sector. The large numbers ironically are testimony to a democratic political functioning of the society, despite their many failings and that the number is driven by the size and ethnic, cultural and religious diversity of the country.