In charts: The sorry state of fundraising at India’s NGOs

livemint.com:

₹100 crore in 2021-22, showed an analysis of annual reports by impact consulting firm Sattva Consulting. Contrast this with the corporate social responsibility (CSR) spending of India's largest companies: 34 exceeded a budget of ₹100 crore in the same year, and the combined incomes of the top 100 NGOs was 30% less than the combined CSR budget of the top 100 spenders. The study, whose data was exclusively shared with Mint, analysed the incomes of 176 of the largest non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India in 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22.

The 138 entities that had data in all three years earned a combined ₹22,274 crore in income in this period, but as much as 59% of this went to just the top quintile (20%) of the set. The annual donation incomes ranged from ₹4.4 lakh to ₹817 crore in 2021-22: note that this is already a very tiny elite set out of India’s estimated 3 million nonprofits. Overall, NGOs were left with a surplus of just around 5% of their incomes after making their spending.

While 85% of the organizations in the full set in 2021-22 were India-headquartered, their share in funding was only 72%. Global NGOs were concentrated at the top. Vrunda Bansode, partner at Sattva Consulting and the author of the study, said the data showed that promising homegrown NGOs needed support in the form of unrestricted grants and capacity-building programmes to help them grow as robust organizations.