NEW DELHI: The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) will now conduct a scrutiny of Indian laws that have been used to crack down on NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch accepting foreign donations. The FATF team is likely to visit India in November, said knowledgeable sources.
The FATF will take a dive into whether the Indian Government is selective and discriminatory in the application of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) to NGOs and think tanks receiving donations from abroad. The FATF says its standards “are designed to ensure legitimate charitable activities are not disrupted or discouraged”.
India has not yet been assessed in the fourth round of mutual evaluations. Due to the pandemic and the pause in the FATF’s assessment process, the mutual evaluation of India had been postponed to 2023. The FATF team will now visit India in November and the issue will be discussed at the FATF’s plenary in Paris in June.
While the Centre’s pet projects, such as Ram Temple, have been accepting foreign donations for a while with no checks, several NGOs and think tanks have been at the receiving end of its FCRA licence denial regime. Recently, the government revoked the Centre for Policy Research’s licence to receive foreign funds.
For a brief while India was under monitoring of the FATF. But at its June 2013 plenary meet, the FATF decided that India had reached a satisfactory level of compliance with all of the key recommendations and could be removed from the regular follow-up process.