Rs 100 cr: Kerala-based spiritual organisation biggest donor to Modi's Swachh Bharat Abhiyan project

Money given by Mata Amritanandamayi Math was much more than some of India's biggest corporate houses

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission) is not just funded by taxpayers but also by voluntary donations to a special fund set up for the purpose. Information obtained by Business Standard under the Right To Information (RTI) Act shows that from September 2014 till October this year, the Swachh Bharat Kosh (SBK) received almost Rs 455 crore in donations. 

The single largest donation of Rs 100 crore came from Kerala-based spiritual organisation called Mata Amritanandamayi Math. The organisation based in Kollam in Kerala made this donation on September 15, 2015. Interestingly, just a few months before the Rs 100 crore donation was made, Mata Amritanandamayi called ‘Amma’ (Mother) by her followers, had met PM Modi at his residence. 

Reports from the time suggest that she had expressed her intentions to contribute to the government’s Namami Ganga project aimed at cleaning the polluted Ganga river. Mata Amritanandamayi has many high profile followers including sportsmen, politicians, businessmen and actors across the world. In September 2016, a year after the donation was made, the Indian prime minister had specially flown to Kerala to attend the spiritual leader’s birthday celebrations. 

Information shared by the Finance Ministry shows that the funds donated by the spiritual organisation was deployed in states through which the Ganga flows. The funds were specifically deployed for “constructing toilets for poor and downtrodden in villages surrounding the Ganga river.” 

The biggest beneficiary was the state of West Bengal which received Rs 83 crore from the spiritual organisation’s donation. Funds were sanctioned to West Bengal by the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s (HRD) department of school education and literacy in addition to the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation. 

The HRD ministry had sanctioned Rs 36 crore on January 12, 2016 to West Bengal from the donation to repair or reconstruct dysfunctional toilets in government schools. The Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation had sanctioned Rs 47 crore on January 21, 2016 to the state for building or repairing over 39000 toilets in households across West Bengal. These funds were to be only used in those towns and villages in West Bengal that were situated around the Ganga. 

While these funds were sanctioned and released, West Bengal hasn’t provided utilisation certificates as of date to the central government.

Other states that received funds out of the donation were Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttarakhand. Jharkhand received Rs 1.64 crore for constructing close to 300 toilets in government schools. Bihar received Rs 11 crore for the purpose.   

The Himalayan state of Uttarakhand from where the Ganga supposedly originates received almost Rs 3 crore for building over 2400 toilets for rural households.   
 

The Rs 100 crore donation by Mata Amritanandamayi to the Clean India Fund is much higher than other corporates who donated under their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. 

Information obtained under RTI shows that one of the largest donors after the Mata Amritanandamayi Math is engineering behemoth Larsen and Toubro (L&T). Unlike the spiritual organisation’s single donation, L&T made multiple donations totalling almost Rs 61 crore from March to July 2015.  The donations by L&T also coincided with major milestones for the Rs 16,000 crore engineering giant. 

The Rs 30 crore donation made in July came just a few days after L&T flagged India’s first nuclear steam generator for the Kakrapar nuclear power plant in Gujarat. 

Meanwhile the Rs 30 crore donation made in June came just a few days before it bagged a Rs 2715 crore contract from ONGC for its offshore Bassein development project. L&T’s defence arm had also bagged a Rs 468 crore contract from the Ministry of Defence for building a floating dock for the Indian Navy in June 2015. 

L&T was in the news recently for sacking over 14000 workers in what was billed as one of India’s biggest layoffs. Despite the gloom over the sackings, L&T has reported higher half yearly profits in 2016-17 as compared to last year. In January last year, journalist Swapan Dasgupta was appointed on the board of directors of L&T. 

Other significant corporate donors include Indian Tobacco Company (ITC), Bank of America, General Electric (GE) and DSP Merrill Lynch. But none of them come even close to the donation of the spiritual trust and the engineering giant. 

When seen together, Mata Amritanandamayi Math and L&T, alone accounted for 35% of the total voluntary contributions to the Clean India Fund. The Clean India Mission is one of the key projects of the Modi government and was allocated Rs 9000 crore in last year’s budget. To fund the campaign, a Swachh Bharat cess of 0.5% on service tax was imposed. The government collected over Rs 3900 crore through the cess in 2015-16. The mission seeks to eradicate open defecation in India by the time the present government seeks re-election in 2019. 

Next in the series: PSU’s contributed almost a third of the donations to Clean India Fund