Plan panel to do NGO headcount

While the UPA government has prepared the much-awaited policy on the voluntary sector, it is yet to find out the number of NGOs in the country.

Now, the Planning Commission has given the task to a private agency, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economic Pvt Ltd. The results are expected in a year.

An official of the centre, Prabhakar Kumar, said the study had started but he was not authorised to speak about it.

Planning Commission's voluntary sector wing, on its part, has pegged the figure at 16,430 even as a report of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act division of the home ministry mentions that 33,000 NGOs are registered with it.

But the figure is misleading, says Voluntary Action Network India, a network of 2,200 NGOs.

"FCRA gives permission to all non-government bodies for receiving foreign funds. These include schools, hospitals and numerous other institutions which may not have anything to do with the voluntary sector," says VANI CEO PC Pande.

According to Pande, the number would come to 2 million. He bases his estimates on a study done by an NGO, Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA).

The study, called `Invisible, yet widespread : the non profit sector in India' put the figure at 1.2 million or 12 lakh. The study said the non-profit sector was predominantly rural and 53 per cent NGOs were in the country's six lakh villages.

The fact that majority of NGOs are unregistered makes the task of quantifying the sector difficult.

The PRIA study, for example, found that the percentage of registered NGOs is the highest in Maharashtra at 74 per cent and lowest in Tamil Nadu at 47 per cent. In Delhi, 30 per cent NGOs are not legally incorporated, the PRIA study says.

What makes the task of measuring the sector difficult is also the fact that 73 per cent NGOs have one or less staff and are not organisations in any sense of the term, according to the PRIA study.

Despite the small size of a majority of the NGOs, the sector has 20 million people working on a paid or voluntary basis. There are around 2.7 million paid workers, according to the PRIA.