Who are these non-government organisations (NGOs) that are receiving foreign funds to trip up the Koodankulam nuclear power plant, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh alleged? The prime minister’s remarks coincided with the government freezing the accounts of four NGOs in Tamil Nadu and sending notices to 77 others in the state.
Indeed, taxed by the NGO community, Home Minister P Chidambaram on Thursday said the action against NGOs in Tamil Nadu did not have anything to do with the anti-Koodankulam movement. Nevertheless, it is intriguing that the government’s scrutiny is focused on NGOs in Tamil Nadu only.
The home minister’s statement is correct inasmuch as only one of the four NGOs whose accounts have been frozen was directly associated with the umbrella organisation, the Peoples’ Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE). This is Tuticorin-based Good Vision, headed by Mano Thankarajan. Good Vision works on livelihood issues and was implementing partner for a United Nations Development Programme and CARE India project in the area.
Thankarajan says he received Rs 1.5 crore from Oxfam over five years for Tsunami-related rehabilitation and nothing after March 2010. “I work with reputed organisations and they have systems of monitoring in place so no funds can go here and there,” he says. “A lot of NGOs receive hundreds of crores each year in the same district as ours. Only Narayanaswami knows why they have frozen my accounts,’’ he adds.
Another community worker who is struggling to get his accounts (close to Rs 2 crore) out of the home ministry deep freeze is Maria James who runs the NGO Rural Uplift Centre in Nagercoil. His main area of work is organic farming and women’s education on human rights.
James gets funds from Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany for drought mitigation and women’s legal aid and literacy, which he admits involves a weekly session on radiation from the nuclear plant. He denies, however, being part of the protest movement.
Two other NGOs singled out for freeze treatment are run by the Bishop of Tuticorin — the Tuticorin Diocese Association (TDA) and Tuticorin Multipurpose Social Service (TMSS). The Bishop’s church-funded organisations have received about Rs 42 crore in the past four or five years from Germany, France and Italy.
Father Santanam, speaking on behalf of Bishop Yvon Ambrois, says the two NGOs run 108 parishes, 250 schools and some orphanages besides maintaining the clergy. He says the funds can’t be diverted to the movement and the Bishop is getting ready to file a petition in the Chennai High Court against the freezing of accounts.
Nuclear activists also deny that the Bishop was funding the movement. The Bishop, however, was part of a PMANE delegation that had met the prime minister on October 7 last year when the agitation had reached its peak to lobby for the plant to be scrapped.
Says M Pushparayan, a PMANE member, “He came with us because the people wanted him to represent them when the government called them for a meeting with the prime minister.”
Although foreign funding of people’s movements is prohibited by law, hard evidence of diversion and complicity of foreign funding is hard to establish. It is true, however, that some of the NGOs that form part of PMANE’s 15-member team do receive foreign funding for their core activities.
PMANE itself is not a registered organisation but the name of the movement. It was launched in 2000 by S P Udaya Kumar, a US-returned school teacher. Udaya Kumar has denied having received any foreign aid for PMANE. Instead, he says, the movement is funded by weekly contributions from local fisherfolk and their relatives in the Gulf.
But he also runs the SACCER Trust that has a primary school where his wife teaches. The trust has been an occasional recipient of aid, including one from a Seattle-based NGO called People for Progress in India after the Tsunami. Udaya Kumar has also reported mentioning Swedish aid for research.
Pushparayan runs an NGO called NGO East Coast Research and Development that receives about Rs 4 lakh annually from Austrian donors for “environmental awareness” and livelihood issues of the fishing community. Now he’s worried. “It might be my turn next to be targeted by the government,” he says.
Opposition to the 2X1,000-Mw Koodankulam power plant is not new — it’s been on since 1988-89.
Ironically, it was no foreign-funded NGO that energised the protests but the nuclear plant authorities. Soon after the blast in the Fukushima nuclear energy plant in Japan on March 11 last year, they called for mock drills in the area.
They called panchayat leaders and asked them to tell villagers to come out of their homes with their faces covered with wet clothes when an alarm went off. They were then told to board buses waiting to evacuate them. The villages refused to comply. Instead of reassuring them, the decision to have the exercise only stoked their fears of what might happen in the event of a real accident. People took to the streets on their own, and we merely followed them, say the activists.
The Koodankulam protests have since received support from researchers and professionals in various cities under the umbrella of Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) that is backed by a group of intellectuals and scholars like Praful Bidwai, Achin Vinaik, Admiral Ramdas.
The CNDP, which is run by Anil Chaudhury, a former student leader of Jawaharlal Nehru University, was formed after the Pokharan tests and about 600 NGOs supported it. The “foreign hand” in this coalition is not clear as the coalition claims to receive no funding.
Chaudhury says people’s movements need little funds and searching for a foreign funding trail won’t get the authorities anywhere. “When I went to Koodankulam a year ago, I had to spend from my pocket. PMANE seldom buys you tickets or hotel rooms,” he added.
The CNDP website is run almost free by a researcher who was a former employee of the Department of Atomic Energy, Sundaram P K, and is paid a salary by the CNDP under a Greenpeace research project. “It needs commitment not money,” says Sundaram.
With the home ministry refusing to link the freezing of NGO accounts to the Koodankulam movement, protestors are feeling vindicated. But it is also a fact that Tamil Nadu’s NGOs receive the highest amount of foreign funds, second only to Delhi. In 2009-10, Delhi’s 1,380 NGOs received Rs 1,815 crore, Tamil Nadu’s 3,218 organisations received Rs 1,663 crore, according to the home ministry. So perhaps all NGOs operating there need to be extra-careful about transparency.
