The Centre for Policy Research (an NGO, mind you, in the interests of full disclosure) assures me that there are plenty of laws in force (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act 1967, Prevention of Money Laundering Act 2002, Foreign Exchange Management Act 1999, etc) that are perfectly capable of protecting India from assaults by foreign money. Look into the proposed bill. It is in the discretionary items that the sting lies. The government will determine who goes on the list and there is a new creature — “an authorised officer” — who can pretty authoritatively ruin any NGO which he or she wishes to. And no prizes for guessing, funding from the UN, the World Bank and the IMF is exempt from all restrictions!

Arguing against this silly anti-democratic bill does not mean that we should not recognise that there is greater need for transparency and accountability in the way NGOs are funded and run. What we need for NGOs, especially those who receive foreign funding, is a transparent regulatory body like SEBI, which insists on the nature of the funding being made public (similar to capital market disclosure), which sets standards for NGO governance (for example, independent directors like Clause 49 does for companies), accounting and auditing requirements and so on. That way, if a Dutch-funded environmentalist NGO urges us to not build dams, it would be easy for the ministry of dams (do we have one?) to point out that Holland’s very existence depends on dykes which are an assault on the environment. Or if it turns out that the NGO opposing the Tata factory at Singur has Japanese or Korean funding and has not published audited accounts for the last few quarters, the citizens of Bengal can come to their

... contd.