Mainstream WeeklyFifty years of amendments, one direction of travel: how the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act became the instrument through which the Indian state removes the organisations that hold it to account.
I have spent more than twenty years in and around civil society organisations. My first fieldwork was in a cramped NGO office in a district town, the kind of place that ran on a combination of Ford Foundation money, two overworked programme officers, and a conviction that someone had to do this. I have watched organisations grow from single-room operations into ones that set national benchmarks for how we understand malnutrition, or violence against women, or bonded labour. I have also watched those same organisations go quiet, then go dark. The equipment is still in place. The staff quietly absorbed elsewhere or scattered. The work stopped.
Oxfam India is the most publicly visible casualty. By January 2024, an organisation that had run one of the country