3.2 million organisations, 2.1% of GDP—can civil society strengthen its voice and impact as India marches toward 2047?
Dr L S Gandhi Doss
Chairman; Director, Institute for Youth and Development
Dear friends, let me open on a light note — our way forward is actually a short one. We are the 42nd JSDP, and 2047 is only five years beyond our own number. I’ll speak in a lighter vein, so don’t mistake me. The way forward has two roads: the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese government building everywhere, and our own national highway development. Disruption works the same way — it has two faces. It can bring change, halt change, or let us leap forward very quickly.
We have two speakers of very different orientation today. Mr Easwaran is from Deloitte, one of the four leading global accounting firms, so expect a delightful, disciplined speech. And we have Mr Mathew Cherian, always cheerful — so instead of Cherian, it should be “Mathew Cheerful.” Between accountancy and care, you will get transformation and transparency, and, if you don’t like what you hear, some caring and soothing besides. One speaker strong, one supportive — that is how I see these two voices sitting together today.
Let me close with a longer thought. The history of modern civilisation shows that every government of the day has stood on the shoulders of civil society to rise; there has never been one that did not. But, borrowing from Tolstoy, who borrowed from the Bible: I sit on a man’s back and carry him, and I will do everything in my power to redeem his struggle — except get off his back. That is the relationship between civil society and government today. We must create a caring environment for civil society everywhere. Household debt is rising by forty percent, and gold-mortgage shops are opening across India — the contradictions in our growth story are real. And on artificial intelligence, here is what troubles me: each of us is unique, by our own value systems and the evolutions we have each lived through. I asked the people at Zoho directly — how will AI, built to write manipulative code at scale, ever interface with millions of such unique human beings? Perhaps even God does not know that yet. Thank you.
P S Easwaran
Partner, Deloitte India
Thank you, Chair, for setting the context and raising the bar. Let me touch on where we go from JSDP 42 to 47, and on India’s own road to 2047. There is an irony worth naming: a commercially-oriented professional services firm sitting in this conversation. But we are, in fact, one of the largest contributors in this space — our people give about fifty thousand impact days a year in India, and another hundred thousand globally, roughly a hundred and fifty thousand days a year. We plan it meticulously, and we take a great deal from this room as we do it.
Civil society, in its truest form, existed long before any republic — the first civil society body in Kodaikanal dates to the 1800s. Its record in India has never been merely transactional. Operation Flood began as a civil society dairy movement before becoming government policy, replicated across all thirty-six states and union territories — one of the world’s best examples of civil society shaping government action. During the second wave of COVID, oxygen-cylinder logistics and plasma-donor aggregation ran substantially on civil society effort. The flood response in Wayanad, and in Chennai the decade before, saved lives through food-distribution models civil society organised in a very short time. All of that is business as usual for you; the real disruption ahead is digital, alongside three other shifts.
Viksit Bharat’s own targets — per-capita income near $18,000 against roughly $2,000 today, a GDP of $30 trillion against under $5 trillion, nine hundred million people of employable age by 2047 — align closely with our own goals of inclusive, equitable growth. Four challenges stand out for us. First, digital disruption: as technology cost collapses and every Indian carries a supercomputer, advocacy will shift from anecdote to data, and you will have to counter misinformation and build cyber-resilience — becoming digitally aware and digitally relevant should be your 2026-to-2031 theme. Second, legitimacy and trust: a digitally native public will demand transparency without any direct relationship with you, much as any buyer reviews a product today. Third, engagement: as the average age rises toward thirty-seven and the employable population nears a billion, your beneficiaries must also become volunteers and donors, which means rethinking leadership pipelines and succession much sooner than the twenty-year horizons some organisations have used. Fourth, move from project-based to outcome-based models — instruments like Zero Coupon Zero Principal bonds on the social stock exchange let a corporate fund a project against reported outcomes rather than returns, with up to ten percent of CSR spend able to flow through this route.
None of this can be done alone — alliances with tech start-ups and digitally native enterprises, not just the eight organisations in this room, will matter as much as funding itself. Engaging youth as implementers, not only beneficiaries, will multiply everything else. I’d frame the roadmap in three phases: 2026-2030, stabilising for disruption — digital literacy, legal and financial compliance, partnerships beyond this room; the following five years, modernising the operating model and localising leadership; and after that, institutionalising what we’ve built. Every successful disruption story follows this arc.
Mathew Cherian
Chair, CARE India; Ambassador, HelpAge International; Former CEO, HelpAge India
Good morning, namaskaram and vanakkam to all of you. This is my first time at this partners’ meet, so let me begin with the good news: crisis and disruption are always the best time to change, and that includes civil society. Some of us recently put together a report on the Indian non-profit sector’s contribution over seventy-five years — I’ll leave copies here. The sector is about 3.2 million organisations strong, employing 18.2 million people, of whom only 2.7 million are paid; the rest work voluntarily. We contribute 2.1 percent to GDP — compare that with IT, which gets free land, tax concessions and every possible benefit, and contributes only 3.8 percent. Civil society gets, as I put it, kicked in the back instead.
Yet the innovation record is extraordinary — the ASHA worker came out of civil society, as did major innovations in primary education and, as Banyan has documented, in mental health. I’ve written on innovation in ageing myself, and by 2047 India will have 350 million elderly people; one in five of us will be a senior citizen, and what looks today like a demographic dividend will look, for that population, like a demographic burden. History bears this out. Civil society in India predates the republic by well over a century — Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s Brahmo Samaj, the Swaminarayan Sect founded in Gujarat in 1844, Dayanand Saraswati’s Arya Samaj and DAV schools, the Guild of Service founded in Chennai in 1930 by Mary Clubwala Jadhav — long before the freedom movement, civil society was already organising, including in support of the 1857 uprising, which led to the first regulation, the Societies Registration Act of 1860.
Since then we have lived through wave after wave of regulation, usually triggered by the state feeling threatened by an organised civil society. The Emergency of 1975, and Jayaprakash Narayan’s opposition to it, brought the FCRA of 1976. Decades of grassroots activism around forests, tribal rights and dams brought further scrutiny on accountability grounds; it’s why some of us built the Credibility Alliance and later GuideStar India, offering platinum, gold and silver ratings that now feed directly into how organisations list on the social stock exchange. Mr Chidambaram’s FCRA amendment of 2010 tightened administrative-expense limits; the Companies Act of 2013 brought two-percent CSR, though its guidelines are routinely bent, right down to opaque vehicles like PM CARES. In 2014, tax exemption on the sector was cut from a hundred percent to fifty. And the 2020 FCRA amendment centralised every account through a single State Bank of India branch in Delhi, banned sub-granting, and cancelled licenses for roughly 19,000 organisations, often on technicalities. The FCRA department today is opaque and hard to reach.
My argument is simple: non-profits are not working against the nation, we are contributing to it — the bulk of us operate precisely in the aspirational districts the government itself relies on for ground data. We need an ease-of-doing-good in India to match ease-of-doing-business: lower tax friction, an end to FCRA overreach, and full tax exemption restored to encourage domestic giving — HelpAge alone once raised a hundred crore a year domestically under the old exemption regime. For our part, organisations must get accredited, professionalise their boards — moving past family- and founder-controlled governance — build a real social media presence, since donors now judge us there rather than on our websites, and fund-raise locally, because the domestic philanthropic pool, currently around sixteen billion dollars, will only grow as the economy does. Fix accountability first; everything else follows.
