Several global civil society groups in a public statements urged the Indian government to withdraw recent amendments to the country’s Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Rules (FCRA) granting the authorities sweeping new powers to police non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive foreign funding.
The organizations document how the rules, adopted on 22 June, facilitate a range of new ways to silence peaceful dissent, restrict human rights, and obstruct independent human rights work in the country.
Among other new powers, the changes force NGOs to comply with a restrictive list of “reasonable activities”, tie their funding to specific Indian states and purposes, subjectively/indeterminately expand the categories of people with compliance responsibilities and impose a minimum spending threshold on NGOs to remain eligible for receiving further funding.
Under international human rights law, they asserted that the right to freedom of association includes the right of associations to seek, receive and use re
The global movements that signed in the joint statement are Amnesty International, CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, Front Line Defenders, Human Rights Watch,
International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), International Service for Human Rights (ISHR) and World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT).
On 22 June 2026, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs adopted the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Rules granting the Indian government sweeping new powers to police the activities, operation, management and leadership of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) receiving foreign funding.
The amendments significantly expand an already restrictive legal framework established under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), 2010, which regulates the receipt and use of foreign contributions by individuals and organizations in India. It prohibits contributions for activities deemed to be detrimental to the “national interest,” an overbroad term open to misuse.
This is the very failing identified by the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association in his 2016 legal analysis of the FCRA, which concluded that the law was not in conformity with international law and failed all three limbs of the permissible restrictions test.
He warned that terms such as “political” in the FCRA were broad enough to capture activities that international law protects and even encourages, including promoting knowledge of rights and participation in public affairs.
India’s own Supreme Court, in Indian Social Action Forum v Union of India in 2020, read the concept of “political nature” narrowly, confining it to active and party politics. The new closed list in the rules and its exclusions risk reopening, through the design of the registration system, the very executive control that the judgment sought to limit.
Since 2010, successive governments have amended the Act three times, most significantly in 2020, when the law was expanded to ban the transfer of foreign funds between organizations, to cap administrative expenditure and to require funds to be routed through a single designated bank account.
In 2016, three United Nations Special Rapporteurs jointly urged the Indian government to repeal the FCRA, warning that it was being used to silence organizations whose priorities did not align with those of the government.
In 2011, the Indian government notified rules to the FCRA, and has amended them 10 times since then. The latest amendments further perpetuate the Indian authorities’ use of the FCRA over the last decade as a tool to silence peaceful dissent and the exercise of fundamental freedoms and obstruct independent human rights work in the country.
Such misuse has been repeatedly noted by various UN mechanisms, most recently by the UN Human Rights Committee in 2024 in its concluding observations on the fourth periodic review of India’s implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
The new rules apply to nearly 14,500 organizations that currently hold a FCRA license, and to all non-profits who may want to apply in the future. Existing non-profit organizations now face a one-year deadline to bring their registration in line with a far more limiting framework, or risk losing the ability to carry out their work altogether.
The latest amendments come amid the Ministry of Home Affairs’ cancellation of 22,498 FCRA registrations over the past decade, many of them targeted because of their human rights work. This is part of a broader pattern in which only 27.7 percent of the NGOs and associations registered under the FCRA remain active, with licenses of the rest either cancelled or deemed expired.
Organizations providing free legal aid or human rights education, and those working on environmental rights or protecting the rights of religious minorities or vulnerable populations, have been particularly targeted, including OXFAM India, People’s Watch, World Vision India, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Centre for Policy Research, Lawyers Collective, Apne Aap – Women Worldwide India, Evangelical Fellowship of India, and Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh.
The Indian government has often sought to justify its FCRA restrictions by claiming they are necessary to comply with the standards of the global terrorism financing and money laundering watchdog, Financial Action Task Force (FATF). However, FATF standards do not support such measures.
FATF’s 2024 assessment of India’s anti-money laundering and countering of terrorism financing called for a targeted, risk-based approach focused on organizations demonstrably at risk of terrorism financing, together with consultation with the non-profit sector, rather than blanket and unlawful restrictions across civil society.
Instead, in March 2026, the Indian government proposed amendments to the FCRA that would grant the authorities sweeping new powers over the assets of NGOs that have had their licenses withdrawn. Even as the bill remains pending in parliament with the Indian government facing severe criticism from minority groups over it, the Ministry of Home Affairs decided to bring in a new set of amendments through the Rules, circumventing legislative or public consultation.
Ch. Narendra, a senior journalist, based in Hyderabad, worked with New Indian Express Group for more than two decades, besides some other media organisations. Also actively associated with human rights groups like Amnesty International, PUCL, Human Rights Defenders Alert- India and Human Rights Society.
Ch Narendra, FCRA, FCRA Amendment, FCRA Bill
