India has one NGO for every 600 people, the Central Bureau of Investigation announced last week. But given India's large population, this mammoth figure of two million non-profit organisations is not as large as it seems.
The United States, for instance, has around 1.5 million non-profits for a population of 313 million people. This gives it a per capita rate of around 209 NGOs per person – three times that of India.
The CBI made its estimate of the number of Indian non-profits last week in response to a Supreme Court order issued in September 2013. The court, while hearing a public interest litigation against the alleged misuse of funds by Anna Hazare’s NGO Hind Swaraj Trust, and wanted to know the total number of non-profits registered with India’s Registrar of Societies, and how many of these file their tax returns regularly.
But for a population of 1.2 billion, one NGO for every 600 people is really not much.
In these two charts published in Quartz, Annalisa Merelli explores how different nations compare with each other in terms of the total number of non-profits and the number of NGOs per person:
The differences between India and other developed countries is stark, but experts prefer not to make much of the numbers. “The bigger issue is of effectiveness, of how well problems are addressed on the ground,” said Aparajita Agrawal, director of the Sankalp forum at social advisory firm Intellecap. “One non-profit for 600 people is not a bad figure, but we need to figure out how to make them more effective and transparent.”
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The United States, for instance, has around 1.5 million non-profits for a population of 313 million people. This gives it a per capita rate of around 209 NGOs per person – three times that of India.
The CBI made its estimate of the number of Indian non-profits last week in response to a Supreme Court order issued in September 2013. The court, while hearing a public interest litigation against the alleged misuse of funds by Anna Hazare’s NGO Hind Swaraj Trust, and wanted to know the total number of non-profits registered with India’s Registrar of Societies, and how many of these file their tax returns regularly.
But for a population of 1.2 billion, one NGO for every 600 people is really not much.
In these two charts published in Quartz, Annalisa Merelli explores how different nations compare with each other in terms of the total number of non-profits and the number of NGOs per person:
The differences between India and other developed countries is stark, but experts prefer not to make much of the numbers. “The bigger issue is of effectiveness, of how well problems are addressed on the ground,” said Aparajita Agrawal, director of the Sankalp forum at social advisory firm Intellecap. “One non-profit for 600 people is not a bad figure, but we need to figure out how to make them more effective and transparent.”