ICC Note:
After Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed office in 2014, over 11,000 nongovernmental organizations lost their licenses to accept any funding from foreign establishments. However, few Western funders are as vocal about this struggle as Compassion International. Ranked as India’s largest single foreign donor transferring around forty-five million dollars a year, Compassion solicits donations through a “sponsor a child” program and distributes the money through church-affiliated service centers. Thirteen-year-old Priya Saxena is among the sponsored children. As a vegetable vendor, her father earns approximately 1,000 rupees or $16 per month.  “Now I do not know what the future holds for me,” she said. “I hoped to become a doctor. But now that we are told we will no longer have sponsors to see us through the education, I don’t know what will happen…This place taught me to have a life. It is finished now.”
03/08/2017 India (The New York Times) – India’s crackdown on foreign aid will claim its most prominent casualty this month, as a Colorado-based Christian charity that is one of India’s biggest donors closes its operations here after 48 years, informing tens of thousands of children that they will no longer receive meals, medical care or tuition payments.
The shutdown of the charity, Compassion International, on suspicion of engaging in religious conversion, comes as India, a rising economic power with a swelling spirit of nationalism, curtails the flow of foreign money to activities it deems “detrimental to the national interest.”
More than 11,000 nongovernmental organizations have lost their licenses to accept foreign funds since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014. Major Western funders — among them George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the National Endowment for Democracy — have been barred from transferring funds without permission from Indian security officials.
But few have been as vocal about their struggle as Compassion International, which solicits donations through its $38-a-month “sponsor a child” program and distributes them through church-affiliated service centers. It has repeatedly ranked as India’s largest single foreign donor, transferring around $45 million a year.
Its executives vehemently deny the government’s allegation that it is funding religious conversions, and say India has given them no opportunity to rebut the accusation. Instead, they say they found themselves in murky back-channel negotiations with a representative of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., a right-wing Hindu ideological group that is closely connected with the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., but that has no official role in governing.
“You think, ‘Wow, am I negotiating with the government or am I negotiating with an ideological movement that is fueling the government?’” said Santiago Mellado, Compassion International’s chief executive officer, in a telephone interview from the charity’s offices in Colorado Springs. He added that a briefing on the situation would be submitted to the Trump administration this week.
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