NEW DELHI: In its bid to further tighten monitoring of foreign funding to voluntary organisations, the Union home ministry has directed nearly 6,000 of the 13,000 registered NGOs in the country receiving foreign donation to open accounts in nationalised banks with core banking facilities.
The move is aimed at tracking any suspicious use of the banking channels by the NGOs who usually maintain accounts in cooperative banks or state government-owned banks which do not have core banking facilities and generally lack modern scrutiny systems .
“To keep surveillance on the suspicious activities of NGOs receiving foreign funding, the ministry wants that all NGOs registered under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act have their accounts only in either nationalised banks or in a few private banks having core banking facilities,” said a senior ministry official.
Over the past two years, the Narendra Modi government had cancelled the FCRA licence of 20,000 NGOs out of 33,000 NGOs receiving foreign donations for violating various provisions of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act.
Over 1,300 other NGOs were denied renewal over the last three years for various violations under the FCRA. At present, there are 13,000 active NGOs in the country that are entitled to receive foreign grants.
Under the core banking system, all the branches of the natioanalised banks are interconnected and adhere to the standing guidelines of the Reserve Bank of India. Any suspicious activity can be detected by the inbuilt system and alert can be sounded to agencies including the I-T Department on real-time basis.