Identifying the good NGOs

There are NGOs and there are NGOs.

If it is true that India has an estimated 3 million NGOs, this would suggest there is 1 NGO for every 80 families in the country. Assuming that 50% of these families need help of some kind, this would mean that every NGO services about 40 families. With at least 5 working days in a week and with dedicated staff and an army of volunteers, one would assume that most of India's problems should be on their way to being solved.

The reality, though, is very different. Most of these NGOs are allegedly bogus, zero-person entities created to route money for politicians and bureaucrats - and their relatives. The founders of many NGOs seem to share the same DNA structure as many of those in the financial services industry: The people who are supposed to help others end up getting the fat checks, leaving their customers and supposed beneficiaries to rot.

But there are some good financial service entities who actually work for the benefit of their clients in a fair, transparent, and honest manner. You may consider this as a disclaimer, a boast, or as a statement of fact: we helped start 3 of them www.Equitymaster.com, www.PersonalFN.com, and www.QuantumMF.com.

Similarly, there must be some good NGOs run by good people doing great work. And who need more resources to grow. The resources could be money, time, or materials. We decided to help these good NGOs get bigger - and better.

A journey begins

In 1990 we started what was India's first institutional-style equity research house. Pradeep Mahtani, who helped in that journey and then went on to work with some of the larger foreign and local broking firms as a research analyst, is leading the effort at www.HelpYourNGO.com

The focus at www.HelpYourNGO.com is:

To allow individual donors to identify those NGOs that are doing good work and support them with money, time, or materials;

To equip the various companies who will, under the revised Companies Act, have to donate 2% of their annual profits for social causes. It is important that this estimated Rs 10,000 crore of annual flows be used wisely and not end up as another source of slush money for the well-connected and bad-intentioned, fake NGOs;

To provide those NGOs who wish to improve with the knowledge and the tools on how to be better NGOs through training programmes. The video clips of these training programmes will be available on the web site for anyone to view for free.

Looking back at our careers in the dirty, corrupt, and messy field of finance Rahul, Subbu and I - ably supported by all our colleagues who chose the more difficult path of taking a journey with us - have built 3 alternative platforms for investors.

And now we have a platform to challenge the questionable NGOs and help improve the abilities and the capacity to do better for the well-meaning NGOs, of which there are many.

So, as Diwali approaches and you wish to share the joy with the less fortunate, I hope you will: encourage the NGOs you support to list their information on the www.HelpYourNGO.com website, and use the www.HelpYourNGO.com engine to select those NGOs you wish to donate your money to.

The above is from the mails I receive from Equitymaster.

If anyone is aware of any NGO which is doing good work, they could inform these people so that th NGO gets help in its operations.