Fear of the foreign: On the FCRA amendments.
The FCRA amendments are unfair in principle and procedure.
The Centre wants to restrict foreign contributions to individuals and organisations in India, but intends to do so in a selective and opaque manner. A fresh set of amendments to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, or FCRA, now temporarily stalled due to protests, is an attempt by the Centre to empower itself to arbitrarily take control of assets owned by recipients of foreign contributions. Introduced in the Lok Sabha on March 25, 2026, the Bill to amend the FCRA proposes a comprehensive statutory framework for a new “designated authority” to seize, manage, and dispose of assets of organisations that lose their FCRA licence. Cloaked in the rhetoric of national security and foreign interventions, the move smacks of bad faith, or even worse, a devious scheme to snatch assets built through legal means. Once an FCRA registration ceases to exist, the designated authority can take control of assets built using foreign funds — schools, hospitals, places of worship — and use them. This process is proposed to be automatic and instantaneous upon the discontinuation of the FCRA status, requiring no judicial determination or adjudicatory process. In effect, the Centre that grants FCRA permission can decide to withdraw that permission, and benefit from its own decision. This is unfair in both principle and procedure, and Christian groups that run numerous health and educational institutions are particularly concerned, given that they may have received contributions from abroad
The Bill has been postponed for now, but the government has no plans to abandon it. The FCRA was first enacted in 1976, and reenacted in 2010 during the UPA regime and amended in 2020 under Narendra Modi — progressively tightening the receipt and use of foreign funds. It is notable that state policy seeks foreign money in a range of domains — from infrastructure to technology, and entertainment to real estate. Regulatory regimes can be credible only when they are transparent and even-handed. That is not the case with the FCRA restrictions. Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas said his parliamentary questions regarding FCRA cancellations, non-renewals, and related data had been disallowed since 2024. That leaves one with the reasonable assumption that the government allows only some to receive foreign funds. That built-in favouritism apart, the design of the proposed legislation violates the principles of natural justice. The assets built legally with foreign funds before an organisation loses its FCRA clearance cannot justly be subject to seizure under any subsequent regulatory action. The Centre must rethink its approach on this issue and ensure that any regulations on foreign funds it introduces are fair, transparent, and steer clear of what exists on the ground.