What is an 80G registered NGO?

An 80G registered NGO is one that has been certified by the Income Tax Department under Section 80G of the Income Tax Act, 1961. Donations to an 80G registered NGO are eligible for tax deduction in the hands of Indian donors. The certificate carries a URN (Unique Registration Number) that must appear on every 80G receipt issued after April 2021.

What is CSR-1 registration and why does it matter?

CSR-1 is the registration a nonprofit must obtain from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs before it can receive Corporate Social Responsibility funds under Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013. Without CSR-1, a company cannot count its contribution to the NGO toward its mandated CSR spending. Nikhaar Foundation's CSR-1 registration number is CSR00107287.

What is 12A registration?

Section 12A of the Income Tax Act, 1961 exempts a charitable organisation's income from tax. It is the foundational registration for any NGO in India: without 12A, the organisation cannot obtain 80G, and its own income is taxable at slab rates.

The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 governs whether and how an Indian nonprofit can receive contributions from foreign sources. An NGO must hold FCRA registration or specific prior permission to receive money from a foreign donor. If you are outside India and want to fund an Indian NGO, always ask about FCRA status before transferring.

How do I check if an Indian NGO is genuine?

Ask for and verify four documents: PAN of the trust or Section 8 company, the 12A registration certificate, the 80G registration certificate carrying a URN, and, for companies giving CSR, the CSR-1 registration. A serious NGO will send these within a working day. If they cannot, that is your answer.

How much of a donation actually reaches the ground?

There is no universal answer. Large NGOs spend more on fundraising, technology, and salaried staff, which can be a fair price for scale but is often not visible to the donor. Small NGOs run leaner and can point at what your specific rupee bought, but they scale slowly and may lack capacity for complex programmes. Neither is inherently better. Pick the model that fits the outcome you want.

What questions should I ask an NGO before donating?

Six that separate the serious from the not: (1) show me your 12A, 80G, and CSR-1 certificates; (2) name a specific project you delivered last year, where, and for how many people; (3) tell me who runs the organisation and how they are paid; (4) send me your last audited accounts; (5) if I fund a specific project, will you send a written utilisation report; (6) what will you not claim credit for.

Donor's guide

How to fund a high-impact NGO in India.

A practical guide for individual donors and CSR teams. What the important registrations mean, how to read an NGO's reporting, when small beats large, and the six questions to ask before you send money.

What this guide covers

01What high impact actually means, and what it does not
02Registrations that matter: 12A, 80G, CSR-1, FCRA
03How to read an NGO's reporting
04When to choose a small NGO over a large one
05Six questions to ask before you send money
06Where Nikhaar Foundation fits in this picture

Section 01

What high impact actually means, and what it does not

Impact is one of the most abused words in the nonprofit sector. A campaign that reached ten million phones has not necessarily reached ten million people. A programme that ran in fifty districts has not necessarily changed anything in any of them. Numbers of this kind are cheap to produce and almost impossible to verify.

A useful definition of high impact for a donor is much narrower: a named intervention, in a named place, that produced a countable change in the lives of a countable set of people, and that would not have happened without the NGO's involvement. Everything else, however sincerely felt, is storytelling.

The reason to insist on this narrower definition is not cynicism. It is that the moment an NGO is allowed to claim credit for outcomes it did not measure, the incentive structure of the whole sector shifts toward performance rather than delivery. You, the donor, are one of the few people in a position to hold that line.

Section 02

Registrations that matter: 12A, 80G, CSR-1, FCRA

Four registrations do most of the work of establishing an Indian NGO's legitimacy. They are worth knowing by name.

Section 12A of the Income Tax Act, 1961, exempts the organisation's own income from tax and formally recognises it as a charitable entity. Without 12A, an NGO cannot obtain 80G, and its receipts are taxable.

Section 80G makes donations to the NGO tax deductible for Indian donors. The 80G certificate carries a URN, a sixteen character code that must appear on the receipt for the deduction to be claimed. Any NGO that cannot produce its 80G URN should not be issuing receipts.

CSR-1 is the registration that a nonprofit must obtain from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs before a company can route its mandated Corporate Social Responsibility spending to it under Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013. If you are a CSR head, CSR-1 is non-negotiable.

FCRA, the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, governs whether the NGO can accept contributions from outside India. It is a separate registration with its own compliance burden. If you are giving in Indian rupees from India, FCRA is not required at your end. If you are giving from abroad, it is the first question to ask.

Section 03

How to read an NGO's reporting

The typical impact report leans on three levers to make its numbers look bigger: aggregating across time and geography, converting activity into outcome, and counting reach as impact. All three are common and none is illegal. The donor's job is to notice them.

Aggregation. A number like "10,000 people served" over a decade across four states means something very different from 10,000 people served in one settlement in one year. Ask for the denominator and the time window.

Activity converted into outcome. "Distributed a thousand books" is an activity. "Raised literacy in the settlement" is an outcome that requires measurement the NGO probably did not do. A serious NGO reports the activity and, separately, whatever it actually measured of the outcome.

Reach counted as impact. Impressions on a social media campaign are reach. Behavior change is impact. If the report cannot distinguish the two, treat it as a communications output rather than a programme output.

None of this is a reason not to give. It is a reason to give to the NGOs that report conservatively, and to reward that behavior by continuing to fund them.

Section 04

When to choose a small NGO over a large one

Large NGOs have real advantages: geographic reach, professional administration, monitoring capacity, and the ability to absorb a large contribution without distortion. They are the right answer for donors who want to fund a proven programme at scale and are comfortable with the overhead that scale requires.

Small NGOs have a different set of advantages, and they are advantages that most donors underweight. The distance between the money and the ground is shorter. The overhead ratio is genuinely lower. The specific rupee you sent is traceable to a specific piece of work. And because a small organisation cannot spend its way out of a delivery failure, its incentives are aligned with actually delivering.

The right question is not size, it is fit. If you want your contribution to fund a bounded intervention in a specific community and to be able to point at what it paid for, a small NGO is usually the better answer. If you want to fund a national programme with a research arm and a monitoring team, it is not.

Section 05

Six questions to ask before you send money

Show me the 12A, 80G, and CSR-1 certificates, and your PAN.
Name a project you delivered in the last year, where, for how many people, and what it cost.
Who runs the organisation, and how are they paid?
Send me the last audited accounts.
If I fund a specific project, will you send a written utilisation report when it is finished?
What outcomes will you not claim credit for?

A serious NGO will answer all six within a working day. The sixth question is the diagnostic one. An organisation that cannot name something it would not claim credit for is claiming credit for everything.

Section 06

Where Nikhaar Foundation fits in this picture

Nikhaar Foundation is one small NGO among many working in Delhi. We are registered under 12A and 80G of the Income Tax Act, and we hold CSR-1 registration with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs under number CSR00107287. Our work is water conservation and access, children's education and welfare, clean air, and civic awareness, in Delhi's underserved neighbourhoods.

We meet the criteria in this guide because we hold ourselves to them. Our clearest deliverable to date is a community water pump we funded, installed, and handed over to residents of Indira Gandhi Camp in Kasturba Nagar, giving roughly 3,000 people water at their doorstep. That is a bounded intervention in a named place, and we can tell you exactly what it cost.

If that is close to what you want your giving to do, our support page has the bank and UPI details, and the impact page has the case study in full. If it is not, the guide above should still be useful in choosing the NGO that fits.

Applying this to Nikhaar

Answers to the six questions above, in one place.

Our FAQ page walks through registrations, transparency, and reporting the same way the guide does. Read it before you decide.

Read the FAQ Ask us directly