Taxing investors to pay NGOs

By Ajay Shah

In India, NGOs are fashionable. It is almost never wrong, in the Indian discourse, to give more money and more functions to NGOs.

Many people have worried about the extent to which NGOs are being used to supplant failing State machinery. This may seem expedient, but no country every became a developed country on the back of NGOs. There is no alternative to fixing the core mechanisms of the State.

In recent days, two pro-NGO policy elements seem to be in the pipeline:

A new Companies Bill seems to require that 2% of profit be spent on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

SEBI decided to force listed companies, starting with the top 100 firms, to describe measures taken by them along the key principles enunciated in the