Why philanthropy in India is not so successful?

In the last two decades, few new economy companies, including Infosys and Wipro, started investing in social developments; however, the real philanthropy is too premature on Indian soil. The reasons: first, most of the Indian entrepreneurs believe in the dynastic transfer of wealth from one generation to the next, which becomes a stumbling block for dispersing huge amount of wealth for public good or philanthropy, and the other one being the upsurging corrupt practices in almost all NGOs and similar charitable organizations those claim to be the crusaders of all socio-economic evils in our society, compel corporates to take enough precautions for not throwing their hard-earned money to some unreliable group of people, and perhaps, that is the most rational reason as to why many companies in India rather take pain in instituting their own trusts or engage some people in corporate social responsibility (CSR) to manage the philanthropic actions. The growing corruptions in social organizations, including misappropriations of funds and a brutal unaccountability, have prompted many industrialists to continue their philanthropic works either though a trust with management control or by engaging themselves with very selective NGOs.

The genesis of NGOs in India dates back to the 1860s when societies like Prarthana Samaj (1864), Satya Sodhan Samaj (1873), Arya Samaj (1875), and National Council for Women in India (1875) got instituted to fight against the social evils propagated by the then feudal patriarchs. With the growing trends of social revolution, the Societies Registration Acts (SRA) was enacted in 1860. Many Christian missionaries continued their efforts to reduce poverty, social bias, and constructed infrastructures such as roads, community buildings, hospitals, and schools. Mahatma Gandhi also stressed on the growth of these social, non-profit organizations and worked seriously on this area by engaging some industrialists like Birlas to contribute some amount of their profits for social cause. Though international NGOs entered India in 1960s and 1970s, the real surge in Indian NGOs took place in 1980s in areas such as social empowerment, civil liberty, education, health, environment, and livelihood. And the participation of large corporates began in the early 1990s.

In all these years India has more than 1.5 million NGOs with over 19 million people work as volunteers or paid workers. Despite this huge organic growth over the years, Indian NGOs haven't lived up to the expectations of the real beneficiaries of this program – the less-privileged people in our society. The most sordid part of this program is that there is no accountability of funds generated by these organizations. And even the worst part is many NGOs act as pressure groups and work for political parties, business organizations, and foreign agencies to generate actionable opinions for the funding organizations. The growing social development programs as projected by NGOs talk an altogether different story in India, a story replete with betrayals, false claims, sufferings, and corruptions. That's why the philanthropy as a popular social measure hasn't appealed to many entrepreneurs in India to act like their foreign counterparts such as Gates and Buffets. And especially in India, human greed, which of course regenerates systemic corruptions, has been the single most contributing factor to the degeneration of a globally acknowledged program, which otherwise could have been a savior of the socioeconomically backward people.