Exclusive: Was Oxfam India, Network Of NGOs Acting On Behalf Of Foreign Powers?

NDTV followed the money to find how the US State Department and George Soros liberally funded anti-India activities through these NGOs.

Exclusive: Was Oxfam India, Network Of NGOs Acting On Behalf Of Foreign Powers?

A probe has found that these NGOs collaborated with foreign entities to stall projects by Adani Group

Modi and business tycoon Adani are close allies. Their fate is intertwined. Adani Enterprises tried to raise funds in the stock market but failed. Adani is accused of stock manipulation and his stock collapsed like a house of cards,” said billionaire hedge fund investor and philanthropist George Soros at the Munich Security Conference on February 17, 2023. 

1. Routing funds through other means despite FCRA registration having been cancelled.

  • As per the Income Tax Department survey of Oxfam India, its income is as below.
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  • The FIR takes a serious view of this and states - “Oxfam India and its employees appears (sic) to be supporting agitational activities. 
  • Centre for Policy Research (CPR) received Rs 12 lakh towards “short-term training” of which Rs 5 lakh was for CPR to use in any way they pleased. Foreign funding was in effect being given as a commission, to circumvent the Act. 
  • A large number of NGOs also received sub-grants from the FCRA amount. A total of Rs 2.2 crore was paid out to various NGOs by Oxfam India after September 2020 when the FCRA Act was amended to make such sub-grants illegal.
     
  • Oxfam India had funded Environics Trust to “mobilize communities with the help of local unions against the coal industries. A portion of the agreement between the two NGOs is reproduced in the FIR.
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 2. Creation of a new structure to continue funding NGOs while bypassing FCRA laws

  • Since Oxfam India's FCRA registration was cancelled, the NGO drew up a new structure that would continue to help it carry out its unstated objectives. The idea was that Oxfam India would co-ordinate with foreign funders (Affiliates) and get them to fund handpicked Affiliate NGOs directly through the FCRA route. One such example noted in their email exchanges is that of NGO Samvad. 
     
  • Oxfam India would also set up For-Profit Companies (FPCs) which would completely oversee the expenditure and the project work of these Affiliate NGOs. 
     
  • Oxfam India would have an “arms-length” approach to both the FPC and the Affiliate NGOs, while in reality driving the whole agenda from behind the scenes. 
     
  • Affiliate NGOs such as Samvad were chosen for funding as Affiliate NGOs on the condition that they would allow Oxfam India “complete freedom to plan the program and staffing in manner they want.” 
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3. Plans to pressurise the Indian government through foreign governments & foreign institutions 

  • Oxfam India was planning to use its influence with the World Bank, IMF, European Union, US State Department, Asian Development Bank and a clutch of European governments to put pressure on the Indian government to renew its FCRA registration.
  • The Irish embassy was also approached by Oxfam India by Amitabh Behar in an effort to get the Ireland government to lean on India to renew FCRA. The excerpt of the email is below. 
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4. Suspicious donations from huge number of foreign individuals 

  • Strangely, a large number of donations have come in to Oxfam's FCRA account from individuals abroad. Even stranger is that the amounts round off perfectly when converted into Indian rupees. And a large number of individuals have donated the exact same amount. Below is a sample of the individual donations from abroad. 
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  • The amount of money donated by foreign individuals via the FCRA route is suspiciously high.
     
  • A British citizen by name Banwari Lal had gifted Oxfam India immovable property in Haryana in 2020. Oxfam India sold it for Rs 4 crore but showed the value of the land as Rs 2.46 crore only. This has raised suspicions about evasion of stamp duty.

Amitabh Behar was the CEO of Oxfam India and was a former Executive Director of the National Foundation for India. Behar is a mentee of Salil Shetty who was, until recently, Vice President – Global Operations in Soros' Open Society Foundations (OSF). The organisations led by Behar have been the recipients of major funding from Soros' Open Society Foundations (OSF) as well as other foreign NGOs that are funded by the OSF. Behar is said to have gone abroad shortly after the CBI raided the NGO.

  • Centre for Equity Studies led by Harsh Mander, a former member of Sonia Gandhi's National Advisory Council who was also recently in the running for a Nobel. This organisation has received Rs 1.2 crore from Oxfam. 
  • Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment (LIFE) which was founded by advocate Ritwick Dutta. Dutta was legal counsel for Fathima Babu, one of the leaders of the anti-Sterlite protests in Thoothukudi in 2018. 
  • Association for Rural and Urban Needy (ARUN) in Telangana which is run by Bezwada Wilson. Partners of Oxfam in ARUN include the Fund For Global Human Rights, a Washington DC based organisation for building activism and protest groups across the world. 
  • Swadhikar or National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), founded in 1998 and now led by Paul Divakar Namala. 
  • Oxfam India also granted Rs 1.4 crore to the Centre for Social Equity and Inclusion (CSEI) between 2016-17 and 2020-21 as shown in their FCRA filings with the Indian government. 

The World Resources Institute (WRI) had provided funding to the tune of Rs 89 lakhs in 2022. 

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LIFE or Legal Initiative For Forest And Environment was founded in 2005 by two lawyers - Ritwick Dutta and Rahul Choudhary. LIFE's aim is to promote environmental democracy through means of law. LIFE does not litigate by itself; it assists and supports groups which wish to do so.

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About Environics Trust

Founded by the late Sreedhar Ramamurthi, a retired official of ONGC and the Central government's Atomic Minerals Directorate, this NGO is alleged to have collaborated with the Mineral Inheritors Right Association “for protesting against Jindal Steel Work Protest in Odisha and Adani Coal Projects in Odisha,” as per the IT Department.

Adani Watch, a group that campaigns against Adani Group's activities wrote a rousing eulogy for Ramamurthi.

The agencies have just unearthed the tip of the iceberg. Many more NGOs and the brains behind them continue to operate actively in India at the behest of their foreign masters. The long arm of the law will catch up with them soon.



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