- Friday, April 19, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Narendra Modi government has renewed permission for Missionaries of Charity, the philanthropic organisation set up by late Catholic nun Mother Teresa in 1950, weeks after rejecting it, the body said.
The government cut off foreign funding to the charity on Christmas Day last year and refused to renew its licence under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), a move which many said targeted the country’s minority communities.
Charities and non-profit firms need to register under FCRA to get funds from abroad.
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“The FCRA application has now been renewed,” Sunita Kumar, a close aide to Mother Teresa, was quoted as saying by AFP.
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The charity, which runs shelter homes across the country, was set up by Mother Teresa who devoted most of her life to helping the needy in Kolkata, the capital of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.
In 1979, Mother Teresa won the Nobel Prize in peace and was declared a saint in 2016.
In December, India’s home ministry said in a statement that it was rejecting the chairty’s renewal application since it did not meet “eligibility conditions” and that “adverse inputs were noticed”.
The Modi government has been accused of stopping access to funding of charities and rights groups across the country.
Last week, Oxfam India said the Indian government had stopped its access to international funding, a move which it said would severely impact its humanitarian endeavours.
In 2020, Amnesty International declared that it was suspending operations in India after the country’s government froze its bank accounts.
