‘Save The Children’ loses its FCRA permit

August 04, 2023 12:17 am | Updated 07:25 am IST - NEW DELHI The Ministry of Home Affairs has withdrawn the permit under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act for U.K.-based NGO Save The Children’s Indian offshoot, Bal Raksha Bharat. The NGO’s registration was valid till November 2021, but the Ministry of Home Affairs extended the validity till March 31, 2022 for NGOs, provided their renewal request had not been refused or they had applied within six months of the expiry of their registration and before the deadline of December 31, 2021. As reported in The Hindu on December 26, 2022, the Ministry of Women and Child Development wrote to all States and Union Territories on November 2 calling a campaign by Save The Children to raise funds from the general public to tackle malnutrition among tribal children “misleading” as the issue was being “vigorously pursued” by the government through its Saksham Anganwadi and Poshan 2.0 scheme. This letter followed another one from the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights in December objecting to the depiction of vulnerable children in “deplorable conditions” for fundraising activities and warned that this amounted to a violation of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015.