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Business News/ Politics / Policy/  India least giving among South Asian nations
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India least giving among South Asian nations

The World Giving Index ranks India at 106, down 37 places from last year; only 20% of the sample size made donations

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A day before Diwali, a festival where households are laden with gifts and is supposed to be as much about giving as about lights and firecrackers, a new report shows Indians are giving less and less.

The World Giving Index, released by Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), ranks India at 106—a fall of 37 places from last year—in a list of 145 countries.

The foundation is an international non-profit organization promoting effective giving and philanthropy.

The World Giving Index is mainly based on data from Gallup’s World View World Poll, an ongoing research project carried out in more than 140 countries representing about 96% of the world’s population (around 5.1 billion people).

The index looks at three measures of giving: the percentage of people who have given to charity; volunteered their time; or helped a stranger in the last month.

Gallup interviewed 3,000 Indians face-to-face between 7 September and 15 October in 2014. The interviews were conducted in 11 languages—Assamese, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odiya, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. The survey excluded people living in the Northeastern states as well as on remote islands. Some districts in Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand were substituted by others due to security concerns. The survey asks questions on many different aspects of life today, including giving.

India has the greatest number of givers: In 2014, more than 334 million Indians helped a stranger and more than 183 million gave money, second only to Americans, according to latest index.

Overall, India was ranked the 106th most generous country—just behind Brazil and at the last among South Asian countries.

The latest index is based on trends seen in 2014 and has found the proportion of people in India donating to charity has fallen to 20%—an 8 percentage-point decrease—from 2013.

Globally, 31.5% of the world’s population gave money to charity in 2014—an increase of 3.2 percentage points on 2013.

There also appear to be fewer Indians who either volunteered with charity or helped a stranger —only 17% of the people interviewed volunteered, a 4 percentage point drop from 2013, and 37% helped a stranger—down 2 percentage points.

Meenakshi Batra, chief executive, CAF India, said: “The size of India’s population means that there are more people performing acts of generosity here than any other country in the world. However, the relatively low proportion of people, who are giving their time or money, shows there is still a lot more we must do."

Myanmar ranked the highest in the world for generosity, with the US coming in second, New Zealand third, Canada fourth and Australia fifth.

The next five most generous countries were the UK, the Netherlands, Sri Lanka, Ireland and Malaysia respectively.

Burundi came last in the index with China, Yemen and Lithuania just above.

Overall, this year’s report shows that while at a global level people have become increasingly likely to donate money to charity or help a stranger, they are less likely to volunteer their time. The research shows that some of the world’s most generous countries are also among the most deprived. Just five of the countries in the top 20 are members of the Group of 20 nations, which represents the world’s largest economies.

Fifteen G-20 countries are outside the top 5, and six of these are outside the top 100.

The countries surveyed and the questions asked in each region varies from year to year and is determined by Gallup.

This, and the variation in samples selected, the non-institutionalized religious and other giving could be reasons behind India’s poor performance, suggested Vidya Shah, CEO of EdelGive foundation, philanthropic arm of Edelweiss Financial Services Ltd. “The two main charity practices in India are helping the lesser fortunate family members and religious giving, neither of which have any formal data collection mechanism and can be overlooked… Though I’m not sure if that is the case or not in the current CAF report," she said.

According to Shah, a big factor in determining the amount people give is the culture of giving.

“Even if people in India have disposable income, they do not necessarily feel they want to donate to charity. The first question they ask is: ‘will this small amount even help anyone?’ As opposed to, say, in the US, where giving is intrinsic, from $10 to $1,000 or even $10,000, no amount is considered too little or too insignificant," she added.

Giving and philanthropy are very important for development, say sector experts.

CAF’s Batra believes wealth in India is predicted to grow significantly in the coming years and if the benefits of this wealth are to reach the entire Indian population through better standards of living rather than simply widening the gap between rich and poor, “we must do more to engage people in addressing development gaps," she said.

Some like Parul Soni, global partner at Thinkthrough Consulting Pvt. Ltd, a financial advisory firm focused on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the social sector, believe the stringent attitude of Indians can be linked to the trust deficit between those giving for charity and those implementing social initiatives from such charitable funds.

“Propensity to earn should be linked directly with the propensity to give. If the latter is not increasing dramatically and only shows marginal improvements, then it is a clear sign that people willing to give don’t trust the institutions which they can give to," he said.

Concurring with Soni, Batra said the only way forward is to strengthen the charitable institutions and mechanisms.

“We will need to build trust in non-government organisations and bring legislation up-to-date to nurture a culture of structured and effective giving. A part of this requires giving more and giving strategically for sustainable long-term impact. Civil society organizations can play significant role in supporting donors to fulfil this objective. To do this, we will need to build trust in non-governmental organizations and create an enabling environment that can nurture a culture of giving," she said.

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Published: 11 Nov 2015, 12:23 AM IST
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