The Impact of Civil Society Organisations in India on Policy-Making

Long before the term “civil society” entered policy vocabulary in India, ordinary citizens were already organising to challenge injustice, run schools, and push reforms. From the reform societies of nineteenth-century Bengal to today’s grassroots collectives auditing village records, these non-state actors have shaped how the government thinks about laws and welfare. Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) sit between the state and the citizen, and their fingerprints are visible on some of the most consequential legislation in independent India, from the Right to Information Act to the rural employment guarantee.

Who qualifies as a civil society organisation 🔗

A Civil Society Organisation is a voluntary, non-profit, non-state entity that brings people together around a shared social, cultural, or ethical goal. The term is broad by design. It includes community-based groups, advocacy networks, charitable trusts, professional associations, cooperatives, and the familiar Non-Governmental Organisation or NGO. What unites them is a commitment to acting in the public interest without being an arm of the government or a profit-seeking business.

Most CSOs in the country are registered under one of three legal routes. The oldest and most widely used is the Societies Registration Act of 1860, a colonial-era statute that still governs literary, scientific, and charitable societies. The others are the Indian Trusts Act of 1882 for private charitable trusts and Section 8 of the Companies Act for not-for-profit companies. Under the 1860 Act, any seven or more persons associated for a literary, scientific, or charitable purpose can form a society by filing a memorandum of association with the Registrar, which is why a simple village collective and a national research institute can both carry the same legal identity.

A long history rooted in social reform 🔗

The organised voluntary sector in the country did not begin with NGOs and donor funding. Its roots go back to the nineteenth-century reform movements that challenged entrenched social evils. The Brahmo Samaj, founded in Calcutta in 1828 by Raja Rammohan Roy, and the Prarthana Samaj, established in Bombay in the 1860s, pushed back against caste rigidity, child marriage, and the denial of widow remarriage while promoting female education. Around the same period, the Unitarian Committee of 1822 and later organisations through the colonial period engaged in welfare and relief work, laying the moral and institutional foundation for later voluntary action.

By the early twentieth century, the reform impulse had merged with the nationalist movement. Gokhale’s Servants of India Society trained people for public service. Gandhi’s philosophy then reshaped the entire ecosystem. His emphasis on self-reliance, the upliftment of the rural poor, and constructive village-level work transformed voluntarism into a principled, ethics-driven practice. Initiatives around khadi, village industries, and the charkha became emblems of voluntary action that were as political as they were economic.

From independence to the present 🔗

After 1947, the state took on the central role in welfare and development, but it also recognised that voluntary organisations would be essential partners. The First Five-Year Plan explicitly encouraged cooperation between the government and NGOs. The severe droughts of 1965 to 1967 brought in a wave of international NGOs with foreign aid, and many later set up permanent offices, reshaping how the voluntary sector funded itself.

Liberalisation in the 1990s added another layer. As the state began to withdraw from some welfare roles, a new generation of advocacy-focused CSOs emerged, demanding accountability, rights, and transparency. The National Voluntary Sector Policy of 2007 was a formal acknowledgement that voluntary organisations needed an invited space in policymaking, although the promise of that policy is still being negotiated in practice.

Two broad types: service delivery and empowerment 🔗

Functionally, CSOs in the country fall into two overlapping categories. The first is service-oriented organisations, which complement government programmes by delivering education, healthcare, nutrition, disaster relief, and livelihoods. Akshaya Patra, for example, serves midday meals to more than two million children daily across over 22,000 schools in several states and Union Territories, showing how a CSO-led innovation can operate at a scale that rivals a public programme.

The second type is empowerment-oriented organisations. These groups focus on rights, advocacy, and collective action rather than direct service. They organise the marginalised, build community leadership, and challenge unjust practices. The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), and the Narmada Bachao Andolan are classic examples. In practice, many organisations do both, running clinics while also pressing for better health policy, or providing legal aid while drafting model laws.

How CSOs influence policy-making 🔗

CSOs influence the policy cycle through several distinct but overlapping routes. Understanding these helps clarify why some campaigns succeed while others plateau.

Advocacy and agenda-setting 🔗

Perhaps the most visible role is advocacy. CSOs articulate the concerns of groups that rarely have access to ministries or Parliament, pushing issues onto the policy agenda. The MKSS’s decade-long struggle in rural Rajasthan, which began with demands for minimum wages and evolved into a national movement for transparency, culminated in the Right to Information Act of 2005. The campaign was led by activists including Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey, and its signature innovation was the jan sunwai, or public hearing, where official expenditure records were read aloud so villagers could audit their own governance. This grassroots method was then translated into a national demand through the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, which was constituted in 1996 to lobby for central legislation and to support grassroots struggles for access to government records.

Drafting and shaping legislation 🔗

CSOs do not just push ideas; they often help draft the laws themselves. Civil society networks provided substantive input into the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the National Food Security Act, offering technical expertise that the bureaucracy alone could not marshal. By conducting research, engaging in advocacy, and mobilising public opinion, CSOs have been instrumental in the enactment of landmark legislation such as the Right to Information Act, the Right to Education Act, and the National Food Security Act. The Medha Patkar-led Narmada Bachao Andolan similarly reshaped how large dam projects are evaluated for their human and environmental costs.

Resource mobilisation and capacity building 🔗

Another underappreciated role is resource mobilisation. CSOs raise funds from domestic donors, corporate social responsibility budgets, and international partners, and they channel these into areas where the state often cannot reach in time. They also build human capacity, training community workers, paralegals, health volunteers, and teachers who then become the backbone of public service delivery in hard-to-reach areas.

Monitoring and evaluation 🔗

CSOs are arguably the country’s most energetic watchdogs. They track whether government schemes actually reach the intended beneficiaries, conduct social audits, and publish independent evaluations. Networks such as the Wada Na Todo Abhiyan, a national coalition of over 3,000 organisations across states, track governance and accountability commitments made by the government. This monitoring function is what turns policies from paper promises into enforceable programmes.

Collaboration with the state 🔗

The relationship between CSOs and government agencies is rarely adversarial in any simple sense. In many areas, the two work in partnership. The Planning Commission, during its existence, brought voluntary sector representatives into plan formulation, and NITI Aayog has continued some of that consultative practice. In education, health, rural development, and women’s empowerment, hundreds of CSOs implement government schemes on contract or through convergence models.

Tax incentives support this relationship. Donations to registered CSOs with 80G certification are tax-deductible, which helps organisations mobilise domestic philanthropy. The Companies Act of 2013 further expanded this landscape by mandating that large firms spend 2% of their profits on Corporate Social Responsibility, channelling significant corporate funds toward CSOs.

Notable examples of policy impact 🔗

Some of the clearest illustrations of CSO influence are worth naming. The Right to Information Act of 2005 is the signature example, emerging directly from a grassroots movement. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005, which guarantees wage employment in rural households, drew heavily on civil society drafts and advocacy. The Right to Education Act, the Forest Rights Act, and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act all had significant civil society inputs. In the environmental domain, sustained advocacy has shaped pollution regulation and the push toward electric mobility.

At the individual level, figures such as Aruna Roy, Medha Patkar, Ela Bhatt of SEWA, and Bunker Roy of the Barefoot College stand out for translating grassroots organising into national policy. Their work shows that the timing of advocacy matters, and civil society intervention at the right moment in the policy process requires careful judgement about where a policy stands in its cycle.

The challenges CSOs face 🔗

Despite their contributions, CSOs in the country operate in an increasingly constrained environment. Funding is the most pressing issue. The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act governs external funds, and the 2020 amendments banned CSOs from re-granting foreign money to other NGOs and capped administrative spending at 20%, causing thousands of organisations to lose their FCRA registration and limiting their ability to receive grants.

Beyond funding, CSOs face bureaucratic hurdles, fragmentation among organisations working on similar issues, capacity gaps in monitoring and evaluation, and questions about internal democracy. The Civil Society Participation Index for the country stood at 0.606 in 2023, a decline from 0.671 in 2022, indicating a narrowing of the consultative space. Public trust is another concern, since a few high-profile cases of financial mismanagement tend to tarnish the credibility of the wider sector.

The way forward 🔗

For CSOs to continue shaping public policy effectively, several shifts are needed. The regulatory regime around registration and foreign funding could be simplified without diluting accountability. Institutionalising civil society participation on advisory boards, as NITI Aayog has attempted with some NGOs on development goals, can be expanded across ministries. CSOs themselves need to invest in transparency, impact measurement, and internal governance to build durable public trust. Digital engagement and social enterprise models can also reduce dependence on shrinking donor pools.

The story of civil society in the country is ultimately a story of citizens refusing to leave policy-making to experts and officials alone. From the reformers of the 1820s to the public-hearing activists of Rajasthan, the sector has repeatedly expanded what democracy can mean in practice. Its future depends on whether both the state and the organisations themselves can keep that collaborative, contested, and deeply productive relationship alive.

What do you think? Do you believe the state should formally institutionalise civil society participation in every major policy process, or does the sector’s strength lie in remaining an independent outsider? And which recent civil society campaign do you feel has most influenced public policy in your own state?

References

1. https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/20573/1/aa1860-21.pdf
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societies_Registration_Act,_1860
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5. https://www.oxfamindia.org/sites/default/files/WP7-Civil-Scty-n-plcy-mkg-in-India.pdf
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7. https://mkssindia.org/pages/aboutus.html
8. https://humanrightscouncil.in/page.php?id=93
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