By Alfie Habershon
Mumbai: Nov 14, 2019: India ranked 82nd among 128 countries for generosity over the last 10 years, according to the tenth World Giving Index (WGI).
Up to a third of Indians helped a stranger, one in four donated money, and one in five gave their time volunteering, the report said, attributing India’s low ranking to its strong culture of unorganized and informal giving to family, community and religion.
It recommended more formal mechanisms of donating to charity.
The report, published online in October, was based on surveys of 1.3 million people in 128 countries during 2009-2018. It asked interviewees if they had helped a stranger, donated money to charity or volunteered their time in the past month.
The surveys used Gallup World Poll data and were commissioned by Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), a UK charity that provides services and assistance to international charities and their donors.
India’s rank on the Index has yo-yoed vastly, the lowest being 134th in 2010 and the highest being 81st last year. This year’s report aggregated data for each country for the last 10 years. India’s overall WGI score this year was 26 percent.
Of the top 10 countries, seven are among the wealthiest in the world. Yet, global generosity is on the decline, stated the report, highlighting that individual giving is now lower in countries with long histories of philanthropy such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
“The top ranking countries will usually have a strong culture of giving, or are more developed,” said Meenakshi Batra, who leads CAF India, a non-profit organization that works to enable effective giving. “Individuals have more resources to give and there is infrastructure for them to give to formal organizations.”
India’s 26 percent WGI score was less than half of 58 percent scored by the United States in the top spot. China, with a score of 16 percent, was at the fag end of the index. The Asian giant also had the lowest score for all three measures considered–helping a stranger, donating money and volunteering.
New Zealand, on the other hand, was the only country to appear in the top 10 on all three counts.
Five of the 10 countries to have improved their rankings the most on the giving index were in Asia. Indonesia, the country that improved its ranking the most, moved into the top 10 for donating money and volunteering. Sri Lanka achieved the highest score for volunteering in the world; at 46 percent, its volunteering score was more than double of India’s 19 percent.
The report attributed this rise in rankings to cultural factors. For example, a majority of people in Myanmar are practicing Buddhists, 99 percent of whom are followers of the Theravada branch that mandates giving. Sri Lanka too has a high population of Theravada Buddhists.
Similarly, in Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population in the world, giving is closely tied to the religious obligation of giving, zakaat.
The improved rankings are also an outcome of countries’ economic development.
“It is not a surprise that these Asian countries have been increasing [their ranking] due to their rising economic prosperity,” said Ingrid Srinath of the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy at Ashoka University in Sonipat, Haryana.
India was the least generous of the seven South Asian countries in the Index, behind neighbors Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. India’s economic growth in recent decades has been felt by fewer and fewer people, which may explain why its philanthropy is not increasing at a rate similar to that of its Asian counterparts, Srinath said.
“India also has more cleavages than other countries around it in terms of religion, class and caste,” said Srinath. “It is possible that these divides make people less inclined to commit to national philanthropic efforts.”
“In India, there is a strong culture of regularly helping and assisting each other,” said Batra.
More Indians (64%) said they give money directly to people and families in need or to a church or religious organisation (64%) than to a non-profit or charitable organisation (58%), as per the India Giving Report, a country-specific report by the CAF Global Alliance, a network of organisations working in philanthropy and civil society.
Besides, India has more than 500 forms of traditional religious giving, such as Hindu daan and utsarg, Islamic zakaat, kums and sadaqa.
“This form of giving may not show up on the Index because Indians consider this a family or a religious obligation,” said Batra. “For instance, it is commonplace for Indians to feed poor people outside places of worship, or serve a meal to pious and holy men. Those responding to the survey would not have counted this as giving, because they consider this to be their duty.”
Incidentally, up to 38 percent Indians said they would donate more if they knew how their money would be spent, and 32 percent would donate more if there was more transparency. “There is potential for organized non-profit organizations to provide more formal options of giving,” said Ben Russel of CAF.
In 2017, the wealth held by India’s wealthiest 1 percent increased by $303 billion. This was equivalent to the central government’s total budget that year, as per this report by Oxfam India.
The contribution of India’s richest to philanthropic activities has grown at a slower pace than the increase in their wealth, as reported by IndiaSpend earlier this year. Large contributions (more than 100 million rupees) by ultra-high net worth individuals (individuals who have a net worth of more than 250 million rupees) have decreased 4 percent since 2014.
India’s lowest WGI score in the last six years (22 percent in 2018) coincided with its reporting a record number of 121 billionaires–the third highest number of ultra-rich individuals in any country, behind China and the United States.
(Habershon, a graduate from the University of Manchester, is an intern with IndiaSpend.)