Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: Niticentral.com
Date: December 2, 2012
URL: http://www.niticentral.com/2012/12/rothschilds-gave-money-for-orphans-ngo-swiped-it-for-fancy-house.html

You would imagine, would you not, that it would be very, very hard to cheat the Rothschilds since they have been in the banking business for centuries. Right? Well, you would be wrong because you would have reckoned without the chicanery and business skills of the Indian NGO sector. In the name of the environment, in the name of alleviating poverty, in the name of rural development, Indian NGOs have been cheating rich Western donors for years because Indian NGOs never have to render accounts. Try finding out how Medha Patkar, for instance, pays for her travels and you are likely to get nowhere. And her refusal to render accounts is by no means unusual.

To come back to the Rothschilds the tale I have to tell in this column today is about how a relatively unknown NGO in Tamil Nadu succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of a member of one of the oldest and most famous banking families in the world. The story begins in 2004 when the wife of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, Lady Lynn, donated more than $390,000 to an NGO in a small town near Trichy to set up an orphanage. The money was given in good faith and an orphanage called Lady Lynn Joyful Home for Children duly came up in Gandharvakottai in the district of Pudukottai. The man who was put in charge of building the orphanage, S Pitchairaj, was running an NGO at the time called Integrated Rural Development Centre. He managed to get this generous donation because he succeeded in impressing a brother-in-law of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild who happened to be wandering around this part of Tamil Nadu.

For the first few years Lady Lynn Joyful Home for Children seemed to function as it was meant to, as a place where orphans from underprivileged families could find succour and shelter. Lady Lynn allowed Pitchairaj a free hand and believed he was looking after the children well and ensuring that they got good food, lived in hygienic conditions and went to decent schools. Then, in 2010 a young French volunteer, called Mathieu Eyquard, came to work in the orphanage and discovered that the children were being denied nutritious food and living without such basic things as medicines when they got sick. He also discovered that Pitchairaj was spending a lot of money on his own needs.

In the letter he wrote to Lady Lynn he said, “He is making a huge and beautiful house built in Kodaikanal (a touristic town in the mountains) for after (sic) rent it. I saw this house it is really huge. He also bought 12 acres of lands, and he is spending huge amounts to buy her (sic) daughter earrings and jewels.”  Inevitably, when Lady Lynn got this whistleblower’s letter she initiated her own inquiries and found that the children of the orphanage named after her were not being looked after in the manner she had hoped they would be. Since then she has been trying to take the orphanage back.

When I called Pitchairaj last week to ask about the whistleblower’s charges, he said, “They are not true. He is making these charges because he has been put up to them by a relative with whom I have a problem.” The matter is now in court with Lady Lynn trying to get control of the orphanage so that “the children can be better cared for” and Pitchairaj resisting interference from someone he considers “only a donor”.

If this were just the story of one duplicitous NGO it would be of no importance. It is important because it happens to be one of the few cases in which the foreign donors have taken action against their money being misused. In 90 per cent of cases the foreign donors never find out what happens because there is no regulation of the manner in which NGOs spend their money and no recourse since in the absence of a regulator Government is not directly involved. The only option is going to court but in India cases like this can take decades to resolve so we have a situation in which NGOs are making small fortunes out of foreign donations.

No names can be mentioned, for obvious reasons, but I know of a so-called environmental NGO which has used donations for the promotion of organic farming to start an organic café in Delhi. It has been my experience that the most duplicitous NGOs in India are those who are supposedly working to save the environment. Having studied their activities carefully I can report that these NGOs nearly always target development projects and rich multi-national companies because it is by doing this that they grab headlines. If they concentrated on saving our rivers, forests and wild life they would get much less attention and possibly fewer resources.

The second biggest charlatans in the NGO sector are those who collect money from rich foreigners in the name of alleviating rural poverty. They keep their objectives deliberately vague so they can range from hygiene and nutrition to education and healthcare. Real results in these areas can take years to become evident so it is easier for money to disappear into the wrong pockets.

So what can be done? Well, just as there have been recent demands for regulating the media, is it not time that demands were made to regulate the NGO sector? Is it not time that NGOs were obliged to submit detailed balance sheets just as private companies do annually? And, is it not time that they submitted their projects to regular inspections so that if money meant for orphans winds up in luxury homes in Kodaikanal action can be taken?