Maharashtra has about eight lakh registered NGOs and charity organisations. Maharashtra has about eight lakh registered NGOs and charity organisations. Attempting to crack down on defunct and bogus NGOs, the charity commissioner’s office has embarked on a drive to deregister all public charitable trusts or NGOs in Maharashtra that have not submitted their annual audit reports for the last five years. In the one week since the drive started, close to 50 public trusts across the state have already been deregistered. Maharashtra has about eight lakh registered NGOs and charity organisations and the Charity Commissioner’s office says that nearly three lakh of these are either non-functional, have wound up operations or have remained dormant. Many of these organisations, having been set up with a social welfare motive, have not held elections or carried out any other organisational activity. In any case, they are all in violation of the provisions of laws under which they were registered, says the Charity Commissioner’s office. Sources said that most of the already deregistered organisations were located in Mumbai and Aurangabad, but declined to disclose the names of these bodies. They said that the trusts that have been deregistered include those registered for working in the fields of education, health and religious purposes. The crackdown comes in the wake of an amendment to the Maharashtra Public Trusts Act 1950 last year that authorised the Charity Commissioner to deregister non-functional trusts. Sources said that nearly half of the organisations whose registrations have been cancelled had applied for closure voluntarily. They said notices were being issued to a large number of NGOs whose functioning was not strictly in accordance with legal provisions. Charity Commissioner Shivkumar Dighe told The Indian Express that a workshop was held in Pune sometime back during which 94 officers were trained on properly scrutinising the functioning of these NGOs and trusts. Dighe, who was earlier Principal District Judge at Ratnagiri and Joint Charity Commissioner in Pune, took charge as state Charity Commissioner in August this year. He said that the campaign was under way to identify educational, social and other trusts that either do no work or have failed to file their audit reports. While the Charity Commissioner’s office is digitizing records to facilitate online filling of forms and for other benefits, earlier this year a special drive had also been conducted to allow pending Change Reports — notifying change in trustees/properties – to be filed from January 1 to 31. This allowed for speedy disposal of as many as 70,000 Change reports. Earlier, there was no pre-set time limit for the disposal of these Change reports and the special drive had facilitated trustees to submit audited annual accounts on record. For all the latest Cities News, download Indian Express App

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