There has been a significant decrease in the amount donated by the country’s super rich people for charitable purposes. This has come down sharply to Rs 4,230 crore in FY22. According to the India Philanthropy Report 2023 by Dasra & Bain & Company, the donation amount was Rs 11,821 crore in the previous financial year. The dramatic fall in donations was about one-third as the Azim Premji Foundation’s contribution decreased by Rs 9,000 crore due to Wipro share buybacks to directly raise cash, the report said.
According to the report, the contribution of all other high net worth individuals, except Premji, has come down to Rs 3,843 crore in FY 2022 as compared to Rs 4,041 crore in FY 2021.
The decline in philanthropic donations comes despite the interesting fact that the net worth of India’s ultra wealthy grew by 9.2 per cent in FY2022, the report said, peaking at Rs 50,000 crore. The wealth of the people saw an increase of 19 per cent.
According to the report, the rate of increase in total private philanthropy funding has been steady and a total of Rs 105,000 crore is given in FY 2022, similar to FY 2021. Also good news is that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) spending has increased by 5 per cent to Rs 27,000 crore in FY21. Also, contributions from high net worth individuals (with assets of Rs 200-1,000 crore) and affluent grew by 11 per cent over FY2021 while retail donations grew by 17 per cent over FY21.
However, foreign funding has come down from 21 per cent of the total contribution in FY 2017 to 14 per cent in FY 2022. But the biggest drop in total donations was in the share of the ultra-wealthy, from 11.4 percent in FY 2021 to just 3.8 percent in FY 2022.
Clearly, India’s super-rich are not giving away as much of their wealth to charity as the super-wealthy in the US, Britain and China. The average contribution of the ultra wealthy in India was only 0.06 per cent of their wealth, compared to 1.37 per cent in the US, 0.33 per cent in the UK and 0.38 per cent in China in FY22.
In FY2022, ultra-wealthy Indians with a net worth of Rs 1,000 crore to Rs 10,000 crore contributed just 0.04 per cent of their wealth to philanthropy, compared to 6.07 per cent in the US, 1.34 per cent in the UK and 2.15 per cent in China.
Based on sector trends, India’s ultra-wealthy have shown interest in contributing more to the education and health sectors. On the other hand in America the attention of the super rich class on these areas is decreasing. These two sectors accounted for 51 percent of the wealthy Indians in FY2022. The report said that a sampling of the contributions of the ultra-wealthy showed that 70-75 per cent of them give at least a part of their total contribution to the education or healthcare sectors.
In contrast, philanthropic donations in developed countries vary greatly and only 40 percent to 45 percent contribute to education or healthcare.
