India Fund

Our work in India centres around funding small NGOs working with the most vulnerable communities in priority geographical areas. 

We believe that communities must be central to the work partners undertake and should place people facing disadvantage in India at the heart of leading change and designing solutions to overcome inequality.

The strategic aims of the fund are to:

• encourage NGOs to take on community-centric development programmes;
• enable communities to take charge of their own development and improve their lives;
• encourage development funding to address systemic change; and
• enhance the capacity of organisations and people who facilitate the above aims.

We fund organisations working with vulnerable communities. This includes but is not limited the following groups:

• Communities with little or no access to education
• Communities with little or no access to health services
• Dalit communities, particularly those in dangerous or harmful work
• Disabled people, particularly children
• Families living in extreme poverty
• Tribal communities fighting for or dispossessed of their land and resources
• Women

We want to fund organisations who support these communities to build on their strengths and develop leadership.

We only fund work in our priority areas. This focuses on central parts of India which are among the poorest parts of the country, stretching between the eastern part of Gujarat in the west to West Bengal and Assam in the east.

We support work in the following states:

• Madhya Pradesh
• Chhattisgarh
• Odisha
• Jharkhand
• Bihar
• West Bengal
• Assam

In addition to these states we also support work in certain culturally identifiable regions in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan which face more extreme poverty than other parts in those states:

• Mewar and Hadoti (southern and south-eastern Rajasthan)
• Bundelkhand (Northern Madhya Pradesh and southern districts of Uttar Pradesh bordering Madhya Pradesh)
• The Dangs (south-eastern Gujarat)
• Telangana (northern Andhra Pradesh)
• Vidharbha (eastern and northern Maharashtra)

There are two ways to apply to our India Fund, depending on the scale of work your organisation does.

Our applications are open year-round, and we do not issue calls for proposals.

The organisations we support for micro-level activities will be small to medium NGOs who have a direct implementation role with communities.

They will be local to their area of work, will have a field presence and will already have implemented (or be implementing) initiatives in that area. They will probably have an annual outlay of less than Rs 1.5 crore (roughly equal to £150,000 GBP) .

All micro grants are restricted to the priority geography areas outlined in this strategy. Around 70 to 80 per cent of funding will be at this level.

At the meso/​macro level, we will fund organisations that operate on a slightly larger scale and can view changes from a broader perspective. Initiatives at this level will bring together experiences from multiple smaller micro-level initiatives, compiling and consolidating their learning to help us address factors likely to improve the ecosystem. 

We see these as organisations of learning that advocate policy change, argue for better implementation of existing policies and enhance the capacities of other NGOs.

Organisations funded under this category could be located outside the geographical priority area. 

Around 10 to 15 per cent of funding will be at this level.