Union Home Minister Amit Shah launches new facilities for overseas citizens. File
| Photo Credit: PTI
Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Tuesday (June 30, 2026) launched a new portal that other than reducing paper work will speed up clearance of applications for registration under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 (FCRA) and also enable real-time monitoring of foreign fund inflows.
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Mr. Shah launched the FCRA 2.0 Portal and an e-Overseas Citizen of India (e-OCI) card initiative. Union Home Secretary Govind Mohan, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, Director of Intelligence Bureau (IB) Mahesh Dixit, and several other senior officials were present at the programme.
At present, around 14,500 organisations with FCRA registrations are working across the country. FCRA registration is mandatory for an NGO or association to receive foreign donations.
The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said that, under the Act, approximately 15,000 to 20,000 applications are made each year and about 17,000 annual returns are filed. The portal, hosted on the National Government Cloud (MeghRaj), includes features such as process re-engineering, an integrated dashboard, Aadhaar-based authentication, e-Sign facility, and OCR-based document analysis.
Unlike the old website, the new FCRA portal has removed the section on year-wise fresh registrations under FCRA. In 2022, the MHA had dropped sections listing NGOs whose registrations were cancelled and a page detailing the annual returns filed by each NGO.
Mr. Shah said that the government’s policy was to ensure transparency, embrace technology so that governance becomes easy for honest people and a strict surveillance system was put in place for wrongdoers, and the country could be made increasingly secure.
Mr. Shah said that prior to 2014, the FCRA system was entangled in files and procedures and was beyond proper oversight, which is critical for both national security and development. He said that in the past few years, there had been a significant increase in the number of applications and the flow of foreign donations.
He said the portal would lead to effective monitoring of foreign contributions made with wrong intentions. He said that with the launch of new system, the process of physically submitting documents will be eliminated. An FCRA mobile application, an AI-powered chatbot, and a dedicated online dashboard for banks will also be launched in the coming months.
He said that the e-OCI card will bring great convenience to more than 50 lakh OCI cardholders. After 20 years, when a new passport is issued, there will be no need to re-issue the OCI booklet, and the cardholder’s registration number will also become unique, Mr. Shah said. Moreover, with the digital OCI card, the problem of losing or damage to documents will be eliminated, and cardholders will be able to carry out real-time verification themselves.
Published – June 30, 2026 07:01 pm IST