Nearly half of all charitable giving by individual Indians flows to religious organisations, according to the How India Gives Report by the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy at Ashoka University.
The findings paint a picture of an Indian giving culture that is vast yet almost entirely invisible to formal measurement. Religious organisations received 45.9 percent of individual donations, followed closely by beggars and destitutes at 41.8 percent. Formal non-religious organisations accounted for 14.9 percent of giving while family, friends and relatives did for 9.1 percent.
While roughly 68 percent of Indians report giving in some form, constituting a market size of roughly Rs 54,000 crore, the vast majority of this capital flows through informal, person-to-person channels that bypass the formal banking and tax systems entirely. Only 10 percent of this individual giving flows through formal channels.
For the Indian government and social-purpose organisations (SPOs), this represents a massive, untapped reservoir of capital. According to the report, the “steady state” of Indian giving is characterised by a deep-rooted moral obligation that favours proximity over paperwork. Unlike mature markets like the US, where individuals contributed $392.45 billion in 2024 through highly structured channels, India’s philanthropic backbone is built on “everyday giving” that is largely untracked.
The report also reflects a normalisation post-Covid. Volunteerism, which had spiked during the pandemic, has now stabilised at a higher level than the pre-pandemic baseline, partly because physical volunteering, often tied to religious service, has resumed in full.
Wealthier households give more, and in more forms. To better understand these patterns, the study segmented donors into four distinct “archetypes” based on education and household consumption: Grassroot Givers (55 percent), who are rural and faith-driven; Aspirational Givers (25 percent), educated but financially stretched; Practical Givers (14 percent), urban donors with limited formal education but strong capacity; and Well-off Givers (6 percent), the most active across cash, in-kind, and digital giving.
Among so-called “well-off givers”, 66.2 percent give in cash, 65.2 percent in kind, and 43.5 percent through volunteering. For “grassroot givers” at the other end of the spectrum, these figures drop to 39.6 percent, 39.9 percent, and 27.6 percent respectively.
Chakraborty points to the broader economic context. India’s labour markets and transaction systems remain largely informal, and charitable behaviour mirrors that reality. Tax incentives, which are a key driver of formalised giving in the United States, play almost no motivational role here. “For everyday Indians, the motivation is moral obligation, a sense of karmic duty,” Uppal noted. “They are not waiting for incentives.”
Comparisons to the US are frequently made but are, researchers caution, largely misleading. Organised philanthropy in America is nearly a century old. India’s institutional giving ecosystem is decades younger, and still maturing.
“Social media usage for giving is a phenomenon of the far-right end of the socio-economic distribution,” says Chakraborty. While Well-off givers are increasingly active on social media, the rest of the population relies on hyper-local social networks, family connections, and traditional media. For the population outside the Well-off bracket, word-of-mouth remains the most powerful recruitment tool.
The report makes it clear that India’s philanthropic economy is not small, it is simply structured differently, and largely unmeasured.
First Published: Mar 06, 2026, 11:21
Subscribe Now