08, Oct 2015

Manan Kumar @Manankmr
New Delhi: The National Foundation for Communal Harmony (NFCH), an autonomous body under the union home ministry, neither has the money nor the manpower. This at a time, when the country needs it the most amongst a spiralling increase in cases of communal violence, the latest being the Dadri incident.
Constituted on February 19, 1992 and working from a nondescript office space on the 9th floor of Lok Nayak Bhawan in Delhi, the NFCH is surviving on just Rs11 crore grant that was given to it twice — Rs10 crore in 1992 and Rs1 crore in 2004.
It has a skeletal staff of only 17 persons to run programmes in 152 districts that are currently on its map and for funding largely depends on the interest of the corpus fund and on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds from public sector enterprises. The NFCH officials concede that given the current state of communal strife there is need to spread its activities to more areas and given more assistance.