For the last several months, I have been struggling with the registration on NGO Darpan website for our Section 8 company.
Government of India introduced Darpan Registration to ensure that Government funding should not go to anti national NGOs. But in the process, some body in RBI circulated to all Banks and REs that Darpan Registration is a mandatory requirement for KYC even if no funding is obtained by the organization from Government sources.
As a result, NGOs not having registration are facing difficulties in collecting genuine revenue for their operations including membership fees. The registration system is however broken for a long time and making it impossible for companies to obtain new registrations creating problems for many NGOs.
Failure of the Darpan Registration system is choking the NGOs by disabling their digital payment system. The problem is going un noticed by the CEO and the Chairman.
Despite e-mails, Linked in posts, X posts etc., Niti Ayog officials are not responding. This is completely unacceptable. I am surprised that even the CEO of Niti Ayog Mr B V R Subramanyam is not able to respond to emails at ceo@niti.gov.in
Today I also found out that there are several You Tube videos explaining step by step instructions for completing the simple web registration. This itself is a vindication that the problem of registration is wide spread and has not been attended to for a long time. In fact Niti Ayog should consider it as an insult that consultants have to post videos to show how the registration has to be completed on the website. This should have been simple enough for any person to complete without spending so much of efforts. Despite using all permutations and combinations for registration, it aways ends up with a 404 error.
There could be two reasons for this complete breakdown of the Darpan Website.
First is that Niti Ayog is not able to manage its day to day administration and is only a paper institution for creating reports and meeting the PM. If so, it is for the Chairman to set it right.
A more likely reason could be that the website of Darpan is not under the control of authorized persons and has been hacked either by an external agency or by rogue employees or a website manager.
Such things usually happen when Government agencies donot pay the service providers maintaining the website and one of them tries to prove their power by creating such problems.
I wish that atleast after this public post, the CEO looks into the administration and ensure that it is functional.
In the mean time, I request RBI to withdraw its instructions on KYC making Darpan Registration mandatory by sending a suitable circular deferring their earlier instructions if any.
Naavi
