It is a description of what an organisation does, not a box it can be put into. No registry anywhere in India maintains a list of NGOs. What the law actually registers is a trust, a society, or a company formed for non-profit purposes — and your very first decision, before any document is drafted or any fee is paid, is which of those three you are going to become. Most founders arrive having already been told the answer by somebody, usually on tax grounds, and that is the wrong basis for the decision. The three forms differ mainly in governance, not in tax. The tax registrations that make donations attractive sit on top of whichever form you choose and are separate applications made afterwards, with their own conditions, for all three. What actually distinguishes the forms is a set of questions about power: who controls this body, how do successors arrive, who can be removed and by whom, how tightly is control held, and where do the assets go if it ever closes. Which is why the honest way to put the decision is this — you are not choosing paperwork, you are choosing who will be running this in twenty years, and you are doing it on the day everybody still agrees with each other. Two more things worth knowing before you start. Your founding document is a constitution, not a formality: three of its clauses — objects, amendment, dissolution — will shape what the organisation can do for its whole life, and they are far easier to write now than to change later. And registration is the beginning of compliance, not the end of formation. Far more organisations come to grief on the filings, the accounts and the meetings that never happened than on anything in the registration itself. A group doing good work with no registration is in a better position than a registered body that has filed nothing for four years.
The phrase describes what an organisation does — work of public benefit, outside government, not for private profit. It says nothing about how that organisation is constituted, who owns it, who governs it, or what law it answers to.
So when somebody says they will “register your NGO”, what they are going to do is register one of three things. And which of the three they choose for you, frequently without asking, determines how your organisation works for the rest of its life.
That is why this page opens the way it does. Not to be pedantic, but because the founders who understand this ask better questions of everybody they then deal with, and the founders who do not tend to sign whatever is put in front of them.
The three are dealt with one by one further down, and then compared on the axis that actually distinguishes them. What comes first is the decision framework, because once you can answer four questions the comparison largely resolves itself.
State this as plainly as possible, because it runs against what most founders are told.
The registrations that make donations attractive to donors, and that relieve the organisation of tax on its own income, are separate applications. They are made after the organisation exists. They carry their own conditions, their own scrutiny and their own renewals. And they are available, in principle, to all three forms.
What is not separate, and cannot be bolted on afterwards, is your governance: who controls the body, how people join and leave it, who appoints successors, and what happens to the assets at the end.
So optimise the decision for the thing that cannot be changed later, not for the thing that is a separate application either way. A founder who picks a form because somebody said it is better for donations has chosen a permanent structure to gain an advantage that was available in all three.
The rest of this page therefore talks about control far more than it talks about money, and that is deliberate.
Answer these between the founders, in plain language, before anybody drafts anything:
Write the answers down. They become the brief for the founding document, and a drafter who has them produces something entirely different from one who is working from a template and a name.
If the founders cannot agree on question two, stop. That disagreement will not become easier after registration; it will simply become a disagreement with a constitution attached.
A trust is property held by trustees for a purpose. Its founding document is a deed, its governing body is the trustees, and control tends to be concentrated and continuous: trustees typically appoint their successors, and the body does not have a wider membership voting on things.
What that buys you is simplicity and stability. Few people, clear lines, less machinery, and a structure that does not change hands because a majority of members voted at an annual meeting.
What it costs you is the appearance and the reality of concentration. A small self-perpetuating board is harder to present to an institutional funder that wants independent oversight, and it puts a great deal of weight on the judgement of whoever the trustees happen to be in twenty years.
Our trust deed drafting and trust registration services handle this route. What they do not do is decide for you whether concentration is what you want — that is the conversation described above.
A society is an association of members who come together for a stated purpose. Its founding documents are a memorandum of the objects and a set of rules, its governing body is elected by or from the membership, and the membership is the ultimate authority.
That buys you legitimacy of a particular kind: a structure that visibly does not belong to any one person, with elections, general meetings and a body that can be changed by the people it serves.
It costs you machinery. Members have to be admitted and recorded, meetings have to be called properly and minuted, elections have to be held, and the whole thing has to be maintained rather than merely constituted. It also means that control can genuinely change hands, which is a feature to some founders and a shock to others.
Our society registration and society bye-laws drafting services handle this route, and the bye-laws deserve more attention than founders usually give them — they are where the real governance lives.
A company formed for non-profit purposes is a company in every structural sense — directors, members, a memorandum and articles, a registrar — with the defining difference that its profits cannot be distributed and must be applied to its objects.
That buys you the most familiar governance language in the country. Institutional funders, corporate partners and larger grant-makers understand directors, board meetings, audited accounts and filings, because it is the same vocabulary they use internally.
It costs you the highest compliance burden of the three, and it is a real cost rather than a nominal one: ongoing filings, meeting requirements, audit, and a registrar that notices when things are late. Organisations that choose this form and then run it like an informal group get into difficulty faster than in either of the others.
Our section 8 company registration service handles this route, and our board resolution service supports the decision-recording that this form requires from the first month.
Rather than a table of features, four questions asked of each form. These are the differences that will still matter in a decade.
Answer those four for each form against your own answers to the four founder questions, and the choice is usually obvious within an hour. Where it is not obvious, that is a signal that the founders have not yet agreed on something, and it is worth finding out what.
And where the decision carries real weight — substantial property, several founders who do not entirely agree, funding from outside India in prospect — take advice on your own facts before anything is filed. That is not a disclaimer; it is the cheapest hour you will spend.
Whatever it is called in your chosen form, this is the document the organisation lives inside. It will be read by banks opening your account, by funders assessing you, by authorities processing your applications, and eventually by whoever is arguing about something.
Templates circulate freely and they are the reason so many founding documents describe an organisation that does not exist. A template cannot know whether you want a self-perpetuating board or an elected one, whether you intend to work in three states, or whether two of the founders have already disagreed about who chairs meetings.
So brief it properly. The drafter should be asking you questions rather than sending you a document. If a draft arrives without anybody having asked who appoints successors, it was not drafted for you.
And read it yourself, slowly, before signing. Not the recitals — the governance clauses. You are agreeing to be governed by this for as long as the organisation exists, and the single most common regret we hear from founders four years on is that nobody read clause fourteen.
What you say you exist to do. Everything else is read against it: whether a bank will treat an activity as within your purposes, whether a grant fits, whether a tax registration is available, whether an official thinks you are operating outside your remit.
Two failure modes, and they pull in opposite directions:
The workable approach is a clear primary purpose, expressed in the language you actually use, followed by the activities genuinely incidental to it. Write the sentence you would say to somebody at a bus stop, then let the drafter render it properly — not the other way round.
And check that the activities you already know you will undertake are covered. It is remarkable how often the founding document omits the very thing the founders were doing the week before.
The clause nobody discusses and everybody eventually needs. It decides whether the organisation can adapt, and on whose say-so.
Written too tightly — unanimity of all original founders, say — it produces a body that cannot change once one founder has moved abroad and another has died. Written too loosely, it means that whoever controls the governing body at any moment can rewrite the purposes the organisation was given money for.
Neither extreme is right and the sensible position depends on your form and your circumstances. What matters is that the question is asked, and that the answer is a decision rather than whatever the template said.
Ask three things of any draft: who can propose a change, what majority or process is needed, and whether any part of the document is meant to be unchangeable. Many founders want the objects and the dissolution clause protected more strongly than the rest, and that is a reasonable thing to build in deliberately.
Where everything goes if the organisation ever closes. Founders find this morbid on the day of signing and it is one of the most closely read clauses in the whole document by everybody else.
The essential principle across all three forms is that the assets of a non-profit body do not return to the people who ran it. They generally have to pass to another organisation with similar purposes. A clause that provides otherwise is a problem, and it is a problem a funder or an authority will notice before you do.
Write it so that a reader can tell what would actually happen: who decides that the organisation should close, what process is followed, who identifies the recipient body, and what happens to assets that were given for a specific purpose.
The practical reason to care, beyond correctness, is that this clause is frequently the first thing a serious funder turns to. A well-drafted one signals that the founders thought about the organisation as something separate from themselves, which is precisely the thing a funder is trying to establish.
A question of judgement rather than law, and one where founders routinely choose by convenience and pay for it later.
The convenient choice is the people already in the room: the founders, their spouses, a sibling, a friend who agreed on the telephone. It is quick, it is cooperative, and it produces a governing body that cannot demonstrate independence to anybody.
The alternative — bringing in people who are not connected to the founders, who understand the field, and who are willing to disagree — is slower to arrange and changes what the organisation can credibly ask for. Institutional funders look at composition. So, increasingly, do authorities.
Two practical notes. Ask people properly, explaining what the role actually involves, rather than collecting consents from people who think they are doing you a favour by signing something. And keep the consents, because you will be asked for them.
Extremely common, entirely lawful in the ordinary case, and worth deciding consciously rather than by default.
What you gain is coherence. A family board agrees quickly, trusts one another, and can run an organisation for decades without the machinery a wider body needs. A great deal of genuine charitable work in India is done exactly this way.
What you lose is a particular kind of credibility. Institutional funders, corporate partners and grant committees look for independent oversight, and a body in which every decision-maker shares a surname will be read as one where the organisation and the family are difficult to separate. That perception is not always fair and it is entirely predictable.
So choose it with your eyes open. If institutional money is central to the plan, build in some independence now rather than reconstituting the board under pressure in year three. If it is not, and the work is funded by the family and its circle, the simpler structure may be exactly right.
Every form needs one, and it does not usually need to be owned. What a registry generally wants is evidence that you may lawfully use the address: an ownership document, a tenancy, or a no-objection from the person who does own it.
Three practical points. Use an address that will still be yours in three years, because changing it is a process and because every notice sent to the old one is a notice you did not receive. Make sure somebody actually collects post there. And get the owner’s consent in writing at the outset rather than telephoning them about it during the application.
Where the address is rented, our rent agreement service prepares the tenancy, and where a no-objection is needed our undertaking and declaration services prepare it in a form registries accept.
A caution worth printing: an address you do not genuinely occupy, arranged by somebody who provides addresses, is a weakness that surfaces at exactly the wrong moment — usually when an official visits or a funder verifies.
More consequential than founders expect, because it goes on everything and because changing it later is a process rather than a decision.
Four things to check before you commit. Is something very similar already operating in your field? Confusion with another organisation is a practical problem long before it is a legal one. Does it still fit if the work broadens? A name naming one district or one activity is a constraint you have written into your letterhead. Is it free of words that require permission? Certain words and associations cannot be used without approval. And is the corresponding domain and handle available, because in practice that matters.
Our trademark search service checks the register before you commit, and our trademark objection guide explains what happens when a name is challenged at the examination stage — a thing worth understanding before rather than after you have printed the banners.
And resist the urge to include an aspirational scale in the name. An organisation called after a whole country, run by four people from one room, invites a question in every conversation that follows.
The exact set differs by form and by state, and this page prints no checklist for that reason. What is stable is the shape of the set, and knowing it lets you assemble most of it before anybody asks:
Two habits save the most time. Collect every person’s documents at the start rather than as each is asked for, because the delay is always the one founder who is travelling. And check that names match across documents before filing, because a registry comparing two spellings will return the file rather than resolve it.
The filing itself is administrative and it goes smoothly when the thinking has already been done. Where it goes wrong, the causes are dull and repetitive: a consent missing, a name spelt two ways, an address document that does not name the person who signed the no-objection, an objects clause that the examining officer reads as going beyond what the form permits.
Two things to do at submission. Keep a complete set of exactly what you filed — not a note of it, the papers themselves — because queries arrive weeks later and are answered in minutes if you can see what went in. And record whatever number or receipt the office issues, somewhere other than on the receipt itself.
Then follow up on a schedule rather than when you remember, with one specific question rather than a general enquiry about status. Our application drafting service writes the follow-up correspondence, and our application drafting guide sets out why a specific, answerable question moves a file and a general one does not.
If a query comes back, answer all of it at once. Half-answers produce a second query, and each round costs weeks.
The certificate arrives and founders relax, which is precisely the wrong instinct. The month after registration is when the organisation is either set up to survive or quietly set up to fail.
Six things belong in it:
None of it is difficult and all of it is the difference between an organisation that can answer a funder’s questions in year four and one that cannot.
Not at formation. Almost never at formation. They fail in year three, when somebody asks for something that should have been accumulating quietly all along and it does not exist.
The recurring pattern is the same across all three forms. The registration was done properly by somebody competent. Then the founders went back to the work, which is after all the point. Nobody held the meetings, nobody minuted the ones that happened, the accounts were a spreadsheet somebody kept loosely, and the filings that had to be made were not made because nobody had written down that they were due.
Then an institutional funder asks for three years of filed accounts, or an authority asks why nothing has been received, and the organisation discovers that its history does not exist in any form it can produce.
The remedy is dull and it works: one named person responsible, one calendar, one folder. Not a system — a person, a list of dates and a place things go. Our ITR filing service handles the return side for organisations that would rather it simply happened.
The most undervalued piece of governance there is, and the cheapest.
A minute is not a transcript. It is a short record of who was present, what was decided, and on what basis. Written on the day, in half a page, it answers questions years later that nobody can otherwise answer: who approved this payment, when was this person appointed, was the chair present, was the interested member absent when their own matter was discussed.
Three rules make minutes useful rather than decorative. Write them the same week, because a minute written from memory in April about a meeting in January is worth very little. Record dissent where there was any — a body that has never disagreed about anything reads as one that does not really meet. And keep them in order, numbered, in one place.
Where a decision needs to be produced to a bank, a registry or a funder, the instrument is a formal record of it, and our board resolution service prepares them properly for the forms that require that language.
Keep books from the first day, including what founders spent before the organisation existed — that money is almost always someone’s contribution and it should be recorded as such rather than vanishing.
Whether an audit is required depends on the form, on thresholds that change, and on the conditions attached to any tax registration or grant you hold. This page gives no figures. What it gives is the habit: assume you will have to show the money to somebody who was not there, and keep the records that would satisfy that person.
In practice that means receipts issued for donations, a clear separation between the organisation’s money and anybody’s personal money, payments made through the account rather than in cash wherever possible, and a note against anything unusual explaining what it was.
The reason to be disciplined is not fear of scrutiny. It is that the organisation’s ability to grow depends on being able to demonstrate what it did with what it was given, and that demonstration is assembled continuously or not at all.
There are registrations that relieve a non-profit body of tax on its own income, and registrations that let donors claim a benefit for giving to it. They are the reason most founders ask about tax in the first conversation.
Four things about them belong on this page, and no numbers do:
Because the sections, thresholds and procedures in this area are revised, we confirm the current position for your organisation rather than printing figures here. A stale number on a page like this could cost a body its standing, which is a great deal worse than being unhelpful.
Whatever your tax position, the discipline around receiving money is the same and it starts on the first day.
Issue a receipt for everything, numbered in a single series, carrying the organisation’s name, registration particulars, the date, the amount and the donor’s details. Bank it. Record what it was given for, particularly where a donor specified a purpose, because money given for a purpose is not general funds and treating it as such is the origin of a great many difficult conversations.
Two practices worth adopting early. Acknowledge in writing, promptly — it costs nothing and it is the single thing donors most often notice. And keep a simple donor record with what was given, when, for what, and what was reported back.
Where the organisation collects online, the pages doing the collecting are themselves documents and they carry obligations. Our website terms and conditions and privacy policy services prepare them, and our website legal pack guide sets out what a site taking money actually needs.
A distinction founders get wrong in both directions — some believe nobody can ever be paid, others treat the organisation as a family income.
Paying somebody a reasonable amount for work actually done is ordinary and necessary; organisations need staff. What none of these forms permit is surplus being distributed to the people who control the body, in whatever guise. The line is between remuneration for work and extraction of profit.
Where a member of the governing body is to be paid, three habits protect everybody: write down what the payment is for, record how the amount was arrived at, and minute that the interested person was not part of the decision. Those three lines answer the question before it is asked.
Staff engagements should be documented like any other employment. Our employee agreement service prepares them, and our employment agreement guide covers the ground that applies to non-profit employers exactly as it does to anybody else.
Deliberately short, because this is one of the few areas where a general page can do harm.
Receiving funds from foreign sources is governed by a separate and considerably stricter regime, with its own registration or permission, its own requirements about which account may receive the money, its own reporting, and consequences for getting it wrong that reach the organisation and the people running it.
It is not something to arrange after a transfer has arrived, and it is not something to infer from what another organisation appears to do. If funding from outside India is part of your plan — or even a possibility somebody has mentioned — take advice on it before you register anything, because it can influence the form you choose and how the founding document is written.
We will tell you plainly when a conversation has reached this territory, and we will say that the next discussion belongs with somebody who practises in it rather than with us.
A question that should be asked at the start and is usually asked in year two, when the work has already spread.
Depending on the form and on where you registered, operating in another state can be straightforward, can require an additional step, or can sit awkwardly with how the body was constituted. None of that is insurmountable and all of it is cheaper to plan for than to retrofit.
So if you already know the work will not stay in one place, say so at the beginning. It is one of the handful of facts that genuinely narrows the choice of form, and it is the sort of thing founders often mention as an aside after the document has been drafted.
And where you operate through local partners rather than by establishing yourself everywhere, that relationship needs a document of its own. Our MoU drafting service prepares them, and our memorandum of understanding guide explains what such a document can and cannot be made to do.
Most non-profits end up delivering something with somebody else — a partner body, a funder’s implementing arrangement, a government programme, a corporate contribution.
Three questions should be answered in writing before any such arrangement begins. Who is responsible for what, in terms specific enough that a stranger could tell which of you failed if something went wrong. Whose money it is and on what terms it may be spent, including what happens to anything unspent. And whose name goes on the work, which sounds trivial and causes more friction than the money.
Also settle, unglamorously, what happens to anything the collaboration creates — materials, data, records of the people served. Our agreement drafting service prepares these, and where personal information about beneficiaries is being collected or shared, our data protection guide is the place to start, because a non-profit handling people’s information is in the same position as anybody else.
Organisations change. Trustees resign, members leave, addresses move, objects broaden, names stop fitting. All of that is provided for, and all of it is a process rather than an internal decision.
Two principles cover almost every case. Do it in the order the document requires — the decision, minuted, then the filing, then the updating of everybody who holds your particulars. And tell the people who need to know: the bank, the registry, any funder whose agreement names individuals, and anybody holding property in the organisation’s name.
The failure that costs the most is the silent one: a governing body that has changed twice without anything being filed, so that the record shows people who left years ago. Every subsequent transaction then has a question attached to it, and the correction is retrospective and tedious.
Where a change requires public notice, our society and trust public notice service handles it, and our public notice guide explains what such a notice actually achieves.
It happens, it is ordinary, and the organisations that survive it are the ones whose founding document anticipated it.
Read your draft as though the disagreement has already occurred, and check that it answers four questions. Who can call a meeting when the person who usually calls them will not? What majority decides a contested question? How is somebody removed, and by whom? And what happens if the governing body cannot function at all?
The reason to do this while everybody is friendly is that these clauses are impossible to negotiate later. Once there is a dispute, every proposed amendment is read as a manoeuvre, and it usually is.
Where a real dispute has begun, stop filing things and take advice. Steps taken during a dispute — a meeting held without proper notice, a removal effected informally, a bank instruction changed by one side — tend to become the subject of the dispute rather than the end of it.
Organisations end, and ending one properly is a service to everybody who supported it.
Each form has a process, and the common features are these: a decision taken in the manner the document requires, liabilities settled, accounts closed and filed, and the remaining assets transferred as the dissolution clause provides — which, as noted, generally means to another body with similar purposes rather than back to the people who ran it.
What should not happen is the quiet version: activity stops, the account is emptied, nobody files anything, and the registration sits on a register for a decade attached to people who have moved on. That leaves the former governing body holding an obligation nobody is discharging.
If an organisation has reached the end of its useful life, closing it deliberately costs a few weeks and settles the matter. Leaving it open costs nothing today and something unpredictable later.
Two quite different things share this word in Indian usage, and founders searching for guidance run into both.
A registered society in the sense used on this page is an association of members formed for a stated purpose — charitable, educational, cultural, scientific — and it is one of the three vehicles a non-profit can adopt.
A housing or residents’ society is an association of the people who live in a building or a colony, concerned with maintenance, common areas, permissions and the relations between residents. Its world is entirely different, and our society and RWA guide deals with it.
If you arrived here looking for the second, that page is where to go. If you are forming the first, the distinction is worth knowing because search results, templates and advice about the two get mixed together constantly.
Formation attracts intermediaries, and most are perfectly competent. Four signals separate the ones worth engaging:
A fifth, subtler one: anybody who tells you which form to choose in the first five minutes, before hearing anything about your governance. That is not expertise; it is a default.
A question almost nobody asks, and an honest one to put to yourself.
Registration is what you need in order to hold property in the organisation’s name, open an account in that name, receive institutional or government money, employ people cleanly, and continue after the founders stop. If none of those is true of your work yet, registering now buys you a compliance burden and very little else.
There is nothing improper about a group of people doing good work together without a legal form. A great deal of it happens. The point at which it stops being sensible is precisely the point at which one of the five things above becomes real — and that point is usually visible a few months before it arrives.
So the honest advice, which costs us the work in some cases, is: register when you can name which of those five you need, and not before. Founders who register in the first enthusiasm and then let the compliance lapse are in a worse position than those who waited.
Five of the six were decisions taken in the first fortnight, by people who had no reason to think they mattered.
Identity and address documents for everybody who will be on the founding or governing body, photographs in the usual form, and the address you intend to register at with whatever you hold for it — ownership paper, tenancy, or the owner’s contact if a no-objection will be needed.
More important than any of that: your answers to the four questions. What the organisation is for in one sentence, who will control it and how successors arrive, how widely control should sit, and where you will work and with whose money. Send those in your own words, however rough. We would rather have four honest sentences than a polished mission statement.
If any founder is abroad, tell us at the start, because their documents and consents take the longest and are the usual reason a file waits.
Clear phone pictures are enough to begin. You will normally hear back the same working day with which form we think fits what you have described, what it will mean for you in practice, and what we would need next.
And where the honest answer is that you should not register yet, we say so. That conversation costs us the engagement and it is the right one to have.
We form organisations and prepare the papers they run on. What we do not do is act in disputes, appear anywhere, or advise on the merits of litigation. Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it. Begin at our find an advocate page; the engagement is directly between you and them, and we take no part in it.
We also flag, early rather than late, the situations that deserve an advocate before anything is filed: substantial property being settled on the organisation, funding from outside India, founders who do not fully agree, or an existing body already in dispute.
Our work begins at ₹9,999, the usual span at our end is 15 – 30 days depending heavily on the form and the registry, you hear the complete figure before we start, and nothing is payable in advance. Formation together with the first year’s documents is priced as one engagement rather than as a sequence of small ones.
Government charges, stamp costs and any professional certification a form requires are their own, quoted to you separately, never folded into ours, and you get the receipts for your file.
Time is rarely lost in the drafting. It goes on founders’ documents arriving one at a time, on a name that has to be reconsidered, or on a governance question the founders had not actually settled — and every one of those is cheaper to face in the first conversation.
And the closing note, because the decisive part of this belongs to you and not to us: write the purpose in one sentence. Decide who controls it and how successors arrive. Choose the form on that, not on tax. Read the objects, amendment and dissolution clauses yourself before signing. Set up the books and the calendar in the first month. And register when you can name the reason, not before. Six decisions, all of them free, and they matter more than every fee on this page.
There is no register of NGOs — what gets registered is a trust, a society or a non-profit company, and the difference between them is who controls the organisation in twenty years rather than anything about tax. We take you through the four questions that decide it, draft the founding document around your answers instead of a precedent, give the objects, amendment and dissolution clauses the attention they will still deserve in a decade, make the filing, and hand you the compliance calendar that is the actual difference between organisations that last and organisations that quietly stop.
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