Shramdaan

Shramdaan means giving labour instead of money. The word comes from two Hindi words: "shram" (labour) and "daan" (donation). People turn up. They dig a pond, build a road, or clean a school. Nobody pays them.

The workbook opens Chapter 1 with this word. It says India has "a rich tradition of voluntary work, known as 'shramdaan'." This tradition shaped the country's civil society ethos. It has done so since Independence.

Shramdaan is not a legal category. It has no registration form and no SEBI regulation. It matters here because it explains where India's large non-profit sector comes from. Long before any NPO filed papers with a Registrar, villages were already organising themselves to do unpaid community work.

The workbook places shramdaan at the start of a historical sequence, not as a standalone idea:

• Pre-Independence: social reformers campaign for an equitable social order. Voluntary action grows out of this campaigning.
• 1970s and 1980s: professional NGOs and NPOs surge in number, supported by government agencies and international donors.
• 1990s: economic liberalisation. NGOs become key advocates for vulnerable groups, and government funding, central and state, plays a bigger role.
• 2013: the Companies Act, 2013 makes Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) spending mandatory for large companies, giving the non-profit sector a further boost.

Shramdaan sits at the informal end of this chain. Every later stage — NGOs, CSR, and now the Social Stock Exchange — formalises and funds work that shramdaan once did through unpaid labour alone.

An illustrative example; the villages and figures are made up. The historical framing is the workbook's.

Say a Bundelkhand village needs a check dam repaired before the monsoon. Decades ago, the village would have organised a shramdaan: every household sends one adult for two Sundays, no wages paid, the job done in kind.

Today the same repair might appear as a line item in an NPO's project budget, part-funded by a CSR grant, and reported through an Annual Impact Report. Say the repair now costs Rs 3 lakh in contractor fees and material, paid for by a corporate CSR grant, because most working-age villagers now commute to jobs and cannot give two unpaid Sundays.

The underlying community need has not changed. What has changed is how the effort is organised and paid for — from unpaid shramdaan to a funded, reported CSR project.

Chapter 1 (Introduction to Social Sector Ecosystem), section 1.1, opens the workbook's history of India's social sector with shramdaan. It sets up the sequence a candidate must know: shramdaan and pre-Independence reform, the 1970s-80s NGO surge, 1990s liberalisation, and the Companies Act, 2013 CSR mandate. A question may ask what "shramdaan" means or what tradition the workbook credits with shaping India's civil society ethos since Independence.

• Shramdaan is a cultural tradition, not a legal form. Do not confuse it with a Trust, Society or Section 8 company — those are the legal structures NPOs later adopted.
• The workbook credits shramdaan with shaping civil society ethos "since Independence" — it describes a continuing tradition, not a scheme that ended.
• Do not swap the decades: the NGO surge is the 1970s and 1980s; liberalisation and the NGOs-as-advocates role is the 1990s; the CSR mandate is the Companies Act, 2013.