The News Minute misrepresents to weave a narrative? The report on ONGC donating CSR funds to ‘RSS-linked orgs’- what it leaves out

On July 19, 2026, The News Minute published a report about ONGC, the government-owned oil and company. The report found that ONGC gave ₹670.97 crore to 20 organisations that have links to the RSS, with this money being given starting from 2013. Most of this amount, ₹668.01 crore, was given between 2015 and 2025. In that same period, ONGC spent ₹4,531 crore in total on CSR. It covered more than 2,000 organisations and projects across India. So the money given to RSS-linked organisations works out to about 14.7% of ONGC’s total CSR spending over that decade. The News Minute report The News Minute divided the 20 organisations into three groups. Nine are directly connected to the RSS, nine were started by or are run by people connected to the RSS, and two have worked with the RSS in the past. The two organisations that received the most money were BAVP (Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Vaidyakiya Pratishthan), which got about ₹434 crore to build a 300-bed hospital in Sivasagar, Assam, and DATSAS (Dr Aabaji Thatte Seva Aur Anusandhan Sanstha), which got about ₹140 crore for a cancer hospital in Nagpur. These numbers come straight from ONGC’s own CSR annual reports, which anyone can find on the ONGC website. These facts are correct, and it’s important to say so clearly before adding anything else. The other 85% The 14.7% figure doesn’t show the full picture. Out of ONGC’s ₹4,531 crore CSR spend, about ₹3,863 crore, a little over 85%, went to organisations that have no connection to the RSS, spread across more than 1,980 other organisations and projects. If we look at ONGC’s yearly CSR reports, which are publicly available since 2018-19, it becomes clear how wide this spending actually is. In the financial year 2024-25 alone, ONGC funded medical equipment for S.M. Dev Civil Hospital and Karimganj Civil Hospital in Assam, including anaesthesia workstations, ICU ventilators, and digital radiography systems along with an auditorium for a nursing college in Haridwar, seven Anganwadi buildings for child development services in Coimbatore, a solar power plant for the Brahma Kumaris’ retreat centre in Gurugram, and an AI-enabled machine to help clean garbage from a lake in Thane. None of these organisations has any RSS connection; they range from government-run civil hospitals to a Sikh charitable trust running an ambulance service in West Bengal. ONGC’s FY2018-19 records show the same pattern on a larger scale. HelpAge India received over ₹7 crore for mobile medical units serving elderly citizens across the country. The Akshaya Patra Foundation got funding for vehicles to deliver school meals in Rajasthan and Jharkhand. During the Kerala floods, ONGC funded relief work through Habitat for Humanity, and after Cyclone Gaja hit Tamil Nadu, it funded emergency food and solar-light distribution through local relief groups. Thousands of smaller grants that same year went toward building toilets in villages across Bihar, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh, installing handpumps and solar streetlights in remote areas, and supporting Kendriya Vidyalaya schools nationally, the latter alone receiving over ₹53 crore in a single year. This spending also touches groups that have nothing to do with ideology at all: the Wildlife Trust of India and Wildlife Conservation Society India for conservation work, the Indian Mountaineering Foundation for training and expeditions, Sulabh International for sanitation projects across multiple states, and organisations supporting the disabled, such as the Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti, which is known for providing artificial limbs at low or no cost. Taken together, this shows an organisation whose CSR spending is genuinely broad, covering healthcare, education, disaster relief, sanitation, wildlife protection, and support for marginalised communities, delivered through everyone from national NGOs to local Gram Panchayats. The ₹668 crore figure The News Minute reported is accurate. But it represents a small part of a much larger CSR budget that mostly goes elsewhere, to a very different mix of recipients. It’s simple math, and that’s exactly why it’s the strongest piece of context to start with. Concentration, not distribution It’s worth looking closely at how the ₹668 crore is actually spread out among the 20 organisations. Almost all of it, about ₹574 crore, or roughly 86%, went to just two organisations: BAVP and DATSAS. The other 18 organisations together received the remaining ₹94 crore or so, in amounts ranging from about ₹1 crore to ₹15.53 crore each. This matters because hospitals and cancer institutes are expensive to build. A single large healthcare project can easily cost hundreds of crores, while most other kinds of CSR work, like schools, hostels, and disaster relief, cost far less. So when two hospital-building projects account for the bulk of the RSS-linked total, the 14.7% figure is really being driven by the scale of two specific projects rather than by RSS-linked organisations broadly receiving large sums across the board. The News Minute report was trying to hide this information. The institutions behind the nnumbers BAVP was established in 1989 and runs several functioning hospitals, including Dr. Hedgewar Hospital in Aurangabad and the newer hospital in Assam, which is a 300-bed facility with 21 specialities and is empanelled under the government’s Ayushman Bharat health insurance scheme. It offers care at low, published rates, including discounts for patients below the poverty line. DATSAS built the National Cancer Institute in Nagpur, a 470-bed facility that opened in 2023. Both organisations are registered and have a real, documented history of medical work. The News Minute reported the leadership and founding history of both organisations do have RSS ties, But it’s useful to hold both facts at once: these are functioning institutions doing real healthcare work, and they also have documented links to the RSS. One doesn’t erase the other. What the organisations say Uday Kuntal, Akhil Bhartiya Prachar Pramukh of Rashtriya Sewa Bharati, said he did not have complete knowledge of the specifics of The News Minute’s report and was not in a position to confirm its findings without seeing the facts directly. He pushed back on the framing that RSS itself is not a single registered entity operating at the district level, but that the organisations associated with it, including Rashtriya Sewa Bharati, are separately registered and publish their information on their own websites. He said it becomes easy to target nationalist organisations simply for being labelled as such, when in reality they are working for the country. Kuntal said it was misleading to suggest that CSR funds were given specifically to RSS-linked organisations because of that link. According to him, organisations like his own work in areas such as hospitals and charity, and the CSR data reflects the projects they’ve undertaken, not an ideological allocation. He said framing it as money being deliberately routed to RSS was inaccurate and manipulative. He also pointed out that his organisation runs training programmes on how to use CSR funding effectively for social work across India for the first time, and noted that several large organisations have also declined or cancelled CSR partnerships with them in the past, which he offered as evidence against the idea of an easy or automatic funding pipeline. Conclusion Both things are true, and neither cancels the other out. ONGC directed ₹668 crore, 14.7% of a decade’s CSR spending, to organisations with documented RSS links. That is not a rounding error or a technicality. It is a substantial sum, and two organisations alone, BAVP and DATSAS, absorbed the bulk of it. The News Minute’s numbers hold up under scrutiny, and no amount of context should be used to quietly wave that away. But precision cuts both ways. A ₹668 crore figure driven almost entirely by two hospital-building projects is not the same story as ₹668 crore spread thinly across twenty organisations as a pattern of ideological favouritism, and conflating the two, even unintentionally, misleads readers about what actually happened. Large capital healthcare projects cost hundreds of crores by nature; that is, arithmetic, not apologetics. Meanwhile, the ₹3,863 crore sitting alongside that figure, 85% of the total, tells a different story than the headline number alone suggests, funding sanitation, schools, disaster relief, and disability welfare through more than 1,980 organisations with no RSS connection at all. Neither fact is a rebuttal of the other. A reader who takes away only “ONGC funnelled money to the RSS” due to TNM’s headline and their own bias has missed the shape of the spending.