The Last Lifeline: Christian NGOs Bridge Gap In India’s Post-USAID Crisis
NEW DELHI — In the bamboo-and-tarpaulin shelters of Thaizawl camp, 11 miles from the nearest town in the hills of Mizoram, a 75-year-old woman named Nuhawih survives on rice, lentils and salt.
She walked for days through jungle mountain paths to escape the Myanmar military's campaign of terror. Today, no doctor has visited her camp. The vitamins and medicines she needs are beyond reach. What keeps her and the more than 600 people around her alive is a fragile web of church donations, local tithes and the tireless intervention of faith-based organizations — a web now stretched to breaking point.
As the United States undertook a sweeping review and restructuring of its foreign assistance programs in early 2025, suspending or terminating a significant portion of USAID's global awards, the reverberations reached India's most remote border communities.
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Programs that once supported health services, refugee assistance and disaster resilience across South Asia were paused or ended entirely. In India's northeast, where an estimated 30,000 to 35,000 Myanmar Chin refugees have sought safety in Mizoram since the military coup of February 1, 2021, the already precarious humanitarian situation has grown more desperate.
The Chin refugees fled across 315 miles of porous Indo-Myanmar border after the junta seized power, burning villages, torturing civilians and using children as human shields. They came to Mizoram because of something deeper than geography: the Mizo people share linguistic, cultural and religious kinship with the Chin. Most are Baptist Christians. That bond of faith, it turns out, is now the primary safety net in the absence of international funding.
A legal limbo
India has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention and has no national refugee law, leaving Chin asylum-seekers in a legal gray zone. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees is not permitted to operate in India's northeast and has classified most Chin as economic migrants rather than refugees.
Without official refugee status, families cannot access government rations, and their children are routinely turned away from public schools for lack of an Aadhaar card — India's biometric identification document, which is available only to residents, not foreign nationals.
In a fact-finding report from Lunglei district compiled by Dr. Rini Ralte of Women in Action, researchers documented the harrowing realities inside these camps. In Thaizawl camp, 628 people — 40 percent of them children — share seven deteriorating shed structures left vacant by road workers four years earlier.
There is no electricity, no running water, and no toilet infrastructure provided by any government body. Pit latrines dug by the refugees themselves collapse in the monsoon rains, and families collect drinking water from a nearby river mixed with mud.
Twelve disabled residents cannot feed themselves. Five pregnant women and nine nursing mothers have received no visits from medical personnel. A tuberculosis patient lives among the general population because there is no isolation facility. When emergencies arise, the nearest hospital is a difficult 10-mile journey over rutted roads — with no ambulance available anywhere in the vicinity.
The 2020 amendments to India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act slashed the cap on administrative expenses for NGOs from 50 to 20 percent, banned sub-granting, and made it nearly impossible for international funds to flow to smaller grassroots organizations even when those funds exist. The regulatory squeeze, combined with the USAID funding disruptions, has created what aid workers describe as a "pipeline break" — a gap between need and delivery that is growing wider by the week.
In March 2025, the Indian government said the U.S. had cancelled 83% of the programs of USAID — equal to 5,200 contracts — that “spent billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, and in some cases harmed, the core national interests of the United States.”
The Trump administration, according to an internal email, said the State Department let lifesaving projects expire because “there is no strong nexus between the humanitarian response and U.S. national interests.”
Faith steps into the breach
Into this vacuum have stepped local Christian organizations, running what one community health worker described as operations held together by faith and church collections.
The Mission Foundation Movement in Mizoram, which oversees more than 19 projects across the region, has continued delivering relief, relying on donations from congregations, local businesses and individual believers. Village councils have organized food distribution committees. Church networks have mobilized to provide rice, lentils and occasional vegetables to camps that receive nothing from the state.
The pattern is not unique to Mizoram. Across the globe, faith-based organizations — many of them evangelical and mainline Protestant — have historically been the last institutions standing when government funding retreats.
Organizations like World Relief, a Christian humanitarian group operating in multiple countries, have long positioned themselves at the intersection of church mobilization and formal relief delivery. The abrupt disruption of USAID partnerships has forced these groups to lean even harder on their denominational networks and diaspora communities for emergency support.
In the camps of Lunglei district, this looks like Pastor David Yungdaw leading Sunday worship in a crowded bamboo hall and telling his congregation that God's protection carried them through the jungle without injury, despite exhaustion and empty stomachs. It looks like teenage girls carrying elderly women to makeshift toilet sites. It looks like volunteer teachers from among the refugees — themselves displaced and traumatized — gathering children under tarps to teach lessons without books, pencils or a blackboard.
What’s at stake?
As monsoon season approaches, conditions in camps like Thaizawl and Phairuang become life-threatening. Bamboo walls dissolve in rain, stagnant water breeds malaria and dengue, and wood-burning stoves fill unventilated rooms with smoke inhaled by infants and pregnant women. Ralte's report warns plainly: without urgent intervention, deaths will occur.
The faith-based organizations doing this work are not equipped to fill a gap left by the withdrawal of a global superpower's humanitarian architecture. They lack the funding, staffing and supply chains. What they have is presence, trust and a theological conviction that their neighbors — even foreign ones — deserve care. In the Chin context, that theological conviction is reinforced by kinship: the Mizo church sees in the Chin refugee not a stranger but a cousin, a fellow Christian and a fellow survivor of history.
What advocates and community leaders in Mizoram are asking for is not charity. They are asking for refugee status recognition from the Indian government, for the UNHCR to be permitted access to the northeast, and for international donors — including faith-based foundations in the United States and Europe — to find ways to channel support directly to grassroots organizations despite the FCRA constraints.
Until that happens, the last lifeline in these hills remains what it has always been: a congregation passing a collection plate, a pastor carrying medicine on a motorbike, a woman who walked seven days through the jungle and still, somehow, finds the strength to help her neighbor.
Rishabh Jain is an India-based journalist who writes on climate change, sustainability, migration and human rights.