Who you work with#
Atria Foundation is the charitable arm of Atria Group. It runs food kitchens and food trucks, the Atria Mega Skill Centre, healthcare initiatives and plantation drives. Its stated numbers include over 1.7 crore cumulative meals served, more than 4,000 people trained in trades such as tailoring, hospitality and IT, and around 620 placed with employers including KPR Mills, Arvind Mills, Hotel Leela Palace and Reliance Trends. It operates around 20 kitchens across roughly 255 locations with 200 or more volunteers.
LoveAll is its social loyalty card. Members pay ₹1,000 a year, get discounts across a network of Bengaluru restaurants and retailers, and their money funds four causes: Food, Education, Healthcare and Bio-Diversity.
The situation#
LoveAll makes a promise most charities do not: that you can see exactly where your money went. The Foundation states it is moving its fund flow onto a blockchain so that transparency is coded in rather than promised.
The programme also wants to grow beyond funding Atria Foundation’s own work, and become a funding engine that other registered NGOs can plug into. That ambition is where the difficulty lives.
What is going wrong#
Nothing is broken yet. The promise has been made and the system that would keep it does not exist. Right now a member who asks “what did my ₹1,000 do” gets an aggregate number, not a traceable answer.
The harder problem is that a naive ledger would be wrong in a way that matters. Indian tax law treats “we spent money on our own programme” and “we gave money to another NGO” completely differently. A ledger that reports ₹1,00,000 sent to a partner NGO as ₹1,00,000 of impact misstates the Foundation’s tax position, even when the partner genuinely spent every rupee.
Why it is not fixed yet#
Four sets of rules apply at the same time, and satisfying one while ignoring another still leaves you non-compliant:
- Income Tax Act — a registered charity must apply at least 85% of its income to charitable purposes each year. Since the Finance Act 2023, a general donation from one registered NGO to another counts as only 85% application for the giver. Corpus donations do not count at all
- Companies Act, Section 135 — for corporate money to count as CSR, the receiving entity must be registered on Form CSR-1 and hold valid 12AB and 80G
- FCRA — since the 2020 amendment, passing foreign contributions on to any other organisation is prohibited outright. This is a hard stop, not a tax inefficiency
- Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 — requires that personal data can be corrected and erased. A blockchain cannot easily erase anything. The main obligations are expected around May 2027
That last one is the genuine engineering tension in this problem, and nobody in the industry has solved it cleanly.
Skills and Expertise#
- Branch — CS, IT. The most demanding software problem in this pool.
- Technical skills — Distributed ledgers and smart contracts, cryptographic hashing and signatures, key management, systems design under regulatory constraint, privacy-preserving data design, payment flows.
- Other skills — Reading legislation and turning rules into system behaviour, arguing an architecture decision on evidence, explaining a technical design to a non-technical trustee.