Indian society has a long history of giving. Among different forms of giving ‘faith-based giving’ was understood to be more pronounced in India. But recent efforts to understand the different facets of giving in India have brought forth the fact that there are emerging alternates that need to be documented and appropriately utilized.

 The marked interest round the world in promoting the acts of giving in recent years has also opened new vistas of philanthropy. This has encouraged new instruments and agents of giving. Thus there has arisen a time where we need to look at new donor constituencies and harness the existing practices to the best of the situation. Channeling resources from richer groups to those who are in need has been the base of all charity.

 Indian society undergoing rapid changes is providing a strange context of values of traditionality and modernity juxtaposed to each other.

The enmeshing of the religious motivation to give and the modern conscious choice to give to particular cause among the growing middle class has resulted in new trends in giving.

The market as the ruling power has time again has been questioned in the Indian context and the shifts that have emerged in the Northern countries have made the corporate also to look at the societal issues not just in the light of monitory profit but also with in the social capital context.

 Recent studies undertaken by PRIA, TSRRC & Project on Third Sector Governance on Indian TSOs indicate that majority of the TSOs in India depend on domestic funding sources. In this direction the two articles in this volume becomes meaningful.

 Another area that needs to be very seriously addressed is the rural giving dimension and revisiting the concept of giving it self. Giving has been understood only in relation  to monetary  form, but giving of individual time and giving in kind are more pronounced in Indian rural population that needs to be understood and tapped by the TSOs in India.