Trust Government Websites for Donations

Recently Indian State Kerala was struck with an unmanageable flood. It was the worst flooding in Kerala in nearly a century. With 370+ deaths and $3 billion property damage Kerala is in a devastating state of emergency. Rescue and rehabilitation work is still undergoing. And, whenever a country or its states face an emergency and run into so much damage – the need for public donation comes becomes an unavoidable option.

Thanks to media and effective communication channels – today, there are a lot of helping hands and volunteers who are ready to donate funds and render help. The problem comes when some institution or an organization sets up a fake donation/charity cell via a website and collects the donation in the name of the state which was facing an emergency. And, uses that money for private gains and profits. Instead of passing it to the right authorities.

If you type Kerala flood donation in Google you will find many websites trying to get the first-page impression via the Google Adwords program. I have no idea about all those websites and their affiliation with the Government of Kerala.

From domain name point of view – I have understood that the .gov.in top-level domain is a domain name which everyone cannot get easily. It’s reserved for government entities only. And, it must meet certain authorization before it’s granted for specific use.

.Gov tld is followed by the country code. For example, for India it’s .gov.in and so on for other countries.

The Kerala government is currently using the site https://donation.cmdrf.kerala.gov.in/

CMDRF stands for Chief Minister’s Distress Relief Fund d3

I think the donor’s money will be put to the intended use to help out the victims of the flood if they use the https://donation.cmdrf.kerala.gov.in/ website.

There are lot of websites that are using the .org tld but the fact is a .org tld has no restriction and anyone can register it, setsup a website and ask for donations. A .org website is generaly not to be construed always to be a non-profitable one.

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