Faith Based Organizations: Mapping the Research Landscape in India

In a country like India, faith plays a major component in constructing cultural, sociological and personal behavior. Around ninety nine percent of Indians choose to label themselves as belonging to a particular religion according to Census reports. Moreover, with a multitude of faiths, India is a country made of people with strong identification to their faiths. With their extraordinary moral authority and power to serve, faith-based organizations (FBOs) are able to set service priorities for communities and target areas in focus. The nature, magnitude, activities and relationships of faith based organizations have remained poorly understood and documented, despite their perceptible importance in service delivery, philanthropic aid, reconstruction anddevelopment. Theoverallquestionaddressed bythisthemeis how the faith based organizations can be a centerpiece of research in the Indian context, therefore paving the way for the research landscape in the Indian background. Addressing this idea, the paper conjointly covers broad spectrum of the conceptual idea of faith based organizations, their distinctive organizational structure. Along these lines of consideration, the next segment deals with how faith based organizationsperform as landscapes of service and direct towards community development and strengthening. Lastly, an attempt has been made to sketch upcoming areas of research in the Indian context, where faith is a major part of one's identity and creates new landscapes of inquiry, thus establishing landscapes of service.