Privacy Policy

Velumic Foundation is a Section 8 not-for-profit company registered in Uttar Pradesh, India, under the Companies Act, 2013. This policy covers the website you are currently using.

If you use the Contact form on this website, we collect the name, email address, and message you enter. This information is sent directly from your browser to Formspree, a third-party form-delivery service, which forwards it to us by email. We do not keep a separate copy of it ourselves.

If you visit the English-language site, a small script checks your browser's language settings and time zone to decide whether to offer you the Hindi version by default. This check happens entirely in your browser; the result is remembered only in your own browser's local storage and is never sent to us.

Section 80G of the Income Tax Act, 1961 requires not-for-profit companies to report certain donor details annually (Form 10BD) so that donors can claim a tax deduction (Form 10BE). Once this website's donation form is live, it will collect: your full name, complete address, a unique identification number (PAN preferred; Aadhaar, passport, driving licence, or voter ID only if you have no PAN), mobile number, email address, donation amount, date, payment mode, and — optionally — which of our three charitable objects you wish to support.

You will be shown a plain-language consent statement and asked to confirm it before this information is collected, explaining why it is needed and that it will be reported to the Income Tax Department as required by law.

Donor information is used to: issue an immediate acknowledgement of your donation; file the annual Form 10BD statement with the Income Tax Department and generate your Form 10BE certificate; and, where you have provided contact details without completing a donation, allow our team to follow up with you about supporting our work.

We do not use donor information for any other purpose, and we do not sell or rent it to third parties.

PAN and Aadhaar numbers are treated as sensitive personal data. They are encrypted when stored, are never displayed in full within any internal tool our team uses day to day (only the last 4 digits are shown, where a reference is needed at all), and access is restricted to the people who actually need them for statutory filing. Our telecalling team can see a donor's name, phone number, email, and giving interest, but not their PAN or Aadhaar number.

We default to asking for a PAN rather than an Aadhaar number, and only ask for Aadhaar (or another accepted ID) if you tell us you do not have a PAN.

This website only processes donations made through digital payment methods (UPI, card, netbanking, and similar) via our payment gateway. Under the Income Tax Act, cash donations above ₹2,000 are not eligible for an 80G deduction; because every donation made through this site is digital, this limit does not affect gifts made here. Donations in kind (goods rather than money) are not currently accepted through this website and are not eligible for an 80G deduction.

Contact form messages are processed by Formspree (see "Information collected today" above). Once online donations launch, payment details will be processed by Razorpay, our payment gateway, which is regulated by the Reserve Bank of India as a payment aggregator. Lead and donation records are stored in a database provided by Neon, accessed only through this website's own backend running on Vercel. None of these providers may use your information for anything beyond processing your gift, delivering this website, and complying with our legal reporting obligations.

If you submit the Contact form or the interest form on our Donate page without going on to make a donation (a "lead"), we keep that record for 12 months from your last contact with us, after which it is deleted unless you have since made a donation.

Once you make a donation, we keep your donation record — including the information listed above — for as long as required by the Income Tax Act, 1961 and the rules governing our Section 80G reporting obligations, which extends beyond the tax year in which you gave. We do not delete a donation record simply because you ask us to before that period has ended; see "Requesting deletion of your information" below.

When you give, you may choose — separately from the consent you give for income-tax reporting — to have your gift shown on the public board on our Donate page. This choice is not ticked for you. If you do not tick it, nothing about you appears anywhere in public.

If you do tick it, you decide what is shown:

Your name, in the form you choose. Your full name, your first name and the initial of your surname, your business's name, or "Anonymous".

Whether the amount is shown. It is not shown unless you ask for it to be.

A short message, if you want one.

What is never shown, whatever you choose: your telephone number, your email address, your postal address, and your PAN or other identification number. These are held for income-tax reporting only, and the part of our website that draws the public board has no access to the records that contain them.

Your gift always counts towards the totals shown for each of our three objects, even if you give anonymously, because a total identifies nobody.

Messages and business names are checked by a person before they appear. A plain personal name may appear straight away. We may decline to publish something — see our Terms & Conditions for what we will not publish and what happens then.

You can change your mind at any time. After you give, we give you a private link to a page where you can hide your name, hide the amount, remove your message or take down your Wall of Fame brick, yourself, without asking anybody. If you lose the link, contact us using the details on our Contact page and we will do it for you.

After you give, we create a link you can send to other people. The link contains a random code and nothing else — it carries no name, no email address and nothing that identifies you. If someone gives after following your link, we record that their gift came through that code, so that we can say how many gifts your link brought.

If you also choose to appear on our Referral Champions list — a separate choice — that list shows the display name you picked and the number of gifts your link brought. It never shows amounts, and it is never a ranking by money.

While you are on our site, the code from a link you followed is kept in your own browser's temporary storage for that visit only. It is not a cookie, it is not shared with any other website, and it is gone when you close the tab.

If you buy a brick on our Wall of Fame, the words you choose for it are public, and they stay public. Your brick appears on the live wall on our Donate page for the number of days stated for the type of brick you chose, counted from the day it is approved rather than the day you paid. After that it moves to our permanent wall, where it stays.

You can take your brick down yourself at any time, from the same private link described above.

We count how people move through this website, so that we can tell where it is confusing or where it fails. We do it in a way that cannot identify you.

There is no cookie, and no tracking across visits. When you open the site, your browser makes up a random number for that tab. It is used to join up the steps of a single visit — for example, that the same visit opened the giving panel and then reached the payment step. It is stored only in that tab, it is not stored anywhere on your device after you close it, and it is gone when the tab closes. We cannot connect today's visit to one you made last week, and we cannot connect a visit to a person.

What a measurement record contains. The page you were on (the path only, never the full address), the language you were reading in, whether your screen is phone-, tablet- or desktop-sized, which button you pressed (chosen from a fixed list we wrote in advance), how you arrived — by a shared link, a link from one of our callers, or directly — and which step of the giving form you reached.

What it never contains. Your name, your phone number, your email address, your PAN or Aadhaar number, your postal address, how much you gave, anything you typed, and your IP address. Not a shortened version of your IP address, and not a scrambled one. We do not read it at all.

We do not record your screen and we do not build heatmaps. No software on this site watches your pointer, your scrolling or your typing.

We do not use a third-party analytics service. Nothing on this site sends anything to Google Analytics or any similar company. The counting is done by our own website, into our own database.

We delete these records after thirteen months.

What we use it for. To find the places where people give up, and fix them. These numbers are seen only by the foundation's own administrators. We do not publish them, we do not put them in our fundraising material, and we do not use them to set prices.

You can ask us to delete information we hold about you using the details on our Contact page. What we are able to do depends on what the information is.

If you are a lead who has not made a donation, we will delete your record on request.

If you have made a donation that has already been included in our Form 10BD statement to the Income Tax Department, we generally cannot delete that record. Section 80G's reporting requirement is a statutory obligation that overrides a request to erase it — deleting it would leave our filing referring to a record we no longer hold. We can correct a donation record that was recorded wrongly, by filing a corrected statement, but we cannot delete it outright while it remains part of a filed statement. Where deletion isn't possible for this reason, we will tell you why rather than leave your request unanswered.

If you have questions about this policy or about information you have given us, contact us using the details on our Contact page.

We may update this policy as this website's features change, particularly once online donations launch. The date above shows when it was last updated.