This paper examines refugee work by Service Civil International (SCI) in Faridabad industrial settlement in 1950-1952. The postcolonial era in South Asia posed new challenges for the humanitarian organisation’s work and ideas. Having established a network of collaborators among leading Indian National Congress members in the mid-1930s, the organisation reinitiated work among refugees in Faridabad in 1950 and expanded into small-scale development work in health and infrastructure projects across South Asia in the following decades. The Faridabad industrial settlement would become the model for small-scale industrialization where SCI worked with skills and health of refugees from the N.W.F.P. Based in Switzerland, SCI had since the 1920s organised international work camps in Europe after wars and natural disasters in order to form inter-personal relations and foster reconciliation. For the SCI, the 1950s represented a shift towards development work in alignment with the goals of the independent Indian nation-state. Without the explicit aims of conflict resolution, forming inter-personal relationships remained an important feature of the organisations profile. The case of SCI sheds light on continuities and breaks in aims of emerging international humanitarianism after pre- and post-independence. The presentation first seeks to understand SCI’s motives and ideas behind the first project in post-independence India; and secondly, it analyses its cooperation with other relief organisations and the policy in the first five-year plan by the Indian planning commission.