Re: UK: Public demands aid cut to India
An excellent article in Guardian:
Is India ready to refuse UK aid?
Aid is a subject vulnerable to a near continuous identity crisis. What is it for? Who should get it, and what should they use it for? All these questions are thrown into sharp relief by India. Here is a country which, as Andrew Mitchell, the UK secretary for international development, puts it, “is roaring out of poverty”. It is the 11th largest economy in the world. It is spending $31.5bn on its defence budget and $1.25bn on a space programme. So why, in these cash-strapped times, is the British government giving aid to India?
*This issue will be considered by the UK parliament’s select committee on international development this week, and is likely to prompt some discussion on the blogosphere (Andy Sumner, from the IDS has blogged on it). It is a key question in the international development department’s internal review – which is due to be published shortly – and there has even been some speculation in India that the UK deliberations could be shortcircuited by India itself deciding it no longer wants British aid.
This should be a straightforward issue – but beware, it’s no such thing. One key expert admitted to me that they change their minds from backing to ending aid to India every other day. Nor is it a trivial issue. Since 1998, India has received more British aid than any other country, a total of £1.5bn in the last five years. India counts as one of 22 UK priority countries in its aid programmes. A lot of money is at stake.
For a group of Conservatives, India is a prime example for their “charity begins and ends at home” approach. When Mitchell came into office, he made great fanfare about cutting aid programmes to China and Russia; allegedly, some in his department wanted to add India to that list but No 10 prevailed. India is still regarded by the UK public as a poor country, despite its recent economic growth and global power.
And the truth is, that perception is absolutely accurate. A third of the world’s poor live in India – more than all those designated as poor living in sub-Saharan Africa. Shockingly, half of all Indian children are malnourished. This poverty is concentrated in just four Indian states, which account for one-fifth of the world’s poor. So if aid is about relieving poverty, UK aid to India is entirely justified.
Some hopeful observers point to a new determination on the part of India’s ruling elite to tackle poverty. Sonia Gandhi recently chaired a two-day seminar with the US economist Joseph Stiglitz on how to provide universal “social policy coverage” – basic services in health and education. It was a point made by Gordon Brown in his book Beyond the Crash, when he wrote about the new statutory rights to food and to primary education.
But there is a long way to go, and the sharp inequalities in India present a stark dilemma for those in charge of aid budgets. As many developing economies grow, more and more of the world’s poorest are in middle-income countries. As Sumner has pointed out in his argument on the new bottom billion, 72% of the world’s poorest are in middle-income countries.
Increasingly, much of the world’s poverty is a result of inequality, rather than the conventional model of countries caught in a poverty trap, and the role of aid in helping to spring the trap. That presents a real challenge to state aid agencies: how do they justify taking their taxpayers’ money to send aid to countries where a hugely wealthy elite is benefiting from an economic boom and failing to meet the challenge of distributing wealth? Aren’t India’s poor their responsibility?
So this is a tough one to sell to British voters, but I suspect even Mitchell will try. There are other crucial issues at stake. On all the official statements, UK aid claims it is aimed at relieving poverty. But of course aid has always been about other things as well. It is about projecting national prestige and status. After Britain lost an empire, it developed a new global role through its aid programme – an ambition that Blair and Brown shared and which David Cameron has signed up to. An aid programme is a way of opening doors to influence in a country, to advancing indirectly your own interests, and a way of making friends. All of these self-interested motives play a big role in the decision on aid to India; it is one of the new global powers and the UK has to find a range of ways to develop ties. Aid is one of them.
There is, of course, the wild card in this debate. There has been some discussion that India will politely reject UK aid. It represents a tiny amount to the country, and the symbolic value of such a rebuff would be considerable. It would be a way to boost national pride, make a statement of independence that draws a line under the centuries of being an imperial possession, and mark India’s new self confidence.
