Why is India rejecting any foreign Aid help?

[cscraja]

Re: Why is India rejecting any foreign Aid help?

There are two elements to any relief work: a) do you have the money/ medicines/ clothes/ food and b) can you reach them to the affected people?

Very few 'donors' offer cash anywhere. Typically, they offer medicines, clothes, tents, food packets. India's experience in the past has not been great with these stuff - the clothes are not what the affected people want; the medicines are unfamiliar to even the doctors and people would play safe by not using them; the food is typically unplatable to even the starving masses used to different tastes - frozen food items are not really what a typical Indian would have ever seen, let alone tasted. Hence, except for cash, anything else is typically a waste. Of course the labours of volunteers is in a different class, but there is no shortage of manual labour in India.

If cash is an option, the only way out for governments (as distinct from NGOs) is to route it through the government of India. Thus aid teams are not really useful.

In many part of Tamil Nadu, the clothes (Indian clothes at that) offered to the survivors were discarded. Newspapers showed photographs of masses of donated clothing lying on the roads. People prefer cash!

Now to the question of access. Andamans, more affected than TN is a case in point. The airstrip there is/ was pretty unusable. The Air Force bases were flooded. So, even if say, the Belgians were allowed, they would have to cool their heels in Madras or Calcutta.

Not all the islands of the Andamans are accessible even to mainland Indians. This was a conscious decision made many decades ago to protect the original inhabitants of these islands (many of whom are not familiar with what we call modern civilization and treat any 'intruder' either Indian or foreign as an enemy). This was a lesson learnt the hard way when people from the mainland who went there during the British days took with them their diseases. Many natives, with no resistance to these diseases simply died.

I am not denying the element of pride that may have gone into the decision. Unless one is desperate, one should avoid foreign aid.

In the early fifities, an european nation apparently donated tonnes of milk powder to the poor country. A minister decided that this powder will not be given away free, but sold at marginal rates. The proceeds were used to build a flourishing farmers' milk cooperative system in Gujarat which to date gives a tought fight to the multinationals in the diary industry. Any aid should be used to build up infrastructure to the extent possible. Of course, I don't think present day ministers would have the foresight.

[system]

Re: Why is India rejecting any foreign Aid help?

India defends refusal to accept foreign aid
By Edward Luce
Published: January 5 2005 17:44 | Last updated: January 5 2005 17:44

New Delhi on Wednesday declared an end to the search and rescue phase of its tsunami disaster operation having accounted for 98 per cent of all probable Indian survivors. “We are now moving into phase two of our operations where the accent will be on restoring normal life,” said Shyam Saran, India’s foreign secretary.

Senior officials also strongly rejected criticisms that India’s refusal to accept foreign aid had hindered relief to its own victims. Foreign aid officials have expressed mounting frustration with New Delhi’s refusal to accept offers of help in a disaster that has cost 10,000 Indian lives.

But Mr Saran on Wednesday said no external help had been needed and that foreign assistance - including India’s largest ever foreign aid effort - should always have been targeted at the far worse affected countries of Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Maldives.

“Any suggestion that there has been a lack of response [within India] is completely misplaced,” said Mr Saran. “In terms of not accepting foreign assistance, we feel we have all the resources to cope . . . Our response to this disaster was very prompt and effective.”

Aid workers say it is too early to tell whether India’s relief effort was in any way hindered by its rejection of foreign aid, particularly in the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where up to 4,000 are thought to have died. But foreign aid officials have praised the quality of the disaster relief effort in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu where up to 7,000 died.

In contrast, foreign diplomats say they are in little doubt that one of New Delhi’s key aims in the wake of the tsunami has been to project India as an emerging great power that gives out rather than receives humanitarian aid. Many assume New Delhi’s stance is also tied up with its goal of achieving a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

“India wants to be seen as part of the solution, not part of the problem,” said a senior western diplomat. “It has certainly been part of the solution in countries like Sri Lanka. But if assessments in the future show that India’s refusal of foreign aid cost Indian lives, then this will not add to its reputation.”

India’s ambivalence towards foreign assistance is deeply rooted but has recently become more forthright following years of relatively high economic growth. Last year New Delhi reduced to six the number of foreign countries permitted to provide aid to India.

Partly in response to neighbouring China’s growing aid programmes, New Delhi has also stepped up its own donor efforts in countries such as Burma, Afghanistan and even in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Last week India was one of three countries, including Australia and Japan, invited by the US to form the “core group” of countries providing emergency relief to tsunami victims in the region. Indian aircraft carrying emergency supplies were the first to reach Sri Lanka, where more than 25,000 have lost their lives, on December 26, the day of the disaster.

But many in India have pointed to the sharp contrast between New Delhi’s newfound willingness to tolerate a prominent US military role in the region - including the deployment of US marines in Sri Lanka last week - and its continuing sensitivity to any external assistance.

“The idea of self-reliance is still the default position of both India’s left and right and it does look outdated,” said Raja Mohan, a security analyst in New Delhi. “What is new is India’s happiness to work to this extent with the US military in its backyard. India knows China would try to fill any regional gap vacated by the US military.”

Foreign officials also point to a gap between New Delhi’s diplomatic rhetoric and the actions of administrators on the ground. In Tamil Nadu, which has one of India’s more effective state governments, civil servants have shown no compunction in requesting foreign help. By contrast foreign agencies have been kept out of the Andaman Islands, which is governed directly from Delhi.

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“The quality of the relief effort in Tamil Nadu gets very high marks by any standards,” said Steven Hollingworth, India head of Care, the international aid agency, which is supplying water and household equipment to some of the 700,000 affected people in the state.
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http://news.ft.com/cms/s/90300afe-5f3d-11d9-8cca-00000e2511c8.html

[system]

Re: Why is India rejecting any foreign Aid help?

Here is a good editorial on this topic ..

Indian Refusal to Accept Aid Is No Churlishness: Andy Mukherjee
Jan. 6 (Bloomberg) – The Indian government’s refusal to accept overseas aid for tsunami relief has invited a sharp rebuke from the country’s largest English-language newspaper.

There's a genuine outpouring of global sympathy for the affected,'' an editorial in the Times of India said. It’s churlish on our part to refuse such well-meant offers.‘’

With more than 15,000 people killed or missing, India’s toll from the Dec. 26 tragedy is bigger than Thailand’s. Only Indonesia and Sri Lanka have reported more casualties. Among the four worst affected nations, India’s annual per capita income of $2,900 is the lowest in terms of international purchasing power.

Moreover, the Indian government doesn’t really have a lot of cash lying around. Its budget deficit as a ratio of gross domestic product was 4.8 percent in 2003, the fourth highest in the world after Japan, Israel and Cyprus, according to International Monetary Fund’s statistics on 34 major economies.

Yet, not only did Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh say no to U.S. President George W. Bush and every other national leader who offered help, his government also announced financial assistance totaling $22.5 million to Sri Lanka, Maldives, Indonesia and Thailand.

Ambition, Not Fear

What’s India out to prove? It isn’t that by accepting a few million dollars in aid the country would have become a stooge of some foreign power. As Brett Schaefer, a fellow at the Washington- based Heritage Foundation, has noted, after receiving $935 million in U.S. assistance between 1993 and 1998, India voted against the U.S. in the United Nations 81 percent of the time --a more formidable show of opposition than by China, Libya, and Iran.

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The real reason behind India’s refusal to accept tsunami aid is ambition, not fear. India is campaigning hard for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. It has a billion people, a space program, a nuclear bomb, and a thriving computer-software industry. What it needs to show now, India reckons, is greater confidence in its own capability.

As part of that effort, India decided in 2003 to phase out foreign aid from all but six major donors – the U.S., the U.K., the European Commission, Japan, Germany and Russia.

Also, in 2003, India became a creditor nation to the IMF, 12 years after surviving a balance-of-payment crisis with the help of a bailout organized by the international lender.

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Is It Fair?

India’s aspiration to be counted as an emerging power is legitimate. Still, in denying foreign help, is the government being fair to citizens? Shouldn’t it try to ``maximize our resources and ensure that relief reaches the right people at the right time,‘’ as the Times of India editorial puts it?

India’s rejection of overseas aid isn’t being greeted with unanimous criticism. I like this recent trend of not taking handouts,'' says one comment posted on Sulekha.com, an online community of Indians worldwide. All the pictures were seeing doesn’t indicate we’re equipped and adequately resourced,‘’ says another.

The Times editorial misses a few crucial points. An offer of government-to-government help isn’t an immediate wire transfer of funds. More often than not, it’s an offer in kind, comprising goods that an affected country may either not need in the first place or no longer require by the time the shipment arrives.

Also, disaster aid is at times just a transfer of funds from developmental aid already committed under country-specific assistance programs. So in net terms, no new money is available.

Politics of Aid

Thirdly, by rejecting foreign assistance, the Indian government has willingly invited greater scrutiny on its relief efforts. One can, therefore, expect a better-than-usual response from the bureaucracy. Already, the Indian air force has mounted one of its biggest peacetime operations in history.

And finally, like it or not, when it comes to disaster assistance, both recipient and donor nations play games all the time. A study titled ``The Politics of Humanitarian Aid: U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, 1964-1995’’ by political scientist A. Cooper Drury of the University of Missouri at Columbia and other researchers presents some disturbing findings.

The authors conclude that the decision by the U.S. government on whether to help a country after a disaster is markedly political. The size of the aid package is somewhat less so, though it is to a great extent influenced by media coverage of a tragedy: One article in the New York Times is worth more disaster aid dollars than 1,500 fatalities, the study says.

Diplomacy at Work

Our analysis puts to rest the notion that U.S. foreign disaster assistance is purely objective and non-political,'' the authors say. It is not even close.‘’

By the same token, India’s own offer of help to other tsunami- affected nations – laudable though it is – isn’t purely out of humanitarian concerns.

India, which is vying with China for economic and political influence in Asia, couldn’t have avoided making a commitment, especially after its more-populous neighbor raised its support for tsunami relief to $60 million from $2.6 million.

The reason India has sent at least 11 naval ships and flown several sorties to Sri Lanka is only partly because it’s the island’s closest neighbor and, therefore, in the best position to help. The decision is also a diplomatic one.

India has always perceived itself as a regional power,'' says Robert Karniol, Asia-Pacific editor at Jane's Defence Weekly in Bangkok. With being a regional power comes responsibilities to respond to these kinds of crisis. India is accepting that responsibility.‘’

http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_mukherjee&sid=aqGPzcBe8620