Britain’s decision to stop giving development aid to India from 2016 marks a turning point in its relations with India.
The decision was taken by the UK government in 2012 after a domestic outcry about India’s growing economic status.
In 2012, then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had said British aid was “a peanut” (sic) in India’s total development spend and that the country could very well do without it.
This statement had led to huge protests in the UK against its aid to India. Many said the UK taxpayer does not need to donate to a state that is itself a foreign aid donor, which is classified by the World Bank as a middle income country (MIC) and whose economy is growing.
As per the statistics released by the Department for International Development (DfID), India received £279 million in 2014, a £10 million increase over the previous year.
Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the UK’s Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “British taxpayers will be staggered that their money is being used to support projects in a country that can well afford to look after its own citizens, especially since we have been told aid to India would be scaled back.”
While financial aid will come to an end, the UK will continue to offer grants and technical assistance to India.
Unperturbed by this development, India’s Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj on December 23 said the move implies that Britain recognises India’s economic strength.
Britons argue why should the UK pay for poverty relief to a nuclear-power country which has sent a mission to Mars, which boasts more billionaires than Britain and itself pays millions of pounds a year to needy nations? It’s not fair to get aid from another country when you are spending money on an agenda far above the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter. The focus should be on trade and more trade, not aid.
Despite many positives like Indian economy growing at over 7% a year, or for that matter India now being a middle income nation, the country is still home to a third of the world's poorest people. About 300 million Indians live on less than $1.25 a day. Forty per cent of the world’s malnourished children are in India, with 1.3 million children dying in India each year from easily preventable illnesses like diarrhoea, pneumonia and malaria.
The flip side, however, is if the aid is not stopped, it will give Britain some level of command to oversee and inquire into how that money is put to use. In India, the state governments allocate millions of dollars towards poverty alleviation, but they hardly reach the poor. A majority is siphoned off allegedly by bureaucrats and middlemen. An independent overseer, perhaps, will go a long way in curbing the corrupt system.
