[release]
[img]http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02129/Pranab-Mukherjee_2129212b.jpg[/img]
Pranab Mukherjee and other Indian ministers tried to terminate Britain’s aid to their booming country last year - but relented after the British begged them to keep taking the money, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
The disclosure will fuel the rising controversy over Britain’s aid to India.
The country is the world’s top recipient of British bilateral aid, even though its economy has been growing at up to 10 per cent a year and is projected to become bigger than Britain’s within a decade.
Last week India rejected the British-built Typhoon jet as preferred candidate for a £6.3 billion warplane deal, despite the Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, saying that Britain’s aid to Delhi was partly “about seeking to sell Typhoon.”
Mr Mukherjee’s remarks, previously unreported outside India, were made during question time in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament.
“We do not require the aid,” he said, according to the official transcript of the session.
“It is a peanut in our total development exercises [expenditure].” He said the Indian government wanted to “voluntarily” give it up.
According to a leaked memo, the foreign minister, Nirumpama Rao, proposed “not to avail [of] any further DFID [British] assistance with effect from 1st April 2011,” because of the “negative publicity of Indian poverty promoted by DFID”.
But officials at DFID, Britain’s Department for International Development, told the Indians that cancelling the programme would cause “grave political embarrassment” to Britain, according to sources in Delhi.
DFID has sent more than £1 billion of UK taxpayers’ money to India in the last five years and is planning to spend a further £600 million on Indian aid by 2015.
“They said that British ministers had spent political capital justifying the aid to their electorate,” one source told The Sunday Telegraph.
“They said it would be highly embarrassing if the Centre [the government of India] then pulled the plug.”
Amid steep reductions in most British government spending, the NHS and aid have been the only two budgets protected from cuts.
Britain currently pays India around £280 million a year, six times the amount given by the second-largest bilateral donor, the United States. Almost three-quarters of all foreign bilateral aid going to India comes from Britain. France, chosen as favourite to land the warplane deal, gives around £19 million a year.
Controversial British projects have included giving the city of Bhopal £118,000 to help fit its municipal buses and dustcarts with GPS satellite tracking systems. Bhopal’s buses got satellite tracking before most of Britain’s did.
In India, meanwhile, government audit reports found £70 million had disappeared from one DFID-funded project alone.
Around £44,000 of British aid was allegedly siphoned off by one project official to finance a movie directed by her son.
Most aid donors to India have wound down their programmes as it has become officially a “middle-income country,” according to the World Bank.
However, Britain has reallocated its aid spending to focus on India at the expense of some far poorer countries, including the African state of Burundi, which is having its British bilateral aid stopped altogether from next year.
The decision comes even though India has a £6 billion space programme, nuclear weapons and has started a substantial foreign aid programme of its own. It now gives out only slightly less in bilateral aid to other countries than it receives from Western donors.
Supporters of British aid say that India still contains about a third of the world’s poor, with 450 million people living on less than 80p a day. DFID says its programmes — which are now focused on the country’s three poorest states - save at least 17,000 lives a year and have lifted 2.3 million people out of poverty since 2005.
The junior development minister, Alan Duncan, said last week that cutting off British aid to India “would mean that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, will die who otherwise could live.”
However, Mr Mukherjee told the parliament last August that foreign aid from all sources amounted to only 0.4 per cent of India’s gross domestic product. From its own resources, the Indian government has more than doubled spending on health and education since 2003.
Last year, it announced a 17 per cent rise in spending on anti-poverty programmes. Though massive inequalities remain, India has achieved substantial reductions in poverty, from 60 per cent to 42 per cent of the population in the last thirty years.
Emma Boon, campaign director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “It is incredible that ministers have defended the aid we send to India, insisting it is vital, when now we learn that even the Indian government doesn’t want it.”
As long ago as 2005, MPs on the international development select committee found that India “seems to have become increasingly tired of being cast in the role of aid recipient.” In their most recent report on the programme, last year, they said that British aid to the country should “change fundamentally,” with different sources of funding. The report praised a number of DFID projects, but questioned others.
As well as the Indian government, many other Indians are sceptical about British aid. Malini Mehra, director of an Indian anti-poverty pressure group, the Centre for Social Markets, said aid was “entirely irrelevant” to the country’s real problems, which she said were the selfishness of India’s rich and the unresponsiveness of its institutions.
“DFID are not able to translate the investments they make on the ground into actual changes in the kind of structures that hold back progress,” Ms Mehra said.
“Unless we arouse that level of indignation and intolerance of the situation, aid will make no difference whatsoever.”
Mr Mitchell last night defended British aid, saying: “Our completely revamped programme is in India’s and Britain’s national interest and is a small part of a much wider relationship between our two countries.
“We are changing our approach in India. We will target aid at three of India’s poorest states, rather than central Government.
“We will invest more in the private sector, with our programme having some of the characteristics of a sovereign wealth fund. We will not be in India forever, but now is not the time to quit.”
DFID declined to comment on why it had asked the Indian government to continue with a programme it wanted to end.
[/release]
[url]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/9061844/India-tells-Britain-We-dont-want-your-aid.html[/url]
You bloody idiot
Jokes on them. Britain funded their entire entertainment industry
[QUOTE=Nikota;34569575]Jokes on them. Britain funded their entire entertainment industry[/QUOTE]
What, the Bollywood?
There's too much bad blood between much of India and Britain. Give it a generation or three.
After all, they did occupy India until the 1960s and pretty much avail themselves of India's resources.
Honestly, if I were India, I would just take the extra money and give people golden unicycles or free cell phones for a year. If Britain doesn't want it why the hell wouldn't they want free money??
Well kinda funny, that Brittain wants to force India to keep receiving aid, oh well I guess I would just stow the money away and then give it back if there was any problems monetarily wise.
[QUOTE=rsa1988;34569833]Well kinda funny, that Brittain wants to force India to keep receiving aid, oh well I guess I would just stow the money away and then give it back if there was any problems monetarily wise.[/QUOTE]
hahaha you think india would actually stow away that much money. im sure it went straight into the swiss bank accounts of some big wigs in the government (state or local level) as soon as they got the money
[QUOTE=Ziron;34569902]hahaha you think india would actually stow away that much money. im sure it went straight into the swiss bank accounts of some big wigs in the government (state or local level) as soon as they got the money[/QUOTE]
Not so much anymore. Eyes of the world on India, remember? Bigwigs are under surveillance.
Hang on, hang on. So, Britain is in a financial crisis, and now is giving money to a country that doesn't want (and is beginning not to need) assistance? I must be missing something here, [b]what?[/b]
[QUOTE=archangel125;34569934]Not so much anymore. Eyes of the world on India, remember? Bigwigs are under surveillance.[/QUOTE]
corruption is common as hell there so who knows
India has massive levels of poverty, they just like to pretend they don't because they're an all-grown-up big country now!
[QUOTE=Ziron;34569950]corruption is common as hell there so who knows[/QUOTE]
I do. I'm Indian.
[QUOTE=archangel125;34570117]I do. I'm Indian.[/QUOTE]
and yet you say that India was occupied by the british in the 60s despite being independent since the 40s
[QUOTE=Dr. Fishtastic;34570128]and yet you say that India was occupied by the british in the 60s despite being independent since the 40s[/QUOTE]
Whoops. Got 47 and 67 messed up again. See, I wasn't born then.
These aid agreements usually have a lot of strings attached anyway, such as conditions on where the money can be spent. It's actually pretty common for foreign aid to have selfish restrictions like "you have to use this money to buy stuff/services from us or our corporations".
That's probably the real reason the UK doesn't want to give it up and perhaps the real reason India doesn't want it anymore.
Top Gear ruined the UK's image there :v:
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;34569941]Hang on, hang on. So, Britain is in a financial crisis, and now is giving money to a country that doesn't want (and is beginning not to need) assistance? I must be missing something here, [b]what?[/b][/QUOTE]
Same here, the way I figure is somekind of economic jigjaggery by giving them loans and letting them pile up and give the british guv'nahs somekind of trumpcard or something to pressure them doing whatever the hell they feel like doing. But it seems that they are just simply giving them money without care.
Someone with more information on the subject care to explain?
Top Gear India Special.
[IMG]http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwy6kotTYg1qauese.png[/IMG]
thats good, we won't have to fund their space program anymore, or build their industry.
Ok can we have all our money back that weve given then?
It's somewhat shameful to take "alms" in many different cultures.
But in certain cultures it is normal that the lower population groups depend on charity in more or less financially demanding situations due to low social care or such.
I don't know what Indians say about this shit but it might have to do with cultural differences like this.
[QUOTE=Falchion;34571307]It's somewhat shameful to take "alms" in many different cultures.
But in certain cultures it is normal that the lower population groups depend on charity in more or less financially demanding situations due to low social care or such.
I don't know what Indians say about this shit but it might have to do with cultural differences like this.[/QUOTE]
It's actually really bad over there, I'll see if I can get a video documentary about it. But there's a caste system where everyone just basically tramples over the "Untouchables."
[QUOTE=P1X3L N1NJA;34571057]Ok can we have all our money back that weve given then?[/QUOTE]
Don't be an Indian giver.
[quote=Britain] but relented after the British begged them to keep taking the money[/quote]
thats pathetic. why would they want them to keep the money when they dont need it?
This needs emphasis. Anyone remember the [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yamamah_arms_deal#Corruption_allegations"]SFO investigation into the Saudi Eurofighter deal[/URL]... Basically there was massive corruption on the part of BAE Systems and the UK Government, and the government badly covered it up, to the extent that they had to publicly kill an SFO investigation. In other words, they admitted to corruption.
And now:
[quote]Britain’s aid to Delhi was partly “about seeking to sell Typhoon.”[...] Britain currently pays India around £280 million a year[...] France, chosen as favourite to land the warplane deal, gives around £19 million a year.[/quote]
Fuck my country. India is [I][B]less[/B][/I] corrupt that Britain.
This makes me really angry.
[QUOTE=Tolyzor;34571404]This needs emphasis. Anyone remember the SFO investigation into the Saudi deal...
Fuck my country. India is [I][B]less[/B][/I] corrupt that Britain.[/QUOTE]
lol
no
There is absolutely nothing funny about this story. It stinks.
The corruption is at a more obscure, perhaps abstract level, but is just as serious.
Corporations that have monopolies over a product or service should not have this kind of power over international politics and use of taxpayer money. That is fucked up.
[QUOTE=Keyblockor;34571364]It's actually really bad over there, I'll see if I can get a video documentary about it. But there's a caste system where everyone just basically tramples over the "Untouchables."[/QUOTE]
The caste system in india is like elementary school level history. I know that system but it doens't really talk about how charity and alms are considered.
What the fuck. There's children living in poverty in the UK but we BEG India to take money from us even when they say they don't want it. Fuck this country.
I wish Britain wouldn't get involved in everything now. I'm proud to live in a country that can be so generous when the economy isn't shifting, but sometimes we really should take a backseat.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.