India goes from aid beneficiary to donor

[IndoCarib]

The assistance provided by India dovetails with its long-term strategic and economic objectives, say analysts

Elizabeth Roche,

After having survived on international aid for decades, India has upgraded its profile to join the ranks of donors and is increasingly extending economic and development assistance to countries in South Asia, Africa, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

And though the Indian government is careful to convey that all such projects are based on considerations of mutual benefit and are not exploitative in nature, people close to the development and analysts agree that the process dovetails with India’s long-term strategic and economic objectives.

To better manage its economic aid and assistance to friendly countries, the Indian government operationalized the Development Partnership Administration (DPA)—a new division in the ministry of external affairs—in March. It is headed by P.S. Raghavan, an officer with the rank of additional secretary. The department is tasked with streamlining the delivery of India’s partnership projects with developing countries, said a person with knowledge of the matter.

“Till a decade ago, both the size and spread of such projects was very limited but now its scope and reach have widened considerably. The DPA is an effort to put together under one umbrella all aspects of project implementation, from conception to formulation, to monitoring implementation and impact assessment,” this person said.

Former foreign secretary Lalit Mansingh said the move will address a major complaint against Indian development programmes—that they were not effective enough as such projects took a long while to get completed. “While India’s manpower training programmes were seen as effective, our building programmes were seen as overshooting timelines and project costs,” Mansingh said.

Some of the big-ticket aid programmes that have propelled India into the donors league include a $1 billion (about Rs.5,630 crore) line of credit to Bangladesh and pledges of $2 billion in reconstruction assistance to Afghanistan.

India’s record of helping neighbours like Nepal and Bhutan is not new, said Mansingh, noting that such efforts go back to the 1950s and 1960s—when India was getting aid from the World Bank constituted Aid-to-India Consortium. Formed in 1958, it consisted of the World Bank and 13 countries including Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan and the US. In the early decades after India’s independence, the aid was used to develop industry and agriculture.

“India was short of foreign exchange...and capital at the time and we needed the assistance,” Mansingh said.

But a reversal in the trend began after India launched its market reforms in the 1990s and foreign investment began to flow in, he said. In the early 2000s, there was an assessment of India’s needs for external assistance and it was decided by the then foreign minister Jaswant Singh to cut the number of countries providing such help to India, Mansingh said. At present, India’s main donors include Germany and Japan besides multilateral lending institutions, according to the latest Economic Survey.

Now India disburses grant assistance, lines of credit and undertakes manpower training programmes under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) programme.

ITEC involves imparting training to students from partner countries to boost human resource development and thereby build institutions, said Biswajit Dhar, director general of the Research and Information Systems for Developing Countries thinktank in New Delhi. The foreign ministry website says the programme involves upgrading skills of civilian and defence personnel in India.

Of the other two, grant assistance helps fund a large number of projects—mostly in India’s neighbourhood, said another person familiar with the developments. This involves India undertaking infrastructure projects. Examples of major projects India is funding under the grant assistance include the construction of 50,000 houses in northern and eastern Sri Lanka for Tamils displaced by the three-decade old civil war that ended in May 2009, and that of a 220kV transmission line from the northern Afghan city of Pul-e-Khumri to Kabul, this person said.

“South Asia accounts for about 70% of our total commitments under grant assistance. If you take the geographical spread, we have a total of 135 grant assistance projects over 61 countries,” the second person said.

Under lines of credit—the third element of India’s development partnership programme—the government offers loans on concessional terms to countries, the first person cited above said. “These are spread again all over the world but many more of them are in Africa than in our neighbourhood.”

Whatever the form of assistance, India is careful to point out that it is responding to the needs of those seeking assistance and not foisting its own formulae on assistance seekers, said the first person. “We don’t lay down the development priorities. And we tailor our projects according to that. We do not impose conditionalities. We are also very careful to be non-intrusive in the matter of how the projects are selected and implemented. And lastly, our projects are based on considerations of mutual benefit,” this person said.

India is also keen that its development assistance programmes are different from the traditional “donor-recipient relationship” and hence the stress on “development partnership”.

Analysts agreed that the model India has chosen to follow is different from the “North-South economic cooperation patterns” that India itself was subject to in the past.

“Donors’ club like the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) have attached conditionalities to the assistance they offer. Some countries are known to use aid to further their commercial interests,” said Dhar. “Countries like India have been opposing these conditions. While the OECD countries have been talking of the effectiveness of the aid, India, for example, has stressed on development effectiveness. India has also laid stress on using local resources and local expertise like in Afghanistan... India can try and help redefine the rules governing rendering assistance.”

Development assistance does have its spin-offs—“promotion of Indian exports and our access to natural resources. Many of them serve our energy security requirements,” said the second person quoted above.

“Strategic and economic goals go hand in hand,” said Dhar, agreeing that development projects like schools and hospitals go a long way in bolstering goodwill vis–à–vis India in the recipient country. In the case of Afghanistan, India has been engaged in reconstruction activities with the stated intent of shoring up goodwill among common Afghans.

“The fact that the DPA division is located in the ministry of external affairs shows it is in sync with our foreign policy objectives of transforming India into a global player” with a corresponding economic punch, said Mansingh. It was not without reason that India’s development assistance programmes were concentrated in countries or regions that would give India resources and energy—like Africa and Central Asia, for instance, where China seems to have an advantage—to boost its economic growth and protect its strategic interests, he said.


India goes from aid beneficiary to donor - Home - livemint.com

 

[IndoCarib]

Not long after grumblers in the UK asked their own government why it was giving money to India, if it was giving its own money away, India unveiled a global aid agency on the order of the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) or the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Called the Development Partnership Administration (DPA), the agency is designed to streamline and make more transparent India's growing foreign aid program, which has expanded from almost nothing a decade ago to a sizable outlay targeting more than 60 developing countries.

India sets up $15 billion global aid agency | GlobalPost

 

[Nair saab]

Wait for &hit Storm ... India ne Liya to bhi galti Diya to bhi Galti ... they find it Annoying if India takes AID , they Find it more annoying even if India gives AID...

 

[DF-41 ICBM]

while 80% of the entire indian population cannot afford to eat, the indian regime gives tax payer money to foreign countries to act like an important country and spends all the money on weapons imports to militarize.
what a vulgar system to live.

its typical of a cruel and evil regime that puts others above your own people.

And you add that pure evil caste system to the mix, you get something similar to the nazi regime that spent most of its tax payer money on weapons and killing its own people like 'operation blue star'.

You add to the fact that the indian population cannot feed itself as the population is increasing uncontrollably due to indians breeding like rats, the hunger problem is only going to get worse, more starvations, all the while its regime wastes tax money on weapons.

Just imagine the amount of corruption there is within the regime, the elites living like kings while dalits are treated as subhumans.
I feel sorry for the dalits.

 

[IndoCarib]

while 80% of the entire indian population cannot afford to eat, the indian regime gives tax payer money to foreign countries to act like an important country and spends all the money on weapons imports to militarize.
what a vulgar system to live.

its typical of a cruel and evil regime that puts others above your own people.

And you add that pure evil caste system to the mix, you get something similar to the nazi regime that spent most of its tax payer money on weapons and killing its own people like 'operation blue star'.

You add to the fact that the indian population cannot feed itself as the population is increasing uncontrollably due to indians breeding like rats, the hunger problem is only going to get worse, more starvations, all the while its regime wastes tax money on weapons.

Just imagine the amount of corruption there is within the regime, the elites living like kings while dalits are treated as subhumans.
I feel sorry for the dalits.

Does DF in your name stand for Dumb Freak ??

Wait for &hit Storm ... India ne Liya to bhi galti Diya to bhi Galti ... they find it Annoying if India takes AID , they Find it more annoying even if India gives AID...

Just as you predicted !!!

 

[manofwar]

while 80% of the entire indian population cannot afford to eat, the indian regime gives tax payer money to foreign countries to act like an important country and spends all the money on weapons imports to militarize.
what a vulgar system to live.

its typical of a cruel and evil regime that puts others above your own people.

And you add that pure evil caste system to the mix, you get something similar to the nazi regime that spent most of its tax payer money on weapons and killing its own people like 'operation blue star'.

You add to the fact that the indian population cannot feed itself as the population is increasing uncontrollably due to indians breeding like rats, the hunger problem is only going to get worse, more starvations, all the while its regime wastes tax money on weapons.

Just imagine the amount of corruption there is within the regime, the elites living like kings while dalits are treated as subhumans.
I feel sorry for the dalits.

Did you like your ban so much that you now want to go back??

You do know that Operation Blue Star was done to weed out terrorists hiding in the gurudwara??
Or that the Indian govt. budgeted more than $100 billion in Welfare schemes??

Add to this the fact that Indian income per capita is increasing by 13%/ year despite rupee devaluation!!In rupee terms, it is well above 20%. And that we just give 1.9% of our budget to defence??And how do you say that the hunger problem will get worse?? Don't you know that FCi keeps tons of food crops for droughts and disasters ready, which is replenished and refreshed evry year

As for the Dalit comment, you should know that they are given preferences in all colleges government jobs, and many private jobs too!!
The fact that we are able to help the Global community should make you happy ,being a part of it!!

If we go by your logic then China , who have 225 million poor themselves shouldn't donate either!! But they do!!

 

[Matrixx]

while 80% of the entire indian population cannot afford to eat, the indian regime gives tax payer money to foreign countries to act like an important country and spends all the money on weapons imports to militarize.
what a vulgar system to live.

its typical of a cruel and evil regime that puts others above your own people.

And you add that pure evil caste system to the mix, you get something similar to the nazi regime that spent most of its tax payer money on weapons and killing its own people like 'operation blue star'.

You add to the fact that the indian population cannot feed itself as the population is increasing uncontrollably due to indians breeding like rats, the hunger problem is only going to get worse, more starvations, all the while its regime wastes tax money on weapons.

Just imagine the amount of corruption there is within the regime, the elites living like kings while dalits are treated as subhumans.
I feel sorry for the dalits.

you got your 50 cent now bug off

 

[Globenim]

Why wont India feed and aid their own overwhelmingly starving and suffering population first?
Anyone care to explain?

 

[IndoCarib]

Why wont India feed and aid their own overwhelmingly starving and suffering population first?
Anyone care to explain?

Do you think we dont have any aid programme to address that ? You guys dont like it even when receive aid

 

[JohnyD]

while 80% of the entire indian population cannot afford to eat, the indian regime gives tax payer money to foreign countries to act like an important country and spends all the money on weapons imports to militarize.
what a vulgar system to live.

its typical of a cruel and evil regime that puts others above your own people.

And you add that pure evil caste system to the mix, you get something similar to the nazi regime that spent most of its tax payer money on weapons and killing its own people like 'operation blue star'.

You add to the fact that the indian population cannot feed itself as the population is increasing uncontrollably due to indians breeding like rats, the hunger problem is only going to get worse, more starvations, all the while its regime wastes tax money on weapons.

Just imagine the amount of corruption there is within the regime, the elites living like kings while dalits are treated as subhumans.
I feel sorry for the dalits.

and the arsehole farts from his dirty mouth..!!

 

[Korean]

India's transition from a receiver to a donor is a bit too quick.

 

[nForce]

while 80% of the entire indian population cannot afford to eat, the indian regime gives tax payer money to foreign countries to act like an important country and spends all the money on weapons imports to militarize.
what a vulgar system to live.

its typical of a cruel and evil regime that puts others above your own people.

And you add that pure evil caste system to the mix, you get something similar to the nazi regime that spent most of its tax payer money on weapons and killing its own people like 'operation blue star'.

You add to the fact that the indian population cannot feed itself as the population is increasing uncontrollably due to indians breeding like rats, the hunger problem is only going to get worse, more starvations, all the while its regime wastes tax money on weapons.

Just imagine the amount of corruption there is within the regime, the elites living like kings while dalits are treated as subhumans.
I feel sorry for the dalits.

if 80% of the Indians cant afford to eat then after a month or two we should be left with 20% only right?Now is that the case?
That makes me ask you what have you been having with your daily meal or is that the average Chinese IQ ??

 

[JohnyD]

India's transition from a receiver to a donor is a bit too quick.

In fact, it was some bad phase in our history of last two-three centuries that made us poor..otherwise, India was not less than any of modern or historical ultra rich region on this planet!!

richness is in our blood unlike others who might have found it for the first time...so we can share our plate of meal with others even if we remain half starved...its our culture and our tradition!

 

[DF-41 ICBM]

In fact, it was some bad phase in our history of last two-three centuries that made us poor..otherwise, India was not less than any of modern or historical ultra rich region on this planet!!

richness is in our blood unlike others who might have found it for the first time...so we can share our plate of meal with others even if we remain half starved...its our culture and our tradition!

if by rich you mean rich in the number of slaves serving the west, then yes, india is without a shadow of a doubt the richest country in world history.
and yes, that IS indian culture and indian tradition.

 

[Korean]

so we can share our plate of meal with others even if we remain half starved...its our culture and our tradition!

That's a wrong analogy. Indian government must first help Indian citizens to get rich and strong first. Only then India can afford to provide aid to other countries freely and generously.

Sharing a meager meal with another doesn't help both.