India tells Britain: We don't want your aid

[-:Undertaker:-]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-your-aid.html

India tells Britain: We don't want your aid

India’s Finance Minister has said that his country “does not require” British aid, describing it as “peanuts”.

Mr Mukherjee’s remarks, previously unreported outside India, were made during question time in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament

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.

All foreign aid ought to be stopped and made voluntary, as Ron Paul quoted in regards to aid from the United States 'Foreign aid is taking from the poor of one nation and giving to the rich in another.' - Of course in this country, all three main parties are committed to giving your money away to the likes of Zimbabwe where it lands in the hands of Robert Mugabe and Co, and this is supposed to be a conservative government i'm told?

Even if you agree with aid being given, give it yourself - don't use government as a tool of force to makes other give the money that they have earnt to a cause you favour, that I find immoral.

But the Conservative Party, backed by the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats will make sure we keep paying.

Thoughts?

[GirlNextDoor15]

Seriously, that is just how pathetic Britain is in these kinda situations. Obviously, ifBritish begged them to take the money, they must have thought that they'll get something out of it. India should not be blamed and you can't just say 'India should be a lot more appreciative when Britain wants to help' cause you and I both know it's not that simple. It's related to the government ffs

[cocaine]

aid is never given voluntarily, it's used as a bargaining tool for future requirements from a country

[Meowingtons]

when i first saw the thread title i thought it meant India didn't want Britain's STD's... confused me a little
anyway on topic -it's up to the country whether to accept aid or not.. clearly it's just a way to get something back in the future.

[.Tom.]

For once I totally agree with you, Foreign Aid should be stopped in this country, at least until we are in a much more stable position ourselves.

We are in serious trouble financially and we can no longer afford to be giving foreign aid out as we've been doing in previous years

I feel for the poorer nations, however we need to stabilizse ourselves first to ensure our own country is in a better position, then, in the future, once we are stable, revisit the topic of foreign aid and see if we can afford it