Sachinism Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 The UK is to end financial aid to India by 2015, international development secretary Justine Greening has said. Support will gradually be phased out between now and 2015, saving Ž£200m ($319m), and the UK's focus will then shift to offering technical assistance. Ms Greening said the move, which will be popular with Tory MPs, reflected India's economic progress and status. Giving his reaction, India's foreign minister Salman Khurshid said: "Aid is the past and trade is the future." The UK's financial support to India, one of the world's fastest-growing economies, has been a cause of concern among Conservative MPs amid suggestions that funding had ended up supporting prestige projects such as India's space programme. Ministers have defended the level of financial help in the past on the basis of the extreme poverty persisting in rural areas and historic colonial ties between the two countries. Ms Greening has been conducting a review of all financial aid budgets since taking over the role in September and visited India earlier in the week to discuss existing arrangements. 'Changing place' She said the visit confirmed the "tremendous progress" that India was making and reinforced her view that the basis of the UK's support needed to shift from direct aid to technical assistance in future. Continue reading the main story The announcement that the UK is scrapping aid to India has been long expected and will not have come as a surprise to the Indian government. UK International Development Secretary Justine Greening was in India early this week to meet senior Indian government officials who were briefed on the move. India has long held the position that while it welcomes financial aid from overseas from those who choose to give it, it will never actively seek it. The move is also a recognition of India's economic transformation. It's now the third largest investor in the UK and the largest market for British goods outside the EU. But much of the UK aid money was used to fund projects in some of India's poorest areas and some will worry that those at the receiving end could suffer. "After reviewing the programme and holding discussions with the government of India, we agreed that now is the time to move to a relationship focusing on skillsharing rather than aid," she said. "India is successfully developing and our own bilateral relationship has to keep up with 21st Century India...It is time to recognise India's changing place in the world." Although all existing financial grants awarded will be honoured, the UK will not sign off any new programmes from now on. By focusing post-2015 support on trade, skills, health and private sector anti-poverty projects which can generate a return on investment, the UK estimates its overall contribution will be one-tenth of the current Ž£280m budget. In making the decision, the UK is citing the progress India has made in tackling poverty in recent years. It says 60 million people have been lifted out of poverty as a result of the doubling of spending on health and education since 2006. The UK also says bilateral trade between the two countries is flourishing, growing 20% in 2010. From 2015, development experts will continue to work alongside the Foreign Office and UK Trade and Investment but focused on sharing advice on poverty reduction, facilitating private sector projects and global partnerships in food security, climate change and health prevention. The BBC's political correspondent Carol Walker said this was an important step that was seen by the government as part of efforts to focus its aid budget on countries most in need. The government is increasing the overall overseas development budget to help meet a longstanding international commitment to spend 0.7% of national income on aid. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20265583# Tomorrow's news: India to cut Technical (Support) Aid to the UK by 2014
Laaloo Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 Good news Now you can give more food stamps/aid to those in need; for example King tendulkar
Lurker Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 Good news for both countries. UK does not need to aid us anymore, and they also need to put that money into their own economy right now. Inspite of our colonial history, post Independence England has been quite fair and helpful to India and has helped India steadily in its development. So we should be gracious enough to thank and maybe help them out today as Europe struggles. Still makes you wonder about the role of Europe in modern world. Clearly they would be a affluent area of the world where people would migrate/work but their strategic and economic role is definitely on the down.
Anonymous Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 UK to end financial aid to India by 2015 Everyone here seems to be getting their knickers in a twist. Dailyfail has been at the forefront of this campaign relentlessly and the hatred/ignorance being spewed on the news sites (even on BBC) is just :facepalm: ( Oops, thanks Mods)
BeautifulGame Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 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.
BeautifulGame Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 In making the decision, the UK is citing the progress India has made in tackling poverty in recent years. It says 60 million people have been lifted out of poverty as a result of the doubling of spending on health and education since 2006. Interesting stat. Btw People can complain all they want about Manmohan Singh govt about these corruption allegations (which they definitely deserve it )but at the same time they have invested hugely and introduced far more schemes in rural India than by BJP govt in the past imo.
SLICKR392 Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 Good news Now you can give more food stamps/aid to those in need; for example King tendulkar :hysterical::hysterical:
gs Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 Interesting stat. Btw People can complain all they want about Manmohan Singh govt about these corruption allegations (which they definitely deserve it )but at the same time they have invested hugely and introduced far more schemes in rural India than by BJP govt in the past imo. India shining?
BeautifulGame Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 India shining? Dont know.But definitely its far more easier for a student from poor background to get quality education or a someone in rural part of India to make decent living today that in the past. Obviously it differs from state to state based on how effectively these schemes are implemented and have no clue about Bihar or Maharastra for instance but know for certain these schemes have had a great impact of Rural india of southern states. Today a poor kid from India can get finish Engineering without spending almost anything and that is an achievement for present Congress govt par excellence.
Tendulkar_Bhai Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 Is this good news? With the millions of those in India in poverty struggling to eat they probably would not agree, £200 million is still 1000's of lives saved and India is too busy spending money on nuclear weapons to worry about these people. I think the lack of empathy on this thread highlights how selfish the Indian middle class are and you hear of no philanthropy (even from cricketers) or fund raising from those with wealth like you do in the West. Its not just govts responsibility everyone can make some change.
PaceAttack Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 Now the middle men have less opportunity to loot foreign money.
1983-2011 Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 Britain to cut all aid to India by 2015 Britain's government has said it will stop all aid to India in 2015 and slash its remaining handouts, bowing to domestic pressure over its foreign development budget at a time of austerity. Justine Greening, the international development secretary, said on Friday that the move, which will save Britain around $320m from 2013 to 2015, recognises India's "changing place in the world". Prime Minister David Cameron has faced growing opposition at home to the aid commitment to India, with commentators often pointing out that Britain's booming former colony is able to fund its own space programme. After visiting India this week with Foreign Secretary William Hague, Greening said that the relationship with India would now focus on "trade not aid". "India is successfully developing and our own bilateral relationship has to keep up with 21st century India," Greening said. "It's time to recognise India's changing place in the world." 'Aid is the past' Conservative Cameron's coalition government is trying to save money as part of its efforts to reduce a record deficit. British aid to India was reduced last year as part of widespread austerity measures, but still committed London to spending $445m a year until 2015. Total spending between 2013 and 2015 will now be $318m less than had been planned previously, although Britain would complete all of its aid programmes in India, Greening said. The Department of International Development confirmed in a statement: "Justine Greening will not sign off any new programmes, and financial aid programmes to the country will end completely in 2015." Cameron has rejected growing pressure from politicians in his centre-right party to scrap his pledge to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas aid. But while he has previously defended aid to India on the basis that tens of millions of Indians live in poverty, an end to the payments has been on the cards for sometime. Britain was stung in February when New Delhi announced a big contract to buy French warplanes instead of the UK-backed Eurofighter Typhoon. That came despite intense efforts to expand trade with India, with Cameron leading a huge business delegation to India in one of his first trips after taking office in 2010. Divided country The same year, however, Britain suffered another snub when India's then-finance minister Pranab Mukherjee - now the president - reportedly dismissed the aid from Britain as a "peanut". On Thursday, Indian Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid had signalled the country would soon stop receiving aid from Britain after holding talks with Hague. "Aid is the past and trade is the future, so we are looking to the future," Khurshid told journalists in New Delhi after meetings with Hague. "We discussed a lot of trade, investment and cooperation issues and I think that is how we see our relationship grow." Aid groups however said the decision to cut the aid was premature. Phil Bloomer of Oxfam said the agency was concerned that completely withdrawing British aid to India by 2015 was "too hasty". "Despite the fact India is a country of growing wealth it is also a hugely divided country with extreme levels of poverty and inequality," he said. "The scale of the challenge remains huge." http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2012/11/201211916493112698.html
Crookbond Posted November 9, 2012 Posted November 9, 2012 Most times you do not quote text, tgis time you quoted it thrice. :hysterical:
nikred Posted November 10, 2012 Posted November 10, 2012 Most times you do not quote text' date=' tgis time you quoted it thrice. :hysterical:[/quote'] More like 5 times. :cantstop:
Stuge Posted November 10, 2012 Posted November 10, 2012 Most times you do not quote text' date=' tgis time you quoted it thrice. :hysterical:[/quote'] Fixed :D
Silva Posted November 11, 2012 Posted November 11, 2012 I am not a big fan of foreign aid, no country becomes rich off foreign aid otherwise africa and other parts of the world by now. But the fact is that aid money does have an impact on gdp and well being of people who take it, and Indias economy is faltering so this is not a great thing. Thankfully the amount of money is irrelavant.
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