It can afford to fund

a space programme. But

it is still worthy of our aid

Gillian McMahon

 

After visiting some of the poorest countries in Africa, I expected India to be a relatively easy place to go on a project visit. In reality, the poverty I saw in India remains the worst I have ever seen.
     The young children in the projects I visited relied on the Mary's Meals food they received at school as the only food they would eat each day and although they were all in primary school, many were also forced to work in informal labour or factories after school. The projects were really a lifeline for the children and when they talked to me about their family lives their eyes seemed glazed, resigned almost, to their dire, hopeless circumstances.      
     To get to one of the schools outside Delhi we drove through continuous, Dickensian slums for well over two hours and I was acutely aware both of the enormity of the challenge facing India in lifting its population out of poverty and of my extreme good fortune in being a UK citizen and therefore able to leave. I then visited a friend for less than 10 hours in transit from Kolkata and she took me to the world's highest building and biggest shopping mall, for manicures and pedicures and a lavish dinner. Twelve hours earlier I had been talking to naked, malnourished children in the slums of Kolkata. I found the contrast between the two cities hard to stomach.
     Despite all this, the UK government's recent decision to continue to include India in the Department for International Development's aid budget has faced heavy criticism. When Andrew Mitchell, the secretary of state for international development, took up his post, he called for a review of aid and indicated clearly that countries such as India, which are defined by the World Bank as middle-income, were likely to be cut from the programme. Mitchell therefore surprised many observers in March when the new programme was announced and India's aid budget was to be continued at a slightly higher level than last year until 2015. A range of UK-based NGOs also have large India programmes and the country receives aid from other countries including Australia, Japan and the US.
     The main argument relates to India's relative wealth and much of the criticism has come from Andrew Mitchell's own party, with Tory MPs such as Philip Davies saying that 'India spends £36 billion a year on defence and £750 million a year on its space programme. [It] is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. It's completely unjustifiable, especially at this time'.
     On a simplistic level, the argument against providing aid to India appears strong. The Indian economy has grown at an average of more than 7% per year since 1997 and the country is now estimated to have over 125,000 millionaires.
India is now a major player in the global economic market and its relative wealth appears visible through its hosting of (or attempt at hosting) events such as the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Indeed, India itself has an overseas aid budget and provides occasional support to several African countries.
However, it is important to understand the complexity of poverty in this vast country. The World Bank estimates that 37% of the Indian population still lives below the international poverty line of $1.25 per day, 'making the country home to one-third of the world's poor'.

 

     The World Food Programme reports that 'India is home to about 25% of the world's hungry poor' and that India contains a third of the developing world's undernourished children. Child labour is a massive problem and India has the largest number of out-of-school children in the world, with one in four children not attending. Most significantly, in a recent large-scale study which looked at multi-dimensional poverty, the researchers found that there are more poor people in eight Indian states than in the 26 poorest African countries combined. These 421 million people are the very clear and simple justification of aid to India.
     Critics of the funding to India take a common approach to aid allocation, which involves looking at countries as a whole, rather than the complexities within each country. In his book 'The Bottom Billion', for example, Paul Collier argues that countries such as India have left countries such as Sudan and Niger behind and that the billion people living in these countries are now permanently trapped in the cycle of poverty. However, this approach is dangerous in that it risks 'trapping' those living in poverty within countries and in India the scale of marginalisation and the polarisation of wealth is massive.
     DFID is focussing its funding on three extremely poor states (and in India all states have decentralised governments) and the scale of these states is so vast that they should almost be viewed as separate countries. For a child growing up in the slums of these most marginalised states in India with limited access to education, health care or social services, there is very little opportunity to escape poverty without additional external support.
     Davies also made the point that the Indian government chooses to fund a space programme and I do agree that, however much the Indian government may argue that the space programme will help generate income, it is more difficult to justify aid to a country that doesn't seem to make its own people its priority. However, government priorities are always an issue in development aid and poor governance is most frequently a major factor in a country's level of poverty. When poverty is so acute in some Indian states, it seems very unfair to punish marginalised people for their government's mistakes. DFID's funding also helps them to continue to pressure the government to balance its budget so that funding is focussed more towards the needs of the masses.
     With this approach, Andrew Mitchell has made a strong, brave and justified decision in continuing to fund India, where wealth is polarised and poverty for the marginalised as acute as Africa. As long as this funding is relatively short-term, targeted, focussed and linked to improving government accountability, it and funding of projects in India by UK NGOs has the potential to make an important and very necessary impact on the lives of India's poor.

 

Gillian McMahon grew up in Edinburgh. She has a masters in development studies from Melbourne University and spent some time working in Uganda. She currently works as a programme officer for Mary's Meals, a Scottish aid charity working in school feeding in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This was her winning paper in the spring 2011 course of the Young Scotland Programme