India will not shed tears if the British government makes a “fundamental change” in its development aid policy and scale down the £250-million annual aid to India.
Following the demand to cut British aid to India from a wide spectrum of people and political parties in Britain, international development secretary Andrew Mitchell had said last week that the “£250 million of public money spent annually on nuclear-armed India could be scaled back.”
India amounted for £300 million of the £6 billion Department for International Development (DFID) aid fund annually. However, Mitchell observed that India didn’t really need British development aid as the rich NRI population of Britain could do more to help their countrymen. DFID is the biggest source of development aid in India after Japan.
Almost 66 per cent of the grant given to India by DFID goes to the government: to fund the health ministry’s Reproductive Child Health and HIV and AIDS programmes (42 per cent) and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (24 per cent). The remaining amount is shared by the Rural Livelihood Programmes in four states and the Poorest Areas Civil Society (PACS) programme.
Indian activists say access to DFID funds is contingent on hiring consultants, mostly British. “When they (DFID) give money they send their own consultants. The way they handle it, it would be better if they didn’t give anything,” said Harsh Jaitley who heads VANI, a network of 2000 NGOs.
Echoing Jaitley’s views Anil Chaudhury, activist and founder of NGO Peace and Action Centre (PEACE), said agreements signed by DFID (and other agencies) have inbuilt clauses that ensure that a chunk of the money was paid to consultancies — a large proportion of these bodies are run by expatriates to ensure that the money flows back into the British economy.
As much as 60 per cent of the grant could often go towards paying the consultants hired by DFID to audit and monitor the programmes. Leakages take care of the rest, said an activist who didn’t want to be named.
Amitabh Behar, co-convenor of the National Social Watch Coalition said none of the ongoing programmes in India that are funded by DFID would be affected if British development aid were to be cut because the Indian government is capable of filling up the gap.
Behar is on the advisory board of the International NGO Partnerships Agreement Programme comprising seven British NGOs. This oversees the second phase of PACS.
He said a cut back on DFID aid could be the best thing to happen to the development sector. What DFID should fund is not the Indian government but institutions that ensure governance, monitoring and auditing of development funds.
But many activists objected precisely to this: large monitoring mechanisms. These interventions, they say, are nothing but the means to get a handle on policy making and to buy clout in the government. “Their role is to influence policies to the advantage of British trade interests.”
The activists cited the example of creating civil societies in poor areas or the PACS programme, run through NGOs. DFID claims to have set up a network of 35,000 community-based organisations funded through 650 NGOs to reach 19,500 villages.
Pradeep Ghosh, who runs museum schools in Bhopal, said unless these organisations are enabled and made self-sustainable, they would exist as long as there was funding and sink as soon as it dried up. This is not a healthy practice, he said.
Jaitley said: “When PACS 2 was launched, the finance secretary was present and he said ‘India doesn’t not need the peanuts offered by DFID. It should instead offer expertise’. So our government is not afraid of the kind of statements the British are making now.”
Grass-roots organisations are least conerned about a possible withdrawal of British aid. Abhay Singh of Dudhi Vikas Samiti in Sonbhadra said NGOs like his had never received anything from big donors who fund the government directly. The government selects a handful of big NGOs who then provide smaller ones some money on and off to do their work.
DFID India office told Business Standard that it has not taken any decision yet on a phase out or withdrawal of funds to India.
| DFID clarifies |
| The Department for International Development (DFID) of the UK government has clarified that a report published in Business Standard on July 16 (Cut in DFID aid not a concern for India) misquoted the secretary of state for international development, Andrew Mitchel, as saying that “250 million pound of public money spent annually on nuclear-armed India could be scaled back”. The DFID clarification states that in 2009-10, 44 per cent of its 285 million pound aid budget in India went to national government programmes on health and education, 41 per cent to the states of Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh and 15 per cent to multilaterals and civil society organisations. Also, the Poorest Areas Civil Society (PACS) programme is not managed by the International Partnership Agreement Programme. These two are separate civil society programmes, both focused on improving the lives of poor people, the DFID clarification has stated. The errors are regretted. The British aid body has also stated that it is not the case that its agreements have “inbuilt clauses” for hiring British consultants. UK development assistance has been untied for well over a decade and management consultants for DFID programmes are selected through open tenders using standardised selection criteria. In 2008-09, DFID let over 200 contracts for services, 85 per cent of which were awarded to bidders registered in India. |
