Dodgy development:of UK in India/We don't Want your Aid

Dodgy development: DFID in India

India is the biggest single recipient of British aid, with £1 billion spent between 2003 and 2008 through the UK's Department for International Development (DFID). This article, written for Corporate Watch by Richard Whittell, introduces a series of short films and interviews about the DfID in India to be published over the coming weeks, which were shot by Whittell and Indian activist Eshwarappa M during a trip to various parts of the country affected by British money. Their experience meeting people whose lives have been directly affected by DfID activities, as well as evidence and opinions provided by activists, academics, journalists, state employees and DfID staff, did not tally with the claims made for British aid by DFID's publicity.

Development opportunities

"I believe our approach offers the best hope for reversing the conditions that lead to hunger and division, and for building a more prosperous, just and stable world." - Tony Blair, 2003

"Foreign aid is not needed. It is an extension of national and international politics and it serves their interests"¦ Our understanding is that the DFID has never worked for poverty alleviation. They want to perpetuate poverty because they want to expropriate the natural resources of third world countries, but with a human face." - Bijay Pandey, secretary of the Adivasi Mukhti Sangathan people's movement in the central state of Madhya Pradesh

The Department for International Development (DFID) was set up in 1997 by the newly elected Labour government, which took it out of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and gave it a minister of cabinet rank (currently Douglas Alexander). Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have made much of their commitment to 'fighting poverty', which has brought them far more praise than their other foreign policies.

In their audit of New Labour's record in government, Polly Toynbee and David Walker, for example, describe the DfID as "the department of Labour's conscience." While decrying New Labour in 2008 as "the most rightwing government Britain has had since the Second World War," George Monbiot nevertheless felt the increase in foreign aid was a "real achievement" that "deserves to be celebrated." Earlier this month, the UN's Kevin Watkins claimed that "whatever your take on New Labour, its credentials on development are impressive"¦ As a nation we have become more generous in our dealings with the world's poorest people, moving from the lower leagues to the premier division of leadership on poverty reduction." Mindful of the sheen of humanitarianism that foreign aid brings, David Cameron has promised to maintain DFID's budget if the Conservatives win the May elections.

DFID in India

"Because a third of the poor people in the world live in India, this has been DFID's largest country programme for more than a decade. In a country of this size, it is a bold ambition to give every mother the healthcare she needs to give birth in safety and raise a healthy child, to give every child a chance to learn and enough food to eat." - International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander

Between 2003 and 2008, India received £1 billion of British aid money. At the beginning of 2009, the DFID released its new country strategy for India after Gordon Brown, flanked by smiling children and the odd Bollywood star, committed to giving another £850 million until 2011.

The DfID works both at the national level (in support of the Indian government's centrally sponsored schemes) and at state level in Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, often in conjunction with other development agencies such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. It has its head office in New Delhi and state offices in Bhopal, Bhubaneswar and Kolkata.

According to its India brochure, the DFID's priorities have been "strengthening the capacity of government to develop and implement pro-poor policies; promoting increased investment in education, health and water; supporting programmes which help poor people improve their own livelihoods and promoting sustainable management of the earth's resources."

With these priorities in mind, this article provides a brief introduction to the five parts of our series about the DfID in India.

Smile for the camera

The first part looks at a DFID-funded Rural Livelihoods Project in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. Through this project, people have been encouraged to grow the oil-bearing jatropha plant on their common land, described by the project as 'wasteland', and sell it to companies to make biodiesel. Among these companies is the British biodiesel company D1 Oils, which is currently cultivating jatropha, together with BP, on 350,000 hectares around India.

The project staff and documents claim that the choice to grow the jatropha has been made democratically, by all members of the village. However, the vast majority of people we met –in an area recommended to us by one of the project staff as one of the 'best examples' of the project's democracy in action- said they had not been involved at all in the decision-making process and did not think they would benefit at all from it, as it was taking up the common land many of them depended on for grazing and resources. The only person who was unambiguously positive was the village headman's brother, who we were taken to meet by the NGO that had been contracted to implement the project in the area.

Of course, the dissenting voices were not meant to be heard and we were only able to record interviews with people who had not been shown the script beforehand as Eshwarappa and Madhuri Krishnaswammy, a member of the Jagrit Dalit Adivasi Sangathan people's movement present in the area, who we had met on the way, were able to nip away from the main tour and speak to people without the NGO staff watching over their shoulders. In an interview after this, Krishnaswammy told us:

"This participatory process is almost entirely on paper"¦ village elites are persuaded to form a small group and they're persuaded that this will be good for them in the future. There has been no informed consent. And in these villages I don't know personally of any single village where there has genuinely been a village council of a substantial body of adult members participating in that, sitting, discussing, thrashing things out, thinking about it and then taking an informed decision. I don't know of a single village where that has happened."

The project, therefore, seems to have reinforced a decision-making structure in the village that had never been representative of the majority of the people who live in it, while, at the same time, enmeshing the interests of the village leaders with those of international markets. But with testimonies from people like the one given by the headman's brother, and the positive evaluation conducted by bodies contracted by the DFID, the whole area is used as a statistic to show how many people British aid money has reached.

The new Raj

The next part of the series scrutinises the claim that DfID's public sector reforms have helped state governments become more 'pro-poor'.

The government of the north-eastern state of Orissa signed an aide memoire with the World Bank and the DFID in 2000, in which it was guaranteed World Bank and DFID money to address its fiscal deficit, as long as it undertook "a program to reform the business and direction of government."

The reforms have, indeed, done that, though their greatest beneficiaries have not been the majority of people in the state but multinational mining companies. In conjunction with a series of reforms commercialising the water and power sectors, the Industrial Policy Resolution and the Orissa Rehabilitation and Resttlement Policy, jointly written and funded by the DfID in 2001 and 2006 respectively, encouraged companies such as Vedanta, POSCO and Tata to come and mine the bauxite, coal and iron ore under the state's lands, paying rates of tax that do little to fill the state's already depleted coffers and displacing thousands of people.

In an interview, journalist Sudhir Patnaik explains:

"We call Orissa a DfID colony. This is not acceptable to anybody who has a sense of democracy. We do not accept a foreign government department coming here and dictating and influencing government departments to do this and to do that. And if you come to the core point, what is their understanding of development in Orissa? If you see the kind of development happening in Orissa, it means developing only industries, mineral-based industries. How many people in the state will benefit from this?"

The reforms provoked a wave of resistance as people refused to make way for this particular development vision. The campaign of the people living in the areas wanted by South Korean steel company POSCO is the subject of our second film, in which Abhay Sahoo, the secretary of the anti-POSCO movement, explains:

"For the last three years, the people of these areas have been conducting a struggle for their fertile soil"¦ we are 100% opposed to the POSCO and we refute the rehabilitation policies of the state government, which were made in connivance with the DfID, which has privatized the government and the public sector of our state."

Educa-shunned

Funding for education is the subject of the third part of the series. The £200+ million given for education turns out to have gone to a central government programme that has led to a continued decline in the quality of government schools, over-burdening teachers, and building schools that lack basic infrastructure such as functioning toilets, and generally demeaning the value, spirit and ambition of the public education system.

When shown quotes from Gordon Brown describing how much a DfID-funded programme has reduced the number of children out of school, Anil Sadgopal, professor of education at the University of Delhi, asks:

"What reduction is he talking of? In order to prove you are succeeding, you count the number of children on registers, and say, a-ha, they are there! Enrollment is not equal to attendance, and attendance is not equal to learning"¦ Are these things not important in British schools? And yet prime minister Brown says remarkable progress is being made. What criteria is he using?"

Mrs Manjula, a parent in a low-income area of Bangalore, explains in the film how, as the public school system declines, more and more parents have to spend a significant amount of their income to send their children to the fast increasing number of private schools:

"Before, government schools would give a good education"¦ but now, if you want your children to do well, you have to send them to private schools, even if you can barely afford it."

Power to the people?

Among the most regularly quoted achievements of British aid in India are the power sector reforms that the DFID funded and administered with the World Bank in the states of Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh. The claim that they have created an 'up-to-date', 'efficient' and 'financially sustainable' power sector is disputed in the fourth part of the series. Terms such as these obscure the fact that this financial sustainability has only been achieved by commercialising and privatising the sector, leading to increased disconnections of people who cannot afford to pay the markedly higher prices that result. People living in a slum in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, show us how these disconnections have forced them to tap into power lines from the local government offices as their only source of power, only to be cut off again by the 'crackdown on theft', which the DfID claims is another achievement of the reforms. The secretary of the employees' union, which was ignored in the discussions regarding the reforms, tells us:

"The reforms were based on cutting the cost of the supply, not the needs of the people. This was advocated by consultants brought in by the DFID. We have pleaded that electricity be treated as an essential service that you cannot apply commercial principles to"¦ The employees were never consulted by the DFID; the unions were not taken into confidence and the consultants brought in by the DfID did not listen to people with experience of the ground reality of the situation."

Neutralising resistance

While most of the DFID's money goes through the Indian government, some of it also goes through NGO's and the 'third sector'. And it is this funding that is the focus of the last part of the series.

The DfID has funded a range of NGO's and organisations through its Poorest Areas Civil Society programme, which the department claims has promoted "greater realisation of citizens' rights and entitlements." There is an increasing body of evidence that this funding is depoliticising groups and making them more pliant in the face of western corporate encroachment, as they become dependent on funding that prevents them from taking 'controversial' positions. Roma, a member of a non-funded people's movement argues:

"Groups should not take their funding. Women have re-taken thousands of acres of land without any funding"¦ if we take this money, we will lose this agenda and sit in air conditioned rooms talking big about poverty. There are resources within the people. We got our independence and there was no funding agency; there was no DFID!"

In addition to this, the DFID funds so-called third sector partnerships to promote sustainable enterprise. This short film looks at the Business Partners for Development project in the Sarshatali area of West Bengal. NGO's chosen and funded by the DfID were hired to tell people who lived in the area that, if they sold their lands to the Integrated Coal Mining Limited company, they would be rehabilitated and jobs would be provided. Ten years later, people are sick from the pollution caused by the mine and displaced from their lands; the promised hospital has not materialised and the few that were given jobs in the mine are fighting for tolerable conditions and acceptable pay. Swaraj Das, the secretary of the union set up for the people affected by the mine, tells us:

"We want to tell the British people that the tax that they are giving to the DFID and other such organisations for the development of poor countries like India is being given for the company. No money has been spent on the rehabilitation of the people. When the money is not reaching us at all, none of us can use even a single penny of that money, so it has no value to us."

In response to a Freedom of Information request about the success of the project, the DFID told us that "a replicable model was developed."

Quit India

It is true that New Labour has given more foreign aid than any other British government, but the key question is not how much it is spending but what it is spending it on. Just as New Labour's reform of public services in the UK has not been compromised by lack of funds but by an ethos of commercialisation and privatisation, effected by a bureaucratic, centralist state, so the ability of the aid to live up to the claims made for it has been ring-fenced by policies that put profits for some over the well-being of the majority; policies that are carried out with little concern for the views of those affected.

This has been challenged throughout India, though. The DFID's and the World Bank's influence provoked a Campaign against Destructive Economic Reforms in Orissa, while people's movements such as the Jagrit Dalit Adivasi Sangathan challenge projects like the Madhya Pradesh Rural Livelihoods Project as an everyday part of their struggle. The electricity supply in Madhya Pradesh was eventually not privatised following resistance by the employees' union and a mass mobilization of people throughout the state.

More action is needed from the UK in solidarity with these struggles. This series is an attempt to encourage the view that development aid and the DFID are not counterpoints to the British state's foreign policy but an intrinsic part of it and one to be opposed accordingly. As Bijay Pandey puts it,

"The British people should ask questions of the DFID; they should expose their dark deeds. They should be put on trial before the UK people, who should see that all the external agencies are involved in dirty tricks."

Dodgy development: DFID in India : Introduction: DFID in India

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".

]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.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds was spent on delivering more than 7,000 televisions to schools — most of which did not have electricity. Few of the televisions ever arrived. A further £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.


India tells Britain: We don't want your aid - Telegraph

Click to expand...

Western countries make a lot of hoop la about air being given to India.

In fact, in the UK, newspapers had gone to town wondering why The UK is giving aid to India, when it wastes on arms, ammunition, space, nukes and so on.

Therefore, why are they giving it when we don't require it?

Sir how about taking "Kohinoor Heera" back ?

I am sick of this huge whining that the Brits start off in a national chorus every time India launches a rocket or buys weapons or some other big thing.

More than half their so-called "aid" is not even government-to-government. It is private organizations which send it in, often linked to missionary activity etc.

As though their freaking miniscule amounts of government-to-government money will make any difference at all to India's 1.7 trillion economy.

I think it is high time the GoI threw their "aid" back on their face and told them to shove it up. The miniscule amount can easily be made up by the Indian middle class. I don't mind paying another 100 rupees per annum to the government to cover this shortfall (even that will be much much more than what the Brits give). I've had enough of this "aid" moaning.

Epic comments in the Telegraph. First, these people are pissed that "India takes aid". And when India says, "Hey, we don't want it. Shove it up.", then they are even more pissed:

"Vile, corrupt wealthy India shows it's contempt for the nations it scrounges aid from. It's time to shut India off "

"Does England, and in fact the rest of the west not see how insulting, and corrupt India is? You owe that sewer of a country nothing, they're vile. Spit in their faces, you're better than they are."

"Indians are lying cheating scum, unfortunately he is probably lying. Flys are to sh** as India is to aid "

"To hell with them, their migrant workforce and their insanitary way of life. "

"We paid to build their country, we educated their people, ended starvation and disease, and gave them technology and infrastructure - and the arrogant sods turn around and say that!!!!"

"Fine. Please give back the last 5 years of aid."

"What utter scruff. Stop all payments immediately and send them a bill for all previous payments. Swine."

Ah, some people want to play this "giving back" game. Cool, we can play that game too. If we were to start asking back stuff, their nation would not exist anymore.

India tells Britain: We don't want your aid

India tells Britain: We don't want your aid

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.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds was spent on delivering more than 7,000 televisions to schools — most of which did not have electricity. Few of the televisions ever arrived. A further £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.

India tells Britain: We don't want your aid - Telegraph

Discussed this in the other thread that was created for this:

www.defenceforumindia.com/foreign-relations/31318-dodgy-development-dfid-india.html

Bangalorean said:

I am sick of this huge whining that the Brits start off in a national chorus every time India launches a rocket or buys weapons or some other big thing.

More than half their so-called "aid" is not even government-to-government. It is private organizations which send it in, often linked to missionary activity etc.

As though their freaking miniscule amounts of government-to-government money will make any difference at all to India's 1.7 trillion economy.

I think it is high time the GoI threw their "aid" back on their face and told them to shove it up. The miniscule amount can easily be made up by the Indian middle class. I don't mind paying another 100 rupees per annum to the government to cover this shortfall (even that will be much much more than what the Brits give). I've had enough of this "aid" moaning.

Click to expand...

Bangalorean said:

Epic comments in the Telegraph. First, these people are pissed that "India takes aid". And when India says, "Hey, we don't want it. Shove it up.", then they are even more pissed:

"Vile, corrupt wealthy India shows it's contempt for the nations it scrounges aid from. It's time to shut India off "

"Does England, and in fact the rest of the west not see how insulting, and corrupt India is? You owe that sewer of a country nothing, they're vile. Spit in their faces, you're better than they are."

"Indians are lying cheating scum, unfortunately he is probably lying. Flys are to sh** as India is to aid "

"To hell with them, their migrant workforce and their insanitary way of life. "

"We paid to build their country, we educated their people, ended starvation and disease, and gave them technology and infrastructure - and the arrogant sods turn around and say that!!!!"

"Fine. Please give back the last 5 years of aid."

"What utter scruff. Stop all payments immediately and send them a bill for all previous payments. Swine."

Ah, some people want to play this "giving back" game. Cool, we can play that game too. If we were to start asking back stuff, their nation would not exist anymore.

Click to expand...

Did somebody delete my previous post ???

"Fine. Please give back the last 5 years of aid."

Click to expand...

"What utter scruff. Stop all payments immediately and send them a bill for all previous payments. Swine."

Click to expand...

Ah, some people want to play this "giving back" game. Cool, we can play that game too. If we were to start asking back stuff, their nation would not exist anymore.

Click to expand...

Arrogant mofos.

Perhaps they don't realize that had they not plundered India their country would not be in this position today and would have been just another shit tiny island - cold and bleak.

Perhaps they should adjust this aid in the resources they plundered from India and settle back the balance at the earliest. Payment can be in cah or in 10 squadrons of Eurofighter.

@ Telegraph article..posted only at 9 PM GMT and within now 1332 desperate pommies have whined about it..

10 squads of EFT will be a glass of water from the ocean of what they looted from us.

the total aid that they gave to india is probably less than 0.0001% of the money that they stole during the colonization.

and that is not counting interest.

if they are trying to atone for past crime then they are not doing very well

Come to think of it, Britain is standing on its feet because of AID. Marshall plan is what saved them from the ruins of world war. America used it to make UK its poodle. It has been faithful since.

Just the kohinoor diamond is worth more than te MRCA deal.

Value of Kohinoor Diamond

All the tax payers' money stolen by our own patwaris, babus and netas is more than enough to build all the roads , schools and hospitals we need.

Has the British public turned against india?

Has the British public turned against india? | Firstpost

The BBC's Question Time programme is frequently like an unruly rabble of children arguing in front of a cheering mob.
Thursday night, one of the questions posed on the show was why international aid should be paid to India when India is spending it's own money on fighter jets.

Both the Tories and opposition Labour agreed Britain should continue to help the world's poorest, but they weren't hitting the public mood.

This started when a member of the audience asked the question: "Why does India need all our foreign aid when it's got several billion pounds to spend on French fighter jets?"

The $15bn Rafale aircraft deal has struck a nerve with the British public — not for the first time — about why India needs help.
Alan Duncan, Conservative MP and international development minister, gave a very forceful defence.

He said: "India is the most difficult country to decide whether we give aid for that reason. I think we're right to be spending the money we're spending. They're on the way up — yes they have some billionaires, yes they have defensive weapons. If you take the three poorest states, there are more of the poorest people there than you have in the whole of subsaharan Africa. You can ignore them if you want because they have a nuclear weapon and want to buy some fighter jets."

"If you ignore them, the world is never ever going to get anywhere near meeting the Millennium Development Goals. It would mean that hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of people will die who could otherwise live on the back of vaccinations and food. We do not link aid to trade."

"We want countries to be able to live by their own means. In due course we will come out of India because it is on an upward path and we should be very pleased that that's the trajectory they're on."

That set off Emma Boon, campaign director of the Taxpayers' Alliance, a right-wing "rent-a-quote" organisation used by media in the UK whenever they need someone to question public spending and previously praised by the Tea Party group in the US. I've used them myself for quick and easy quotes — check this page to see how easy it is to generate a quote.

But she knows the public mood.

To enthusiastic applause, she said: "The government in India is making the choice to spend money on a space programme, on fighter jets, when the Indian government could make a choice to spend its money on its own people. Why are we paying?"

Labour MP Sidiq Khan replied that the UK is a "just, generous and fair society" and lives were being saved. But, "Of course it would be far better if the Indian government was saving these lives, but they're not. In the meantime, children are dying."

The loudest applause and even cheers at one point came for former CBI director and now House of Lords member Digby Jones when he talked about "fairness".

"YOU," pointing to the audience, "are paying Bernie Ecclestone to have a grand prix in Delhi." "All this money sent abroad when they need help — who's going to help us?" asked a woman in the audience, to which a young man replied, "You mean when we need help paying our Sky TV bill?"

As I said, Question Time descends into bitter arguments every week, but this one was surprisingly hostile towards foreign aid, despite ever increasing numbers of donations by the British public when there are natural disasters or celebrity TV appeals such as Comic Relief.

When times are tough, you see countries pull apart more and incredible excuses for selfishness and even more corruption as everyone scraps over the crumbs.

Those in the right are in their element at the moment, as governments and opposition movements hit out at all spending, frequently to the benefit of their own business connections. Fiscal responsibility is a good thing, but when it drifts into an almost isolationist and libertarian "ignore everybody else", you get problems.

Aid is not perfect — in fact, it's deeply flawed and Dambisa Moyo rightly pointed out in the book Dead Aid that many countries have become trapped by developmental aid. However, that is not an excuse to say we ignore those worse off than ourselves. The UK ignores its own elderly neighbours, sometimes for years, so it's open for debate whether we can lecture anyone about prioritising those in need, particularly compared to war machines.

Britain's politicians last night had to defend giving aid to India to the British public, and they didn't really win, based on the audience of Question Time. India though could, perhaps, do a better job explaining how the aid is helping, or offer more effective alternatives.

The one undeniable fact is that there are still millions of people living in poverty. As yet, neither UK aid, nor Indian fighter jets, have managed to solve that problem.

After neglecting the Indians they ruled who died in famines they are all stuck up with righteousness. Bloody racist b'tards. And whatever happened to their ideals of freedom of right to choose!!

ejazr said:

Has the British public turned against india? | Firstpost

The BBC's Question Time programme is frequently like an unruly rabble of children arguing in front of a cheering mob.
Thursday night, one of the questions posed on the show was why international aid should be paid to India when India is spending it's own money on fighter jets.

Click to expand...

wonder what would be the question if EF got the tender, most logical one it seems that since India is paying out of its pocket for Fighter jets, why we should not increase aid to that country.

BTW it appears that brits wake up too late.

I hate the colonials probably more than most people commenting here, I just don't express it.

For me it's not just the loot part but also some other racist, biased,ill informed and pea brained decisions they took in the subcontinent.

Their foolishness has been reflecting a lot in their foreign policy in the past few years, especially with relevance to the subcontinent.
They did that in the past and continue to do it in the present too.

British public has no time to think about India. They are busy with their own world. Their world is limited to ,boozing,smoking, petty crimes, sex at the age of 12,swearing, living on govt benefits,doing no work, etc etc

The british public can go ----.Some years back in Lucknow some wannabe Raj tourits were assaulted with cow dun and bottles when they wanted to commerate the revolt of 1857's 150 th anniversary.

All this rabble rousing is being done by the Labour Party to corner the Tories.

The average Limey is more intrested in Pubs,football matches and his David Beckham