Aid to India makes Britain great

The UK is right to keep giving aid to India and Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell is showing boldness in defending the policy. His statement comes on the day that Trevor Kavanagh’s column in The Sun argues that stopping UK aid to India “could have saved us slashing our own Armed Forces. Or keep hospitals open. Or soften the welfare cuts.”

The UK is set to spend just £280m per year in India and does so in the three poorest states. As I have argued before, it’s wrong to trade off bednets and body armour. It's also wrong to blame aid to India for the closure of hospitals, when the government has ring-fenced the NHS budget in the same way as the aid budget. And the idea that Trevor Kavanagh should want to soften welfare cuts flies in the face of just about ever column he’s ever written. Besides, there is political consensus both on welfare reform—and the associated benefits cap—just as there is on reaching the UN target of spending 0.7 per cent of GNI on overseas assistance by 2013.

It would have been far better for the government to keep its manifesto pledge on legislating for aid spending, but it is heartening to see ministers argue that they will not balance the books on the backs of the world’s poor.

Critics are right that India is a country which has growing wealth but it is also a country of great inequality and of incredible levels of unimaginable poverty. A third of the world's poorest people (that is people living on less than $1.25 or 80p a day) live in India—more than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. If we are serious about meeting our international commitment to the UN Millennium Development Goals, we must do our small part and not sit back waiting for the India government to redistribute the wealth that it is in everyone’s interest that their economy creates.

Of course, no aid programme is forever. With the right political leadership, strong policies and aid support, desperately poor states like Bihar have shown that they can grow and lift people out of grinding poverty. That is the point of international development and why DFID is a "development department" and not an "aid agency" within the Foriegn and Commonwealth Office. But Brits should be proud that more than a million children have gone to primary school in India because of the generosity of the UK taxpayer. Had we have withdrawn aid from India while waiting for their government’s policies to change, those children would have grown up illiterate and been condemned to a life of unending poverty.

In 2009, I was privileged to visit India with Douglas Alexander and Ed Miliband, in their respective positions as development secretary and energy and climate change secretary at that time (along with, as it happens, Prospect's politics editor James Macintyre). As well as the meetings and the speaking engagements, three visits on that trip brought home to me the three best reasons for the UK to keep giving spending British taxpayers' money in India.

We visited a slum in West Bengal where UK taxpayers’ money had paid for toilets and a sewage system that brought some level of dignity to people living in poverty and prevented children dying from disease.

By contrast, we also took a trip on the new air conditioned metro system in Dehli with office workers from India’s new middle class. They are the people who will provide the tax revenues for the Indian government to tackle poverty without international assistance. They are also the consumers to whom the UK can export goods and services, boosting our own economy in the process.

And we visited a new housing development where all the power for homes is provided by solar energy, so that India’s economic development does not come with the global cost of rising carbon emissions and damaging the global battle against dangerous climate change.

I am glad that Andrew Mitchell is tacking on the argument and defending aid to India. I was proud of Alan Duncan for putting the case to the public on Question Time last week. And I know that in politics it is far easier to play to the gallery than to take a stand for what you believe in, however unpopular it may be.

Richard Darlington was Special Adviser at DFID 2009-2010 and is now Head of News at the think tank IPPR. Follow him on Twitter: @RDarlo