Our Indian aid bill has rocketed by £10million!
3 years after Tories vowed to give less to nation with its own space programme...
BRITAIN’S aid budget to India shot up by £10million last year, despite a pledge to stop funding the booming nation.
India – a country wealthy enough to afford its own space programme – is now the second-highest recipient of UK aid, behind only ethiopia.
Latest figures show that in 2014, India was handed £279million, up from £269million the year before as the fourth largest recipient.
Three years ago then aid minister Andrew Mitchell pledged to end aid to India by the end of this year, saying: ‘We are walking the last mile with them.’
But it has now emerged that Britain will still be ploughing in tens of millions of pounds to India by funding private firms and ‘technical assistance’ programmes.
Tory backbenchers – already angry that the UK is pledged to spend 0.7 per cent of its income on development every single year – demanded ministers look again at the ‘absurd’ aid budget for India.
Details of how much India still receives were revealed in the Department for International Development’s annual ‘statistics on international development’, which also found:
n The UK remains the world’s second most generous donor, with its £11.4billion aid budget in 2014 – only behind the US and greater than France, Spain and Italy combined; n Britain gave more than £200million in aid to countries defined as ‘upper middle income’; n Our bilateral aid – given by a government directly to the government of another country – goes to 131 different countries throughout the world rather than being concentrated on the most needy; n At least £370million of UK aid money went on ‘administrative costs’; and n More than £1.1billion was channelled through the notoriously wasteful european Commission. taryIn March Andrew 2012, Mitchell former announcedaid secrethe UK was to stop doling out millions of pounds of aid to India by the end of 2015. he said: ‘ We are walking the last mile with them. We won’t be there forever.’ his successor, Justine Greening, clarified in November 2012 that Mr Mitchell’s statement meant that just ‘financial aid’ would end.
Last night DfID admitted that this meant that its spending on technical assistance programmes ‘focusing on sharing skills and experience’ would continue beyond the end of this year.
Money will not go directly to the Indian government in the form of grants. Instead, the UK will help the country build up its skills in the area of health and education.
In addition, the Foreign Office, the business department and other agencies – who spent £91million on India in 2014 – would also continue to invest in private sector projects that help the poor.
Peter Bone, Conservative MP for Wellingborough, said: ‘It is absurd that at a time of austerity we are spending more than ever on India when even the aid department say we shouldn’t have.
‘We should be saving that money and spending it on public services in this country – that is what my constituents would want.’
The report also showed that aid spending in the UK is now more than double the figure in 2007, when the budget was £4.9billion.
France spent just £6.3billion, Italy £2billion and Spain £1.2billion in 2014.
A spokesman for DfID said: ‘We are doing exactly what we said we would do back in 2012 – ending financial aid to India by the end of this year. Since 2011, DfID has cut aid to India by almost 40 per cent, saving the British taxpayer more than £300million.’