Foreign aid doesn’t help any poor countries – it just corrupts their governments
As a beneficiary of British foreign aid – I bought my first house with money saved from the generous salary an aid project paid me when I worked in the South Seas – I am well placed to appreciate the absurdity of continued British aid to India. It is not only absurd: it is corrupt, the modern equivalent of what Charles Bradlaugh and Henry Labouchère considered the Empire, a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes.
India, which has just announced that it will do what Britain could not do – send a space probe to Mars – is now a country with more technological prowess than our own. Its economic progress has been remarkable. I have been going on and off to Calcutta, City of Dreadful Night, for 40 years, and the difference between my first and last visit is startling. There is still poverty, but they don’t any longer collect dead people from the pavements who have died in the night of starvation.
The former Indian finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee (now the president), said that India didn’t need British aid which, he added, was “peanuts” anyway. He was right on both counts, but oddly enough his pronouncement – no more than the most obvious truth – was met by almost grovelling British requests to continue aid to India. Why? Full story...
Related posts:
As a beneficiary of British foreign aid – I bought my first house with money saved from the generous salary an aid project paid me when I worked in the South Seas – I am well placed to appreciate the absurdity of continued British aid to India. It is not only absurd: it is corrupt, the modern equivalent of what Charles Bradlaugh and Henry Labouchère considered the Empire, a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes.
India, which has just announced that it will do what Britain could not do – send a space probe to Mars – is now a country with more technological prowess than our own. Its economic progress has been remarkable. I have been going on and off to Calcutta, City of Dreadful Night, for 40 years, and the difference between my first and last visit is startling. There is still poverty, but they don’t any longer collect dead people from the pavements who have died in the night of starvation.
The former Indian finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee (now the president), said that India didn’t need British aid which, he added, was “peanuts” anyway. He was right on both counts, but oddly enough his pronouncement – no more than the most obvious truth – was met by almost grovelling British requests to continue aid to India. Why? Full story...
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