India’s development partnership: Expanding vistas
Author: Nutan Kapoor Mahawar and Dhrubjyoti Bhattarjee
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Publisher: KW Publishers
Pages: 384
Price: Rs 1,580
It is a given in international diplomacy that foreign aid is not a philanthropic or altruistic instrument. In fact, it is considered an instrument of a country’s foreign policy and external engagement. Any country capable of providing foreign aid has combined this capability with its foreign policy goals and strategic objectives. Developed countries such as the US have used foreign aid as a tool to redirect spending on military equipment for security reasons. For example, the US negotiated the Public Law 480 agreement (also known as the Food for Peace Act) to provide foreign aid to poor countries in an effort to prevent those countries from accepting aid from their Cold War adversaries. President Lyndon B Johnson used the PL-480 as leverage to gain support for US foreign policy objectives, even placing famine relief on a limited basis to India until he received assurances that the Indian government would accept criticism of US policies towards Vietnam would temper.
The edited volume discussed here, which consists of reports from a seminar on India’s development assistance, analyzes India’s development assistance in various countries, especially in its immediate and extended neighbourhood. It is noteworthy that India is still a developing economy that aspires to be a developed economy. Nevertheless, India provides development assistance to needy countries, especially in Asia and Africa. Indian aid diplomacy is conducted through two broad omnibus architectures: “Development Cooperation” and “Economic Diplomacy”.
The Development Partnership Administration (DPA) was established in January 2012 to handle India’s aid projects from conception and launch to implementation and completion. Several chapters in the book, written by scholars and diplomats with domain expertise and practical experience, provide comprehensive accounts of facets of Indian development assistance through partnerships, lines of credit and the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) program under the Ministry of External Affairs. , leveraging Indian know-how and connecting the dots to meet local needs, rather than imposing an Indian model that only suits New Delhi’s strategic objectives.
All the chapters in the book are quite useful, but some deserve mention. The chapter on Afghanistan titled “India’s Soft Power Diplomacy in Afghanistan: Need for a Policy Rethink?” by Shanthie Mariet D’Souza is enlightening. It is another matter that India has not recognized the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which regained control in 2021. But before the Taliban’s recovery, India had robust economic involvement in Afghanistan despite security concerns.
The main focus of Indian development assistance in Afghanistan has been capacity development of Afghan nationals and institutions. India built the majestic Parliament Building in Afghanistan as well as the Salma Dam, which was renamed as the India-Afghanistan Friendship Dam. Moreover, India also built the Shahtoot Dam, which provides water to the people of Kabul. India has embarked on high-impact community development projects in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan. Through the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR), India provides a large number of scholarships to Afghan nationals to study in India. So far, India has offered more than 1,000 scholarships to Afghan nationals.
In other essays, such as those by Nihar R Nayak, Biswajit Nag, Medha Bisht, and Angshuman Choudhury, we get a sense of other aspects of India’s aid involvement with its immediate neighbors. For example, India provides a number of ICCR and ITEC scholarships to Bhutanese nationals. India also built Paro airport. A major Indian-backed project is the Kaladan Multi Modal Transit Transport project, aimed at connecting the India-Myanmar-Thailand trilateral highway. Once completed, the Trilateral Highway will provide a seamless connection between India’s northeastern states and Myanmar, Thailand and other ASEAN countries. India has also funded the Myanmar Institute of Information Technology in Mandalay and the Advanced Center for Agriculture and Education in Naypyidaw. The political slugfest in Nepal and Chinese checkbook diplomacy have hampered India’s involvement in Nepal to some extent. Despite this, India is developing rail links in the landlocked country.
A state-of-the-art cultural center has been built in Jaffna under the India-Sri Lanka Development Partnership. India’s development assistance to the neighboring island was people-oriented. For example, a housing project with 50,000 houses for the resettlement of internally displaced persons is progressing well. The construction and repair of 46,000 houses under an owner-driven process for internally displaced persons in the Northern and Eastern Provinces has been completed.
A comparison between Indian and African development aid is best expressed by the African proverb: “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for the rest of his life.” This is how you can differentiate between the nature of Chinese and Indian aid. The predatory and mercantilist nature of Chinese development aid; and the hidden agenda of the flagship One Belt, One Road program is now being exposed in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Africa and elsewhere – so much so that Italy has withdrawn from it.
The editors have succinctly summarized the book’s conclusions in the introduction, underscoring the need to expand the scope of development partnerships beyond a government-to-government approach to include the private sector and civil society, and to strengthen the civil society interface. and local communities for better reach and sustainable growth.
The reviewer is a former senior fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research and the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses. These views are personal
First publication: Oct 02, 2024 | 11:53 PM IST