Clare Short, the British Minister for International Development, was on a visit to India from December 3-5. The UK government works on development and poverty elimination through Department for International Development (DFID) and is UK’s largest bilateral development assistance programme. Focussing on poverty elimination, it spent Rs 1,400 crore and is expected to go up to rise Rs 2,100 crore by 2004. She met Union Finance Minister Jaswant Singh, Minister of External Affairs Yashwant Sinha and N.K. Singh, Member, Planning Commission. She also travelled to Kolkata to hold talks with West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya. What is significant is that their work largely consists of working with national and state governments. They work in partnership with four states — Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Orissa. Short spoke to Sonu Jain.What was the main area of concern for you when you met the Indian ministers?We have a number of programmes at the national level on education, health, literacy and primary education. Though there has been a growth in the aid money but spending is slow at times. Instead of the 230 million pounds, we were only able to spend 170 million last year. We could have spent the same amount of money in the sub-Sahara region, Afghanistan and Palestine.Why have you decided to work with the government and not with smaller NGOs or individuals?We ensure that our aid is sustainable. Usually if there is no school, a school is provided but collapses when the aid money runs out. We invest to improve systems to make our aid more sustainable. The Finance Minister was saying that states have debt problems at the state level and revenue system of the country has to be right. We provide development assistance that is used to leverage reform.How do you ensure that the aid is in sync with national reform agenda?It is not right for any external country to dictate terms on what a country’s reform policy should look like. Hence we have the United Nations Millennium Development goals. It is a mutually agreed agenda with fixed targets like halving poverty by 2015 and works beautifully for two countries that are working together.Is it true that the present BJP government is not as open to receiving foreign aid?After the nuclear episode in 1997 unlike others we did not withdraw aid to India. This was on the premise that the poor of India had no hand in the bomb. There is a growing programme for India for increased focus on reducing poverty. And Prime Minister Vajpayee has welcomed this growth.Is there any way you can assess the impact your programmes are having in the country?Thanks to the Millennium goals, we have measurable targets like how many people have benefitted or the number of poor people that has come down. So far, things are going on track, but we need to do better especially in the area of girls’ education. There has been a lot of rhetoric around poverty but the indicators are not hiding any more. We can get to know country by country, year by year. Like in Orissa, we know that there was a set-back because of the floods but there have been successes there.On what basis do you identify the state and then how do you go about disseminating the funds?We first see if the state has a reform agenda, whether it is serious about it. Then we go ahead with providing technical and other kind of assistance working together. For example, in Andhra Pradesh, we have worked in a village where all the women were illiterate but now all the girls are going to school in spite of the resistance of the teachers’ union.Like in the state of Andhra Pradesh there is a programme called Vision 20 for primary education — there was same thinking, working on it without caste or class barriers. It was a state-driven programme but we helped in deployment of teachers, improving buildings, providing equipment and getting teachers to teach and ensuring local accountability.What are the lessons learnt in India?There are vested interests that resist reform. Surprisingly a large group of interests rally around politics and diverts attention from reforms. I think India will be able to halve poverty by 2015 as the programme is going on track. What is tantalising is that it could have done more.
