Homegrown nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play crucial roles providing social services to the poor, holding governments accountable, aggregating the political power of the disenfranchised, and helping to shape public policies. Their importance to development is well known.

But what explains the reason why some developing countries possess so few independent organizations while others have a multitude?

Take Pakistan for instance. Whereas in Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, NGOs have played such a prominent role that they have supplanted the state in some crucial areas, in Pakistan they are far less influential. Despite having 180 million people, the latter has relatively few important NGOs, think tanks, and independent monitoring organizations (IMOs), as pointed out by former ambassador to Pakistan William B. Milam in his book Bangladesh and Pakistan. Despite a generally positive government attitude (at least towards domestic organizations) and much growth in recent years, the number of important institutions pales in contrast to Bangladesh’s total. (more…)

The Center for Global Development has been organizing a Study Group on a U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan. It published a report listing its recommendations last June.

Nancy Birdsall, CGD’s president, has also issued a series of open letters to the US government, such as the one posted recently.

CGD should be praised for undertaking such an initiative. Getting aid right in Pakistan matters a lot to US national interests, as well as to the idea that donors can contribute to state building. No fragile state is as important as Pakistan. Its governance problems have allowed terrorists to use its territory to plan attacks, and make its growing stockpile of nuclear weapons less secure. On the other hand, its strategic location and growing population (the country will be the 4th largest in a generation) ought to make it an important emerging market.

It is also rare that any think tank so closely examines aid policy in a specific country, though the importance of Pakistan means that two Washington organizations have done so in the last year (the Wilson Center issued a report in December).

But, CGD’s approach is flawed. Although the report makes sensible recommendations (on things like opening markets, promoting investment, engaging reformers, and improving USAID operations), it says almost nothing specific about Pakistan. There is no attempt to understand the drivers of its political economy, and the causes of its weak governance. There is no attempt to delve into the reasons why its leadership has consistently failed the country or why its state apparatus works so badly, especially for the country’s tens of millions of poor people. All its ideas more or less repeat verbatim what could be said about U.S. aid to almost any developing country. There is no context. (more…)

Remember that “terrible phrase”, Winning Hearts And Minds (WHAM)? Using development programs as a tool for counterinsurgency? PRTs and Money as a Weapons System? So last decade, right? Well it’s back, and there’s some new evidence to show that it might actually work – for certain things, and when done right. From Afghanistan, of course. It’s only taken 10 years.

  (more…)

Syria is slipping further into chaos.  It’s sad to think that the Security Council has been debating the situation there for almost half a year to no effect.  Or, to be more accurate, the only effect has been to make lots of diplomats very unhappy, as I explain in the new edition of Pragati:

It’s hard to find a happy diplomat at the United Nations Security Council these days. Western officials grumble about the difficulty of negotiating with India, Brazil and South Africa (the IBSA countries) over the Syrian crisis, to say nothing of China and Russia. The non-Western powers, they suspect, are all plotting to frustrate the U.S. and Europe.

Piffle, reply the supposed plotters. The bleak mood in the Council is a result of the West’s distortion of the UN mandate to protect civilians in Libya. If NATO hadn’t used that as a basis for regime change, there might be real cooperation over Syria. Even the unhappiest European officials accept that other powers’ anger over Libya is genuine.

Does anyone gain anything from the stalemate? Russia arguably does. Earlier in the year it failed to halt Western interventions in not only Libya but also Côte d’Ivoire. As Russia’s main claim to leverage at the UN is its willingness to act as a spoiler, these set-backs made it look a shadow of itself. On Syria, its blocking power returned as it resisted – and in October vetoed – EU and US efforts to pass a resolution sanctioning Syria.

For China, the benefits have been less clear, as it prefers to look pragmatic on the Security Council. Nonetheless it felt obliged to side with Russia over Syria. But the real losers have been the IBSA countries, which have often looked trapped between the West and the Russo-Chinese axis as they have tried to respond to events in the Middle East.

But at least IBSA has emerged as a semi-credible diplomatic force in UN affairs, right?  I’m not so sure:

The fact that IBSA voted as a bloc can be interpreted as a success – it is generally recognised that the trio of powers have been significant swing voters in the Security Council this year. But this may only be a temporary phenomenon. Brazil is approaching the end of its two-year term on the Council, and South Africa continues to have a greater stake in acting as the leader of the African bloc than in aligning with India. IBSA’s brief moment of importance in the Council could soon be forgotten, and India’s leverage duly reduced.

President Obama has announced that American troops will pull out of Iraq by the year’s end.  Why?

The United States had earlier agreed to exit Iraq by the end of the year and leave 3,000 to 5,000 troops in Iraq as trainers, with some members of Congress advocating the retention of a reduced fighting force as well. But Pentagon lawyers insisted that the Iraqi Parliament grant immunity from legal prosecution to the troops if they were to remain. In recent weeks American negotiators in Baghdad concluded that it would be impossible to obtain that immunity, essentially scuttling any chance of a substantial troop presence here next year.

I can understand the Pentagon’s position.  But what if a country’s troops enjoyed immunity from prosecution while operating on domestic soil?  That, as Sushant K. Singh points out in a WSJ op-ed today, is the case for Indian forces who operate in Kashmir under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).

Enacted by India’s parliament in 1958 to facilitate a counterinsurgency in northeastern India, the law allows the army greater scope to operate in those areas state governments declare to be “disturbed.” It gives armed forces the power to shoot to kill in law-enforcement situations, to arrest without warrant and to detain people without time limits. The act also forbids prosecution of soldiers without approval from the central government, which in practice is rarely granted. It was extended to Kashmir in 1990, after the Pakistan-backed insurgency overwhelmed local police.

Every national government needs legal cover to fight insurgencies, but the devil in AFSPA lies in its particular draconian details. Not surprisingly, the continued application of this law to Kashmir has been a massive political problem.

Meant to protect soldiers who may kill a civilian by mistake during an operation, the act has ended up blocking all state-level attempts to prosecute soldiers for alleged charges of rape and murder. Separatists point to the law as an example of Delhi’s “imperialist designs” to occupy Kashmir. India’s reputation abroad suffers for its use of a law which arguably violates its international human rights obligations. But for the army’s insistence that it can’t do counterinsurgency without AFSPA, the law would have certainly been repealed by now.

But now, as Sushant has emphasized before, things are looking up in Indian-controlled Kashmir.  The number of militants on the loose has dropped, and terrorist incidents have declined.  The protests that shook the region last year have not been repeated.   Now Omar Abdullah, Kashmir’s admired Chief Minister, wants to end the application of AFSPA in the most stable districts of Kashmir.   There’s a good case for this:

Scaling back AFSPA’s application would bolster the standing of pro-India leaders in the state, allowing them to seize the political space in separatist strongholds. By taking away their strongest rallying cry, more separatists will be forced to seek negotiations with New Delhi, so that they can join the political mainstream.

This political change could have security implications. Many Kashmiris, egged on by separatists, resent the army and New Delhi as “occupying” forces. In the long term, insurgents can keep surviving in Kashmir only as long as some locals assist them. Here, a normal political situation can reassure locals and help the security forces. Encouraged by the security turnaround, New Delhi is already considering withdrawing 10,000 central security forces this year—that will reduce the sense of “siege” some Kashmiris feel.

President Obama has said that he wants “normal” relations with Iraq after U.S. forces depart.  It’s good to see that India is in a position to establish normal relations with some long-troubled parts of itself.

He’s back!

How does the world look to New Delhi’s top policy-makers?  Hobbesian, according to a speech this week by Indian National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon:

In other words, while domestic societies have evolved or are evolving towards rule of law, international society is still much closer to primeval anarchy, where to a very great extent “the strong do as they will and the weak do as they must.”

OK, that’s from Thucydides, but you get my point.  Menon pulls no punches:

We live in a time where international law remains underdeveloped, international governance is non-existent or weak, and international society is fundamentally anarchic. As a result the role of force in international relations has been magnified. But the age of weapons of mass destruction and newer technologies make it essential that we consider new ways of regulating the use of force in international relations.

Now that technology has made the spectrum of conflict wider than ever before, it is more than ever a political call whether and how to use force. Societies that have not followed this simple rule have suffered as a consequence. Militaries will have to strive to close the gap between their military capabilities and desired political outcomes. This will require flexibility and agility.

India as a society and nation has by and large made wise choices in the past on matters relating to the use of force, showing strategic restraint and realism. We have contributed force to internationally legitimate uses such as UN peacekeeping, while limiting its domestic deployment. Today we are in a position to make a greater contribution to global public goods in areas such as maritime security. At the same time we are moving towards an Indian doctrine for the use of force, though this is a work in progress.

If the ultimate doctrine is anything like the NSA’s speech, it will be a bracing read.

It now looks like the Security Council will vote on a (still too weak) resolution demanding the end of the Syrian crackdown today or tomorrow.  Russia is still bad-mouthing the proposal, drafted by the Council’s European members, but other powers are lining up to back it.  Brazil – previously numbered among opponents of a resolution along with China, India and South Africa – looks like it’s on board:

In a joint statement issued the same day European nations were to seek a vote on a UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria’s crackdown on protests, EU leaders and visiting Brazilian President Dilma Roussef said the two sides “expressed grave concern” at the current situation in Syria.

“They agreed on the need to continue urging the Syrian authorities to put an end to the violence and to initiate a peaceful transition to democracy.”

The well-informed David Bosco predicts that India and South Africa will also vote for the resolution, although the Indians were fighting a rearguard action against it last week.  He thinks that China and, in the end, Russia will abstain.  Meanwhile, Turkey is giving the resolution full support from outside the Council:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan voiced support for the proposed UN resolution and said he would soon announce sanctions on the neighbouring country.

“The draft resolution before the council today is in the nature of sending a warning. We hope there will a positive outcome of this vote and that there will then be further discussions about whatever further steps need to be taken,” Erdogan told a news conference during a visit to South Africa.

The political picture could change again before the vote, and it can’t be repeated too often that the EU’s resolution has been watered down a lot , with a threat of sanctions reduced to near-invisibility.  But I think that this episode underlines the point Franziska Brantner and I made in our recent update on human rights and the UN for ECFR: many non-Western powers, especially rising powers like Brazil, want to distance themselves from Russia’s obstructionism in UN debates.  Even China is ready to step away from the Russians, as it did over Côte d’Ivoire.   As we noted in our paper, and I repeated here last week, this opens up the EU’s options for coalition-building in New York.  It looks like the EU is finally finding ways to use those options…

Last Thursday, I published a grumpy post over on the blog of the Takshashila Institution, an excellent Indian think-tank. Why was I in a bad mood?

On Friday, India will use its month-long presidency of the United Nations Security Council to convene a discussion on the state of peacekeeping.  This is timely, as UN operations have been through a turbulent year, navigating crises in Côte d’Ivoire and Sudan.  There is talk of a new mission in Libya.  But this meeting is likely to be a bore.

And why did I think that the debate would be a snooze-fest?  Demonstrating a remarkable degree of foresight, I guessed that “Security Council diplomats will be thinking of how to beat the traffic from New York to Long Island’s beach resorts once the debate is finished.”  Er, no.  With Hurricane Irene almost literally on the horizon, everyone was probably wondering when they could go and stock up on bottled water and black truffles, or whatever ambassadors consume during hurricanes.

The debate was also overshadowed by the tragic attack on the UN offices in Nigeria.  Nonetheless, a quick read of the summary of the discussions suggests that they were every bit as tedious as I had predicted. Let’s get a quick taster:

Most speakers in the ensuing discussion stressed the continuing importance of United Nations peacekeeping and the need for increased engagement by the partners involved.  In that context, many welcomed more regularized consultations with troop- and police-contributing countries and urged continuous improvement in cooperation among all stakeholders.  Many also called for innovative thinking in closing resource gaps, particularly in supplying such enablers as helicopters, and in implementing the recommendations of previous peacekeeping reviews.

Enough already!  When multiple speakers are highlighting the  importance of “implementing the recommendations of previous peacekeeping reviews”, you know that “innovative thinking” is probably in short supply.  I’m afraid that I fault the Indian conveners for not shaking up the discussions:

A background paper prepared for the Security Council’s meeting contains a solid but all-too-familiar litany of diplomatic statements about how peace operations are resourced and managed.  It fails to grapple seriously with the hardest cases facing the UN or offer a serious framework for resolving them.

As I’ve argued before, peacekeeping is an issue on which New Delhi can show global leadership, but holding debates in New York in which everyone says more or less exactly what they’ve always said isn’t the way to achieve that.

Sushant K. Singh has a great piece over at World Politics Review on the state of Indian Kashmir (you may need to subscribe).  Something seems to be going right:

With the global spotlight unwaveringly focused on the momentous changes in the Arab world, subtle shifts taking place in another strife-torn Muslim-majority region in Asia have escaped the world’s attention. Jammu and Kashmir, the object of a longstanding territorial dispute between India and Pakistan, has been ravaged for the past two decades by a violent, Pakistan-backed Islamist insurgency that has exploited popular grievances among Kashmiris. But almost a year after turmoil in urban Kashmir led to the deaths of 112 unarmed civilians in police actions last summer, the situation has been completely peaceful this year.

This is in spite the fact that Kashmir has been holding local elections, previously a high-risk activity. Even more surprisingly, says Singh, turnout has been exceptionally high in these polls, even in separatist strongholds. He ascribes this to the senistive political touch of Kashmir’s Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah (a voracious user of Twitter) and promises of big grants from Delhi. Other factors are at play:

A team of interlocutors appointed by New Delhi, though systematically ignored by the separatists, has further helped cool tempers by engaging with various sections of the Kashmiri population. In addition, New Delhi has approved a skills-training program for Kashmiris that aims to generate employment for 15,000 youths in the next five months. The local police have also geared up to prevent any repetition of last year’s street violence. Meanwhile, the fatigue gripping the two-decade-old insurgency led by Pakistan-based jihadi groups has been exacerbated by Pakistan’s own internal strife, which has undermined the separatists’ goal of merging Kashmir with Pakistan on the basis of religious affinity.

With everyone watching Pakistan with deep concern – and ramifications of the Bin Laden killing still playing out – this is one bit of good news for South Asian security.

Francis Fukuyama has got a lot of attention for his new book The Origins of Political Order.  He’s still so closely associated with having announced the “end of history” in the early 1990s (a complex idea that’s more often  cited than understood) people are struck that he’s decided to go back to the beginning, tracing the evolution of political order in different societies from prehistory to the French Revolution.  As I argue in a new review for The National, “this is a remarkably old-fashioned project”:

In tracing the highways and byways of human development, Fukuyama appears far more interested in probing the classics of political philosophy and sociology than current development theory. The majority of books in the bibliography date from before 2000, and the argument includes detailed discussions of Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Max Weber and Friedrich von Hayek. With some authors, this might be dismissed as a tokenistic tour through “Great Books of Political Theory”. But Fukuyama embraces such non-household names as “the great English jurist Sir Edward Coke”. As has been said of another Coke, this is the real thing.

But there are obvious differences between this book and its intellectual forebears:

Marx apparently failed to grasp huge differences between ancient Indian and Chinese societies, lumping them together under the headline of “Oriental despotism”. Weber failed to see just how far ancient Chinese society advanced.

As his dismissals of Marx and Weber suggest, Fukuyama does not treat the histories of the great Asian empires as an adjunct to “the rise of the West”. He notes at the outset that he will downplay Greece and Rome. Socrates and Aristotle make only cameo appearances. By contrast, Fukuyama treats Confucianism and Hindu thought in considerable detail.

Does this mean that Fukuyama, once associated with the Project for a New American Century, is giving up on the West? Not so. As I argue in the review, his strategy is to cast more light on non-Western societies and ideas so to emphasize the enduring strength of Western political models:

India, Fukuyama posits fairly early on, has yet to escape from the norms of its pre-colonial politics. Caste groups and kin ties were so crucial to its development – and continue to play a significant role today – that the country remains difficult to unite.

If that’s bad news for Delhi, what about Beijing? Fukuyama argues on the very last page of The Origins of Political Order that today’s Chinese system bears the hallmarks of its imperial predecessors, with power concentrated in the centre and too little accountability.

“An authoritarian system can periodically run rings around a liberal democratic one under good leadership,” he argues, clearly thinking of today’s Sino-American competition, but at the same time it will always be in peril of slipping into political decay. In spite of Fukuyama’s attention to the histories of today’s Asian powers, his message is clear: if you want to get ahead in today’s global competition, it’s still best to refer to the ideas that shaped the West.

So this is good reading not only in its own right (and it’s a stimulating work of history and ideas) but also intellectual material for those who in the West who still believe that, as Barack Obama said in London, “the time for our leadership is now”…

Everybody say...aaah!

Horrific new data released by the latest census in India and analysed on the Guardian’s development blog shows that things are getting worse for girls.  The ratio of girls to boys at birth has fallen from 927 girls per 1000 boys in 2001, to 914 girls per 1000 boys today.  In the worst district, the ratio is 774 girls to 1000 boys.  Usually you’d expect about 950 girls per 1000 boys. That adds up to 15 million girls not born in India in the last 10 years.

Wealth and urbanisation aren’t changing this – Mumbai’s figures are worse than the national average.  They might even be making it worse, since medical progress, through the easy availabilty of ultrasound, makes it easier to identify girls and safer abortions reduce the risk of getting rid of them.

This is a tragedy, an abuse of just about all the rights I can think of, and a pretty horrific illustration of how new technology can sometimes serve outmoded and repressive ideologies rather than contribute to their overthrow, as the technological optimists would have it. 

But it’s also, possibly, storing up big economic problems for the future – for all of us.  Research in China, where the ratio is even worse, at about 819 girls per 1000 boys, finds an interesting link between the one-child policy, the preference for boys, and high savings rates.  It goes like this: there are more boys than girls.  When the boys grow up, they are competing over the limited number of girls in the marriage market, and so their parents give them a helping hand by saving up for a nice flat, a nice car (yep, this stuff really does work, like it or not). The authors show that Chinese savings rates shot up in around 2002, when the generation where boys really outnumbered girls reached the age when they started to think about marriage, and that savings rates are higher in areas where the gender ratio is most skewed.  They argue that this effect explains about half of China’s high savings rate.

Now, as I’m sure all the well-informed readers of this blog will know, the high rate of savings in China was one of the factors causing the global imbalances which were one of the contributors to the financial crisis. 

So there you have it.  Women’s rights are good for financial stability.  Perhaps a cause that the likely first woman head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, would like to take up?

The new UN population projections were published to great fanfare last week, with much of the coverage focusing on a significant increase in overall estimates from the 2008 figures.

Pakistan, however, bucked the overall trend. It is now projected to have 60 million fewer people at mid-century, with its population peaking at 283 million in 2075. In the 2008 data, it was projected to hit that level by 2035 – a striking difference of 40 years.

What gives? I have absolutely no idea. Pakistan has not had a census since 1998. As a result, much of the country’s data is based on extremely ropey projections over a nearly 15 year period.

But somehow the United Nations has managed to make significant changes to its data for Pakistan (oddly population figures revised downwards all the way back to 1950). What gives?

Over at Mint, my colleague W.P.S. Sidhu reflects on the BRICS summit in Sanya, where the big non-Western powers were in a non-interventionist mood…

While the categorical assertion in the Sanya Declaration that the BRICS “share the principle that the use of force should be avoided” is commendable as a tenet, ruling out the use of force under any circumstances cannot be a viable policy option. Indeed, at the regional level all the BRICS countries have resorted to force at one time or another when other means of persuasion have failed. India’s interventions in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives are evidence of this pragmatism.

India’s stance on interventionism is one topic of a new paper just out from CIC by Nitin Pai of the Takshashila Institution. Nitin focuses on India’s policy towards weak states in its region – including Afghanistan, Nepal and Burma but also Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – and argues that New Delhi faces a “paradox of proximity”. The  fact that India is so close to these weak states means that it has (i) strong reasons to be involved in their affairs but (ii) even stronger reasons to be cautious. This is why India’s interventions in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, decades ago, remain exceptional:

Domestic politics, fear of military overreach and bureaucratic factors moderate boldness and circumscribe policy innovation. They have also forced New Delhi into a pattern of reacting to developments. Other than the peace process with Pakistan, India’s political leaders have shown little interest in stewarding bold departures from extant neighbourhood policy. Changes in New Delhi’s policies have been incremental even in the face of momentous changes in the countries of the region.

So while Sidhu emphasizes India’s “pragmatism”, Nitin highlights its “cautious prudence”.   For those used to U.S. debates between idealism and realism, a contest between pragmatism and prudence may seem rather low-key.  But a measured rise to superpower status may well be more sustainable than a meteoric ascent.

My post earlier today about whether or not rising powers like Brazil, India and China might help mount a UN peace operation in post-Gaddafi Libya has drawn some interesting, if robustly negative, responses.  “Pragmatic Desi”, an Indian expert who had dismissed my idea out-of-hand, argued that I overestimate the readiness of the BRICs: “India (& even China) still consider themselves to be consumers of geo-political stability, not providers of it.”  David Bosco of FP concurs:

I very much doubt that BRIC countries do feel the obligation [to push for peace in Libya] that [Gowan] describes; after all, the Security Council calls on people to do all sorts of things all the time without asking or expecting Council members to provide resources to ensure that they happen (though I do agree that Council members should feel a much greater sense of obligation to give meaning to the body’s entreaties). More broadly, my sense is that the BRICs view the entire response to Libya (including Resolution 1970, which they supported) as Western-driven and are not particularly invested in a particular outcome.

But let’s say the BRICS were willing to provide military observers to police a political transition. Would the West feel comfortable handing off what was essentially a war for human rights to countries that have a very different take on that concept?

David has consistently argued - since at least 25 February - that the emerging powers have decided to take a ”you bomb if you want to, we’ll just watch” sort of approach to the Libyan crisis.  After the BRICs abstained on Security Council Resolution 1973 – the basis for bombing – he offered this explanation for their ambivalence:

First, they didn’t care all that much and they didn’t want to use up diplomatic capital resisting strong Western pressure for intervention. Second, and more deviously, they may have liked the idea of the West spending time and resources in Libya. They knew the West wouldn’t intervene absent a Council resolution and so they abstained in order to induce an intervention they calculated would drain resources and open up the West to the very kind of criticism they’re now happily dishing out.

I suspect there’s more than a grain of truth in this analysis. But if so, I’d suggest that politicians and planners in Delhi and Beijing in particular are failing to grasp the full meaning of events in the Middle East for them. Back in early March I made the following argument in a piece for Abu Dhabi’s The National:

China and India are both significant customers for Libyan oil and gas, and roughly 30,000 Chinese citizens and 20,000 Indians lived in Libya before the troubles began. Last month, New Delhi ordered warships to the Mediterranean to rescue its nationals, while Beijing organised similar evacuations.

Historians may come to see the Libyan crisis as a pivotal moment in China and India’s rise as global powers. There has recently been copious commentary about the new Asian economic superpowers’ investments in Africa and the Middle East – and criticism of their ties to unstable leaders such as Sudan’s Omar al Bashir and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. They have rarely paid a political price for these risky relationships.

Yet Libya’s implosion has shown how India and China’s expanding economic presence makes them vulnerable to the fall-out from far-away events. Ten years ago, a conflict in the southern Mediterranean would have been dismissed as something for the US and Europeans to resolve. But as the fighting in Libya threatens economic recovery elsewhere, it quickly became a global problem. The Asian powers’ reliance on Middle Eastern oil meant that they had to be involved in stemming the crisis.

David may be right that China and India (not to mention Brazil and Russia) are failing to address the Libyan crises on these terms. But even if this may keep them out of trouble for the time being, it may be a strategic mistake in the longer term. By failing to get involved in crisis resolution at this stage, the BRICS are arguably missing the chance to gain a stronger strategic foothold in the Middle East. My guess is that, if China and India had rushed forward to help out over Libya, cash-strapped Western powers would have welcomed their support.  Are the BRICS wasting a good crisis?

Last week was aid to India week.  There were three pieces on the subject on the Guardian website, plus the predictable ‘why oh why’ articles in the Daily Mail and the Express , and a five minute slot on the BBC’s ‘Question Time’.  And not forgetting Andy Sumner right here on GD. But you know, I’ve read it all and I still don’t know what I think.  

Let’s leave aside the national interest argument for a minute.  Is there a development case for giving aid to India? And can we put numbers on it?

For some, the fact that one third of all poor people in the world live in India is reason enough to give it aid.  Half of all India’s children are malnourished; our money can help them, so let’s send it over.  And maybe that should be all there is to it.  But for most people, somewhere in the moral calculus of aid is the idea that some countries, as well as some people, are needier than others.

How does India fare on the scale of need at a country level?  India’s (in)famous space programme is of course exhibit A for cutting aid, and its plentiful supply of billionaires is exhibit B.  But hold on a minute.  According to Martin Ravallion of the World Bank, even if marginal tax rates on the Indian middle class were 100% this would still only provide enough money to reduce dollar a day poverty in the country by 20%.  India is not rich enough to end poverty right now with its own resources, space programme or no space programme.

India’s growth rates are also sometimes cited as a reason not to give aid.  The argument is that economic growth, forecast at nearly 9 per cent for next year, will end poverty without our help.   Sadly, not for a very long time.  Growth in India is surprisingly inefficient at reducing poverty.  A comparison between India, China and Brazil found that each percentage increase in GDP reduced poverty by 3.2 per cent in Brazil, by 0.8 per cent in China, but by only 0.3 per cent in India.   So even though the country is growing fast that doesn’t mean that poverty is going to be ending any time soon. 

So – a country that has a space programme but is still too poor to end poverty.  And a country where economic growth is firmly in the fast lane but where poverty reduction is stuck in a tailback behind a caravan.  As ever, it’s the politics, stupid.  Poverty reduction is frequently low on the list of priorities for national and local leaders. Instead, the focus is on showcasing India’s credentials as a big power – that space programme again – and on growing as fast as China, whatever the cost. 

Perhaps all the arguments against aid to India are actually arguments in favour – if India is rich and fast growing but people are still so poor then maybe aid is justified on the grounds that people need support more if their government seems less able or willing to tackle the problem.  But the aid that the UK sends to India is tiny – a fraction of one per cent of GDP.  It can’t plug the gap.  Anyway, some argue that aid can slow down political change by letting the government off the hook – though again, the amounts involved are probably too small to make this a serious problem.   On the other side of the fence, the optimists hope that aid will speed up political change and poverty reduction, by catalysing changes and showing what can be done.  That’s just as plausible.

Last week Andrew Mitchell made his choice clear. For the foreseeable future, aid to India continues.  Politicians have to take these decisions.  The rest of us have the luxury of uncertainty.