http://bihartimes. com/Newsbihar/ 2008/Nov/ Newsbihar18Nov9. html
Patna, (Bihar Times): Britain will spend £825m over the next three years in aid to India to lift “hundreds of millions of people” out of poverty.
According to report in Guardian Douglas Alexander, the international development secretary now on visit to India’s poorest state, Bihar, said on Monday that despite “real strides in economic growth” there were still 828 million people living on less than $2 a day in India.
Alexander, the first UK cabinet minister to visit Bihar, said the money will help alleviate poverty in India. He was in Bihar on Tuesday to attend the inauguration ceremony of Bihar Prashashnik Sudhar Mission.
However, critics argue that British taxpayers should not be devoting the largest single sum in its aid budget to one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. They also point out in terms of national wealth, as measured by purchasing power parity, India’s economy is larger than Britain's. The Guardian report while quoting IMF’s figures show the Indian economy at $3tn compared to Britain’s $2.2tn.
However, he said: “There are more poor people in India than the whole of Africa … if you are serious as a global community about (meeting the millennium development goals) then you have to do something about the level of chronic poverty in India.”
Guardian report says that the Department for International Development says that if the United Nations' millennium development goals––which centre on alleviating extreme poverty, reducing child mortality rates and fighting disease epidemics such as Aids – are not met in India, they will not be met worldwide. India’s shortcomings are striking: 43% of children go hungry and a woman dies in childbirth every five minutes.
Alexander contrasted the rapid growth in China with India’s economic success––highlighting government figures showing that the number of poor people had dropped in the one-party communist state by 70% since 1990 but had risen in the world’s biggest democracy by 5%.
Alexander said he had become aware of the yawning gap between rich and poor in India when he visited software professionals in Bangalore, capital of the country's “Silicon Plateau”, seven years ago and saw the poor huddled just "a few hundred yards away" from the gleaming industrial parks.
41-year-old Alexander’s visit to Bihar, a state of 90 million people the size of Austria, marks a change in British policy that had until recently focused on wealthier states in India. Bihar has been seen as a symbol of poverty, lawlessness and corruption in India––bypassed by the economic boom affecting much of the rest of the country.
Characterised in The White Tiger, this year's Booker Prize winning novel
as simply the “darkness”, Bihar is India’s most rural state where two-thirds of women cannot read.
“If Bihar was a country it would be the 12th most populous and the 10th
poorest. It is a challenge,” said Alexander after visiting a poor village afflicted by leftwing violence where, flanked by gun-toting commandos, the minister talked to young mothers living in mud and brick houses
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