‘Aid’ing perceptions
Recently (ok not so recently) I read something in our beloved “Times Of India” that made me feel quite proud and I even mentioned it one of my previous posts. It was an article about how under the Bush regime India was removed from the “developing” list of companies and put into the bracket of “transforming” economies.
India was among the top recipients of US aid in 1960s when it was considered a basket case and termed an "underdeveloped country". It stood a distance fourth behind Israel, Egypt and Russia in 1994 in terms of US aid. As for the fiscal year 2008, it will not even be in the the top 20.
I had read the it in the hard copy of TOI that comes to my house and recently was searching for an online version, when one the links that google popped up was this blog by Randeep Ramesh. It is an analysis on the genesis of the TOI article and then he moves on to the same news being reported the Washington Post.
The bulk of the $23 billion in annual U.S. foreign aid goes to a handful of key countries, leaving about 120 nations to battle over $3 billion of the pie. India, for example, is one of the big losers in Rice’s foreign aid revolution. All U.S. aid to assist India in education, women’s rights, democracy and sanitation is terminated under the new system. Overall aid to India, where 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day, would be cut 35 percent in 2008, to $81 million, on the theory that India has one of the best-performing economies in the world. Under a detailed grid that Tobias developed, India is labeled a "transforming" country, in contrast to Pakistan and Bangladesh, which are labeled "developing" countries. As a result, India’s slice of aid is cut. Assistance to countries such as Nepal, Congo and the Philippines also was cut, while democracy programs were reduced in Eastern Europe and Russia. Meanwhile, huge sums are devoted to administration priorities in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As Ramesh has pointed out, in the TOI view the whole “cutting of aid” is a good thing where the Washington Post talks about India being the loser here. So the immediate question that comes to ones mind is -: is one of the pieces blatantly misleading the readers or are there two sides to the coin?
I feel it’s more of the latter since this is a case where perceptions play an important role for to answer that question we will have to try and answer other un-answerable questions like how good the Government Aid mechanism is? or how much of the current aid is actually essential?
Government Aid mechanisms are something that I have never been convinced about. I know I don’t have the right to preach from the armchair since I don’t know the actuality of the same first hand, but since the money has to go thru the same class of beaurocrats that I see every day, I can extrapolate how much of the money that would actually reach the people who it is intended for in a form that is useful to them. I remember reading somewhere that for every 10$ that comes into India as aid only 1$ or less reach the poor. I know better than to believe in such kind of statistics but still in this case I am convinced in the authenticity of that statement to some extent
I can imagine that some countries might have had powerful lobbies that must have lead to India being removed, while they are still in list, but this being the case, it is a good feeling to know that your country is no longer considered among the last set of countries (socio and econo -wise) what even be the motives behind such a classification.
It’s very easy for me to say that since I do not come under the bracket of people who are being deprived but, like I said earlier, the question of who are the actual beneficiaries of the aid programmes running currently is not very clear. But to solve this moral dilemma the idea by Seadipper at Ramesh’s blog (as a comment) seems very apt. He/She argues that the aid should take a route of charities since the Govt aid mechanisms in most of the countries mentioned are not any better.
As long as the intent and nature of the charities are credible enough, this seems to be a very good solution and I feel this should be the way to go.
