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U.S. to end financial aid to India
By siliconindia
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Friday, 09 February 2007, 18:30 IST
Washington: India's boombing economy seems to have transformed into a bane of sorts as the United States had decided to end all bilateral financial aid to the country reports The Times Of India.
Citing New Delhi's growing economic performance and changing profile, the current aid of $ 124.9 million aid in 2006 is being cropped to a meager $ 81 million for the coming fiscal, recording a drop of 35 percent.
Even that downsized funding "will be used for the eventual orderly close out of U. S. Agency of International Development's programme in India," reported a state department official. In a matter-of-factly disclosure that brings to an end one of the largest aid efforts undertaken by Washington, rivaling the famed Marshall Plan, while not drawing as much attention.
By US estimates, India has received the equivalent of $14 billion in American economic assistance ($57 billion in today's dollars) from the time Washington opened the aid flow in 1951. US bilateral financial assistance to India has been thinning steadily after peaking in 1960 when Washington gave $ 1.6. billion, 92 percent of it as food aid, to a country that was widely considered a basket case.
Throughout the 1960s Washington poured in billions to kick-start India's Green Revolution and bump up food grain production from 70 million tons those days to more than 200 million tons today.
US aid helped establish eight agricultural universities across India, and more famously, two IITs -- in Kanpur and Kharagpur - and 14 regional engineering colleges.
More recent US assistance has been directed towards such efforts as establishing a National Depository and paperless trading in stock exchanges and helping Ahmedabad become the first city in India to receive an investment grade rating and float a municipal bond.
With an economy that is growing at over 8 per cent, India had become a donor country, US AID Administrator Randall Tobias said, citing New Delhi's $ 50 million aid to Afghanistan.
"India is in a position where they are taking on more of the burden for the problems facing India," Tobias observed at a briefing for the foreign media.