Ethnic Supplies

This heading has preoccupied Current Affairs and News programmes at the BBC over the last two weeks and in case you missed it all here are some facts as I understood them for you.

1. India receives in excess of £300M in AID  from the British tax payer- this despite the fact that India has its own Foreign AID programme as well as a Space programme
2. the reason why it gets the AID mentioned above, several districts in India are much poorer than DR Congo and other sub- Saharan Africa
3. the poor districts in India rank so low on the human development indices
4. 43% of Indian children are Malnourished and the charity Save the Children is faces a mammoth task of feeding them

But why is this? Why is India this poor  and yet elsewhere it is deemed as an emergerging economy on par with China. The Indian diaspora wherever in the world they be appear to be doing very well and much better than their African counterparts

Is it a case of bad policies which mean that wealth is not spread all over India?

The moral question that the panel on the BBC’s Moral Maze had to answer was whether India should continue to receive the UK tax payer’s  money if it is indeed doing that well?

I have never been to India and as such I am not familiar with how society is organized there or how it functions so I am not I am able to speak with any authority on these issues.

If you have knowledge of Indian affairs I would be grateful for some enlightenment here as I am on the side of the coin that says India is not a poor country