Key facts: India

Last updated: September 2008

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DFID: Working to reduce poverty in India

Making aid effective | Health | HIV/AIDS | Education | Urban and rural livelihoods | Microfinance | Civil society | Millennium Development Goals

DFID’s largest country programme and its largest country office are in India. Containing one third of all the world’s poor people, the country is crucial to the global success of the Millennium Development Goals (see below). In 2002-07, we gave more than £1 billion to India, and from 2008 to 2011, we will be investing another £825 million, up to £500 million of which will be spent on health and education.

Three Faces of India, DFID’s new country plan for 2008-15, proposes ways in which the UK can engage with three aspects of India’s development:

• Poorest India: the 456 million people living below the international poverty line, who can’t access basic services or feed their children adequately
• Developing India: the 400 million people living just above that level, not rich by any standard and vulnerable to any crisis
• Global India: supranational issues (e.g. adaptation to climate change), areas where India can contribute to poverty reduction elsewhere (e.g. the production of generic drugs) and reform of the international development system.

As well as working at the national level supporting the government’s centrally sponsored schemes, DFID also assists programmes in five ‘focus states’: Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal and Bihar. Both our national and state programmes concentrate on promoting equitable economic growth and better quality health and education. We also have several urban and rural livelihood programmes.

In Bihar, DFID - in partnership with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank - is working on a governance reform programme. Over the next five years, we’re planning to invest up to £100 million there on urban services and on health, such as medical care for pregnant women.

Making aid effective

DFID has always supported India's own five-year plans, which contain schemes to reduce national poverty, and DFID’s new country plan for India aligns with the 11th of these.

Partnership agreements are in place between DFID and the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Unicef, UN Development Programme and International Labour Organisation. Some of our funding for health and education programmes is pooled with that of the World Bank, USAID and the European Commission.

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Health

DFID supports a number of the government of India’s nationwide, centrally sponsored schemes, as well as working in the health sector in our focus states.

• Reproductive and Child Health II (£252 million, 2006-11) aims to reduce the maternal mortality rate from 450 to 100 per 100,000 live births and the infant mortality rate from 57 to 30 per 1,000 live births by 2015.
• The goal of the National Polio Eradication Programme (£128 million, 2004-09) is to interrupt transmission of the wild polio virus in India and, then, eradicate the disease altogether by 2010.
• The Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme II (£41.7 million, 2005-10) is expected to more than halve the number of annual deaths from TB by 2015. India has the greatest number of people with TB in the world, its 15 million patients accounting for nearly a third of all cases worldwide.
• Health sector reform is being helped through DFID’s sector budget support in West Bengal (£100 million, 2005-10), Orissa (£50 million), Madhya Pradesh (£60 million) and Andhra Pradesh (£40 million).

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HIV/AIDS

DFID funds the National Aids Control Programme, working in partnership with the National Aids Control Organisation to implement its third phase, for which DFID will provide £102 million over five years. The focus is on the promotion of safer behaviour among high-risk groups to prevent them contracting and spreading HIV. This funding will also help to scale up HIV prevention programmes so that they cover 80% of high-risk groups.

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Education

DFID has spent £350 million on education in India since 2003. This includes £35 million to Mahila Samakhya, the government’s empowerment programme for women and girls in rural areas, to help them access education and overcome discrimination. We are also currently giving £150 million to the Indian government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) programme, which is committed to achieving universal elementary education by 2010.

Both SSA and Mahila Samakhya are working towards improved female literacy in India, and the former is proving to be particularly effective: the number of children not attending primary school has reduced by almost 5 million per year since 2003 across the entire country.

Some of the aid money pledged by the UK in 2008 will help provide 300,000 more teachers and another 300,000 classrooms - ensuring that by 2011 a total of 4 million more children - half of them girls - will be able to go to school.

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Urban and rural livelihoods

The Urban Services for the Poor programmes run in West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh seek to help the poor have better access to basic services. More than 10 million slum dwellers have benefited through improved municipal government and services, with a major focus on extending clean water and sanitation.

DFID’s current rural livelihoods portfolio comprises support to three major programmes: Western Orissa Rural Livelihoods Programme, Orissa Tribal Empowerment and Livelihoods Project and Madhya Pradesh Rural Livelihoods Programme.

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Microfinance

Our Microfinance Support Programme (£17 million, 2000-09) has helped to establish more than 100 microfinance institutions, which benefit over 7 million poor people, mostly women. In this way, DFID has played a significant role in founding the Indian microfinance industry.

The SME Support Project (£20 million, 2005-12) aims to facilitate increased flow of financial and non-financial services to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the development of which is crucial for the creation of the jobs and income needed to reduce India’s poverty.

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Civil society

DFID’s Poorest Areas Civil Society (PACS) programme (£27 million, 2001-07) supported civil society organisations - community groups, trade unions, etc. - in the poorest districts of India. It operated in six states - Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh - covering 108 districts.

It was the first anti-poverty civil society initiative created on such a large scale, affecting 20,000 villages and eventually reaching more than 6 million poor and marginalised people. DFID is now developing a second phase to build on the achievements of the first and make these impacts more sustainable.

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Progress towards Millennium Development Goals

MDG 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
The proportion of people living below the international poverty line has been decreasing, but not fast enough to meet this MDG target. And even meeting the target would still leave around 250 million in poverty in 2015.

MDG 2: Achieve universal primary education
India is likely to meet the primary education targets as there has been a big rise in enrolment of primary school children. The focus is now on improving the poor quality of the education they are getting.

MDG 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
Girls’ enrolment in school is growing faster than boys’, but a significant gender gap remains at the secondary level. Only 8.3% of seats in the Indian Parliament are held by women.

MDG 4: Reduce child mortality
The percentage of children under 3 who are underweight has fallen but remains very high at 40%. Accelerated efforts to reduce infant deaths will be required to meet this goal.

MDG 5: Improve maternal health
India is failing to achieve the target to reduce the number of deaths among women before, during and shortly after childbirth. Currently only 48% of births are attended by skilled attendants.

MDG 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
Relatively good progress is being made in controlling communicable diseases. Polio is close to eradication, India is on track to achieve the TB MDG and HIV/AIDS infection has been kept below a rate of 0.5%.

MDG 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
India is showing mixed progress on environmental, water and sanitation targets. Only 33% of the population has access to improved sanitation, and India is the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

MDG 8: Develop a global partnership for development
One element of this MDG is access to communications technology. From 2000 to 2006, according to the UN, the number of people in India with a mobile phone subscription rose dramatically from 0.35 per 100 to 14.83.

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