A BRITISH plan to help India become a leading aid donor despite being home to a third of the world’s poor has been fiercely criticised by campaigners in both countries.

Gordon Brown backed the plan during a visit to India last week, when he announced more than £800m in aid over the next three years while praising its growing prosperity.

India now has more billionaires than Britain, Brown said, and the time was right for the two countries “to use our combined knowledge and resources to expand this partnership to tackle poverty globally”.

Last week British officials said that although India desperately needs aid to curb extreme poverty, it regards itself as a rising global power and wants to be seen as a donor rather than a recipient.

Even though Britain gives more aid to India than any other country, it will in future be regarded as a “global partner” in poverty reduction, rather than a poor beneficiary of UK charity.

In recent years India has declined relief shipments after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, given aid to America after Hurricane Katrina and become a donor in Afghanistan.

British aid officials said last week that India had some notable development successes which could be adopted for Africa.

“We can take what works, like getting children into primary education, and export that to Africa,” said Susanna Moorhead, head of Britain’s Department for International Development in India. She said while India has between 350m and 400m people living on less than 50p a day, it wants to take “its rightful place in the world”. She will work with officials in Delhi to identify African countries that could benefit from Indian expertise.

The plan has met with disbelief among the antipoverty campaigners in India, who say that the country should put its own house in order before taking on the problems of Africa.

They said the scale of India’s poverty was so great that all available resources and talent should be focused on helping its own people first. “India should not be distracted with helping other countries meet their goals when it has so far to go to meet its own,” said Ashok Agarwal, a lawyer and child poverty campaigner.

Professor Praveen Jha, a United Nations adviser, said that in eight of India’s 17 states, poverty was increasing. “In malnutrition, India’s record is worse than most of sub-Saharan Africa,” he said. “My request to Indian officials is: please address things in your own country first.”

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