NEW DELHI // Before an NGO told them otherwise, women living in Dingerhedi who went into labour would pay ambulance drivers to take them to the nearest government hospital.
They did not know that the ambulance was a free service.
Since 2008, however, a Citizen's Voice and Action programme run by an NGO named World Vision India has effectively educated residents of Dingerhedi near Delhi about their government entitlements.
It is an important programme in the NGO's stable, said Jayakumar Christian, the CEO of World Vision India. But its funding now stands to take a hit because a significant portion of its money came from the government of the United Kingdom.
Last week, Justine Greening, the UK's international development secretary, announced that all direct financial aid to India would cease by 2015.
For some time now, aid to India has drawn fire from members of the UK's Conservative party, who point out that India runs an indigenous space programme and has an increasing number of billionaires, even as the UK was undertaking its own austerity measures.
"India is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. It's completely unjustifiable, especially at this time," Philip Davies, a Tory member of parliament, said early last year.
The UK will scale back its aid to India between 2013 and 2015 by about £200 million (Dh1.2 billion).
India receives about £280 million a year in direct financial aid from Britain.
After 2015, according to the UK's Department for International Development (DfID), aid to India will consist of technical assistance, skill sharing, and "returnable capital investments", by which investments in small Indian business will assist the poor and still deliver returns.
"Having visited India I have seen first-hand the tremendous progress being made," Ms Greening said. "India is successfully developing, and our own bilateral relationship has to keep up with 21st-century India. It's time to recognise India's changing place in the world."
In India, the home minister, P Chidambaram, said that his government found the UK's decision "perfectly acceptable".
"We don't really need the aid," Mr Chidambaram said. "We have accepted it in the past, but I think both countries have agreed that we can emphasise on trade, rather than aid."
In February this year, the finance minister at the time, Pranab Mukherjee, called British aid "peanuts" in its overall development budgets, and India has certainly given signs that its own funding abilities have expanded.
The budget for a rural employment guarantee scheme this year, for instance, is 330bn rupees, or about £3.8bn. India's total health outlay for 2012-13 was announced, during the finance minister's budget speech earlier this year, to be 344.9bn rupees.
This summer, the Indian government even announced the establishment of its own international aid agency, with a corpus of £9.5bn, to be disbursed over the next five years.
But at the same time, about 450 million people in India continue to live below 70 rupees a day, prompting several development experts to maintain that all additional aid is precious.
"It is clearly unfortunate that DfID would take this step, and from our side, it's also unfortunate that we would call British aid peanuts," said Dr Christian, World Vision India's CEO. "You and I aren't the direct beneficiaries of this money. It's easy to sit in comfortable chairs and call the money peanuts."
Dr Christian maintained that the scale of poverty and of its avoidable child deaths made India a "high-burden country". He also pointed out that, given the corruption and collapse of streamlined governance in many parts of the country, "DFID's insistence on value for its money is a good corrective".
"There is more accountability when DFID funds a project," Dr Christian said, as compared with funding by a government agency.
Numerically speaking, the financial assistance provided by the UK was indeed "peanuts" compared with India's own budgets, admitted Yamini Aiyar, the director of the Accountability Initiative, a research programme within a think tank called the Centre for Policy Research.
"But this money can be used to do innovative things that the government wishes to do, but for which they may not necessarily get sanctioned funding," she said.
Ms Aiyar also noted that international donor agencies are often able to impose stipulations for their aid, which induce positive side effects. "The right to information framework in Karnataka, for example, came about because the government of that state was getting a big World Bank loan, and the World Bank put right to information as a condition for getting this loan."
[ ssubramanian@thenational.ae ]
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