With funding from the Asia Foundation, the Indian Development Cooperation Research (IDCR) project is in the process of developing a comprehensive database of Indian development assistance and publicly disseminating narratives on Indian bilateral development partnerships.
Indian development assistance has changed remarkably since its inception shortly after its independence. The size and diversity of its development partnerships has grown markedly over the past decade, nearly doubling in volume by some estimates. Moreover, Indian development assistance today is comparable to the foreign aid budgets of smaller, high-income European countries with one large difference: the Indian development cooperation budget is growing at a rate which is significantly higher than all but those of other emerging market economies.
Yet despite a large and rapidly growing development assistance programme there is little public understanding of the different grants and loans of which it is comprised. In trying to better understand Indian development assistance there are two major stumbling blocks: the lack of a comprehensive, consistent, and internationally comparable database on Indian development cooperation, and the absence of a narrative about India’s development partnership. We at IDCR aim to bridge this gap.
