About the talk
India’s development cooperation program has evolved considerably since India’s independence and has witnessed a significant growth and diversification of aid instruments over the last decade. Today, India’s development cooperation allocation is comparable to the foreign aid budgets of some of the smaller, high-income European countries and is similar to Australia’s aid budget when compared in PPP terms. Moreover, India’s development assistance budget has been expanding at a time when the aid budgets of many high-income countries have been stagnating or even decreasing. Yet despite the growing importance of India’s development cooperation, both as a foreign policy tool of the Indian government and in terms of it’s growing regional and global importance, there is no public information on the size and modalities of Indian foreign aid.
In order to address the dearth of data on Indian development assistance, the Indian Development Cooperation Research (IDCR) program at the Centre for Policy Research will launch a comprehensive and internationally comparable database of India’s development cooperation and present an analysis of trends in Indian foreign aid. The IDCR Database was developed with funding from The Asia Foundation and provides information on India’s development initiatives extended towards foreign governments through financial grants and loans, by year, sector, geographical location, and costs of the project, among other information. Analysis of trends will include an overview of the growing size, reach and modalities of engagement, as well as the changing nature of the Indian foreign aid over the past few years.
About the Speaker
Dr Rani D Mullen is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore; an Associate Professor of Government at the College of William & Mary, United States; and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, India, where she directs the Indian Development Cooperation Research (IDCR) programme. She was a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the Afghanistan Studies Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, in 2013-14 and a Visiting Scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University as well as a Liechtenstein Scholar on Afghanistan in 2008-09. Prior to teaching at the College of William & Mary, Dr Mullen worked as the Asia Project Manager at the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at Princeton University, was a consultant at the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the United States Agency for International Development, and worked for a German think tank as well as for a member of the German Parliament.
Dr Mullen’s research and teaching focus is on South Asian politics, particularly state-building and democracy in and foreign policies of India and Afghanistan. Her book, ‘Decentralization, Local Governance, and Social Wellbeing’ in India, was published in 2011 by Routledge. She has published articles in Asian Survey and Foreign Affairs and book chapters on state-building in Afghanistan, India’s democratic institutions, and Indian foreign and aid policies in several Oxford University Press and Routledge publications. She is also a founding member and co-chair of South Asia in World Politics section of International Studies Association.
Kashyap Arora is an economic policy researcher at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi, India. He is also the founder of “Indian Strategist”, a current affairs based online platform. Previously, he has worked with organisations such as Standard and Poor, Global Development Network (GDN), and HDFC Life. His research interests broadly lie in macro and monetary economic analysis, diplomacy and international economics.
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