UK aid to India

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We have published our country portfolio review of the UK’s aid spending in India since 2016. The government has also published its response. We completed our follow-up report in April 2024.

Summary

India is one of the fastest growing major economies and is projected to become the world’s fourth largest economy by 2030. Despite its economic success, India is constrained in reaching its full global economic and political potential by significant challenges, including continuing high poverty rates, skills shortages, unplanned urbanisation, a huge infrastructure deficit, pollution and the impacts of climate change.

UK aid to India has undergone a major transformation since 2015 and lessons from these changes will be relevant for UK aid in other countries.

In the decade before 2015, India was one of the largest recipients of UK aid. The UK’s portfolio of direct financial aid, focused on supporting the government of India’s delivery of services, such as health and education, in the country’s poorest states. Since 2015, UK aid to India has decreased, after a longstanding debate in the UK about the extent to which limited aid resources should be spent in middle-income countries and after statements from the Indian government that UK aid was no longer needed. Nevertheless, we estimate that between 2016 and 2020, the UK provided around £1.9 billion of aid to India.

This country portfolio review examines how the UK’s aid programme in India has developed since the former Department for International Development stopped providing direct financial aid to the Indian government in 2015.