Growing Mountain, Shrinking Mouse? Indian Poverty and British Bilateral Aid

In the book compiled by Mervyn Jones after Kingsley Martin's death in 1969, Asa Briggs recalled that 'no country meant more to Kingsley Martin than India'. Martin's writing, campaigning and travelling all confirm this. His life also confirms his priorities for development and poverty reduction. Famously, however, he was not an economist, and he does not seem to have brought these concerns together, or to have asked how aid might best be used to help. This paper, in a small way, aims to fill that gap. The need to do so is brought out by two extracts from Martin's London Diary in a single month, during the euphoric early years of India's industrializing Second Five Year Plan. On 2 November 1957, Martin rightly praised Commonwealth aid under the Colombo Plan for putting training before hardware [New Statesman and Nation 1957: 556]. Yet a fortnight later [ibid.: 638] he commends the USSR for aiding India 'to erect a heavy machine and building plant ... to manufacture her own machinery for iron and steel work', and chides the West for (so far) denying similar aid. By the mid-196os the costs, to India's poor, of a growth path 'heavy' on forced rural extraction for protected monopoly industries were only too clear. Yet a decade's misdirection of investment-and of supporting, competitive Cold War aid-cast a long shadow. Poverty-orientation in aid may nowadays be a near-cliche; but how does British aid to India really function?