India’s Growing Involvement in Humanitarian Assistance

The present paper, which is part of a broader research project on non-Western humanitarian assistance donors conducted by the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), therefore seeks to analyze India's state behavior in humanitarian assistance separately from development aid.
The paper is based on a review of the primary documents and literature about Indian foreign policy as well as 31 semi-structured interviews conducted in New Delhi and elsewhere, mostly with serving and retired officials in the Indian Government (notably the Ministry of External Affairs), representatives of international organizations, Western donors and the corporate world. Due to the absence of reliable centralized humanitarian aid records, quantitative data served only as a secondary source. The authors compiled their own overview of Indian humanitarian contributions from 2000-2010 from a range of sources.While this mix of methods allowed the authors to answer the research question at hand, we should note that assessing the effectiveness of Indian humanitarian assistance was beyond the scope of the study and that the quantitative data on India’s contributions is still not exhaustive.