India's Growing Involvement in Humanitarian Assistance

In March 2011 GPPi published a research paper that aims to provide a better understanding of the norms and foreign policy interests that inform India's humanitarian engagement. Titled India's Growing Involvement in Humanitarian Assistance, the paper is authored by GPPi research associate Claudia Meier and C.S.R. Murthy, professor in international organization at Jawaharlal Nehru University's School of International Studies in New Delhi. It is part of the GPPi research project Humanitarian Assistance - Truly Universal? In the first section of the paper, the authors discuss India's conception of humanitarian assistance. Despite the absence of a written humanitarian assistance policy, Indian decision makers have a clear conception of why India provides assistance, what principles it wants to adhere to and what channels to use. In the next chapter, the authors analyze the Indian humanitarian aid bureaucracy and discuss the implications of the fact that decision-making power is widely spread among the different geographic divisions of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. The third chapter provides an overview of where India provided humanitarian aid in the past 10 years. While India devotes the bulk of its humanitarian assistance to its extended neighborhood in South Asia, it is increasingly engaging with Latin America and Africa. India has also started to engage more with multilateral humanitarian system in the past years, while cooperation with other states on disaster relief is almost exclusively focused on the region. In their conclusion, the authors analyze the main normative and interest-based motives that guide India's approach to humanitarian assistance. They emphasize that although humanitarian aid is part of India's aspirations to lead through soft power, and despite regional stability considerations in South Asia, those interests do not contradict a principled approach to humanitarian aid. Meier and Murthy then provide a set of steps that Western donors, multilateral organizations and India should take to enable better cooperation with each other. The research was funded through a research grant from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida).