India is expected to extend loans and fund infrastructure development to strengthen relations with a group of economically poor but resources-rich nations from Asia and Africa during a ministerial meeting in New Delhi this week, ahead of a possible revamp of the United Nations Security Council.
The support of the group of 48 countries will be crucial for India which is seeking a permanent seat in the revamped UN Security Council.
“With India aspiring to play a global role, this group, that constitutes a large chunk of the world community, will be an important voting bloc,” said former foreign secretary Lalit Mansingh. “It will be useful for us to have their support when the UN expansion takes .”
Foreign ministry officials in New Delhi are touting the meeting as an example of “South-South” cooperation—or partnership among developing nations such as India and the Least Developed Countries, or LDCs, thus ranked on per capita income, human asset and economic vulnerability indices.
“The development experience of developing countries that have now become emerging economies is perhaps of greater relevance to the least developed countries and therefore will be much more effective in increasing their growth rates,” said Dilip Sinha, additional secretary in charge of international organizations at the foreign ministry. “That is the theme of this conference, which is South-South cooperation.”
India is already engaged in capacity building, extending lines of credit, training people from these countries and infrastructure development, said Hardeep Puri, India’s permanent representative to the UN.
Since 2003, India’s privately-held and state-owned companies have invested $35 billion (Rs.
Asked if India would announce more concessions to LDCs, Puri said: “My expectation is yes. I think it will be only appropriate that we allow the announcement of those additional...contributions to be made at the appropriate political level.”
Of the 48 LDCs, 33 are in Africa, 14 in the Asia Pacific and one in Central America.
Some countries, such as Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe and Sudan, are rich in energy sources such as oil and gas. Indian companies have been scouting for possible assets in these countries, competing with China for energy and mineral resources required to fuel India’s economic growth.
The LDCs as a whole account for 815 million people, half of whom live below the poverty line, a statement from the foreign ministry said. They account for 1% of global trade.
The foreign ministers of most of these countries will attend the conference, which will pave the way for the UN-LDC conference to be hosted by Turkey in May. The Turkey meet will be the fourth in the series of UN-LDC conferences held every decade since 1981. Only three LDCs—Botswana, Cape Verde and the Maldives—have graduated to the grouping of developing countries in the past four decades.
“The level of ambition in Istanbul plan of action which will be agreed on (in the New Delhi meet) is of a high order. They want 50% of the countries, or 24 of them, to graduate” to developing status in the next decade, said Puri. “Whether that is a realistic target remains to be seen. Just now it is everybody’s effort to see what more remains to be done to enhance the productive capacity” of these countries, he said.
Puri denied the meeting was aimed at garnering support for India’s ambition to be part of the permanent members of the UN Security Council. India’s cooperation with the LDCs “predates” its Security Council ambitions, he said, pointing that India hosted an LDC meet under the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in 1968.
Mansingh said India is still a developing country with more in common with this group than with industrialized nations. “India was the leader of the G-77 group of developing countries that looked at the economic issues of poverty and development while the Non-Aligned Movement looked at the political interests of these countries,” Mansingh said. “Post-1991, after India’s market reforms, India neglected this constituency. So this, in a way, is course correction.”
Source: Livemint
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