If India doesn't want our aid, stop it now, Cameron told

British Prime Minister David Cameron was under intense pressure to slash the pound 1 billion in aid Britain gives to India after the country said it no longer wanted the money. India's Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said the booming country should 'voluntarily' give up the £ 280million a year it receives from Britain.

He told the Indian Parliament: "We do not require the aid.

It is a peanut in our total development spending."

It also emerged that in a leaked memo dating from 2010 India's then Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao suggested India should not accept any further aid from Britain's Department for International Development because of the "negative publicity of Indian poverty promoted by DFID".

Sources in Delhi suggested British officials begged India to accept the aid. One commented: "They said British ministers had spent political capital justifying the aid to their electorate. They said it would be highly embarrassing if India pulled the plug."

The revelations raised fresh questions for ministers who have been struggling to defend the Indian aid programme in the face of criticism from the public and Conservative MPs.

They also risk raising fresh questions about the Coalition's controversial decision to pour billions more into foreign aid at a time of deep spending cuts at home. Tory MP Philip Davies called for the Indian aid programme to be cancelled immediately.

Davies said: "India spends tens of billions on defence and hundreds of millions a year on a space programme - in those circumstances it would be unacceptable to give them aid even if they were begging us for it.

"Given that they don't even want it, it would be even more extraordinary if it were to be allowed to continue. There will be millions of hard-pressed families wondering why on earth the Government is wasting money in this way.

"The fact is that India's economy is growing much faster than our own. We should be encouraging free trade with them and trying to learn from them rather than handing out patronising lectures."

Tory MP Peter Bone urged ministers to abandon the 'vanity project' of pursuing a target to hand out 0.7 percent of the UK's entire national income in aid.

Courtesy: Daily Mail