01
Apr
As India gears up for its biggest jamboree of foreign leaders on Indian soil in over 30 years, promises made in the last two editions of India Africa Forum Summit are still to be delivered – plagued by cash crunch, land issues and indifference from several countries.
It would mean that one of the main priorities for IAFS-3 in October would be just to fulfil the previous assurances. “What we do like to concentrate is on implementation, rather than expansion,” said an MEA official.
Last Wednesday, the External Affairs Ministry had announced that the third India-Africa Forum Summit, postponed from December due to Ebola epidemic, will be held on October 26-30.
For the first time, invitations will be sent to the heads of states of all the 54 African states, bringing India to the same high-table as the US, China and Japan, who had held summits with all African Union member countries. This would make it the largest gathering of foreign leaders in India since the Non-Aligned Movement summit in 1983.
India, of course, began the summit mechanism partly in response to regain its stature in the continent, which had been overrun by Chinese state-run firms.
Even as India is “making it large” this year, the reality is that most of the projects announced during IAFS-1 in 2008 and IAFS-2 in 2011 are yet to take off.
Officials said that the outcome of IAFS-3 would finally be thrashed out after a series of meetings with the African Union beginning from May. “Ultimately, the agenda will be decided with negotiation with the AU,” he said.
The “substantive” part of the negotiations with the AU will be led by secretary (west) Navtej Sarna, while preparations will be done by a secretariat headed by chief coordinator Syed Akbaruddin.
Incidentally, the Parliamentary Standing Committee, in its report released in December, had spent a lot of time in finding out of the reasons for the enormous delays in IAFS projects in Africa. Money and manpower have always been an issue for the MEA, with budgetary allocations always less than expected. The budget for 2014-15 under Aid to African countries was increased to Rs 350 crore since the cost of the summit came under this head. But, after postponement, the revised budget estimates more than halved it to `145 crore.
The new budget presented by the Finance Minister this February has brought no relief. At `200 crore, it is abysmally low. “What do we do if we don’t have the money,” asked an official.
The ministry also identified two other factors for delay in the projects — most of which involved setting up capacity-building institutes – delayed response from the African Union and Regional Economic organisations, and disinterest shown by the selected countries themselves.
In many cases, the ministry found that the host countries, selected by the AU, often expressed inability to provide for land or rebuilding or taking on the recurring cost they had originally committed.
Under IAFS-1, 19 institutes were to be built, out of which only two vocational training centres were built in Ethiopia and Egypt.
The MEA’s outcome budget 2015-16 makes similar reading. Nineteen of the 22 schemes under IAFS-2 have had zero expenditure till December 2014, again the earmarked outlay for 2014-15.
Sources told Express that even when these ambitious targets were mapped out during IAFS-1 and IAFS-2, officials knew that only about “40-45%” of the projects may be completed on time. “The important thing was that it gives talking points to Indian ambassadors to remain engaged with the government and the regional organizations. Every ambassador has a clear objective,” he said.
There was also a proposal that ambassadors would be assessed on how these projects were implemented, but it never went through.
The whole-sale transfer of all projects to development partnership administration division in MEA from the line territorial divisions may have also slightly disadvantaged African plan. “Inevitably, the priority went to aid projects in the neighbourhood, so the political importance for Africa withered away,” he added.
Interestingly, while India may not announce too many new projects in the October summit, there would certainly be an enhancement of lines of credits. So far, India has extended $7 billion lines of credit to Africa.
But their implementation had also slowed down a bit, with strict rules for their usage put in place over the years. This led to an African head of state to complain to a senior Indian diplomat at AU meeting in Addis Ababa, “if we wanted to do so much paperwork (for line of credit), we would have gone to world bank”.
Source: http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/Unkept-Promises-may-Mar-Indo-Africa-Meet/2015/03/30/article2737505.ece