UK lauds India's efforts to reduce poverty, stress on growth

LONDON: The British government has appreciated India's fast movement towards reduction of poverty with "inclusiveness" and said Prime Minister Narendra Modi's stress on investment in growth and infrastructure was "encouraging".

Applauding India's efforts to alleviate poverty, Baroness Northover, government's spokesperson on international development, told the House of Lords yesterday that British history showed that poverty alleviation in this country was a slow process but in the past decade the number of Indians living in extreme poverty had come down from 37 per cent to 22 per cent.

There was a spate of questions on poverty in India during question time in the house, prompting an Indian-origin peer Lord Swraj Paul to ask whether the government was more interested in seeing poverty eradicated in India than in strengthening the market for sales of the UK military hardware.

The Indian Prime Minister was very much aware that the people had voted for him to remove poverty, Paul emphasised. Baroness Northover told him that India was an important bilateral partner and her department was strongly engaged to try to ensure that poverty was eliminated. She pointed out that development through good governance was a central plank of Modi's election campaign.