Trump's Aid Cut-Back Is a Wake-Up Call for India

Ignore political slugfests over USAID. America's self-harming aid cut-off isn't a major worry either, but China filling a vacuum to gain clout would be. Let's step up our global outreach

- 

Donald Trump seems to be in a tearing hurry to make America great again. No one should quibble with such a mission: the world needs a prosperous and stable US. But this should not come at the cost of the world's poorest. Yet, that's precisely what appears to be happening—as a fallout of the US President's decision to immediately halt all programmes of the world's biggest aid agency, USAID, pending a 90-day audit.

The overnight cessation of US development aid, whose biggest beneficiaries are some of the poorest people in Africa, South America and South Asia, puts lives at risk and threatens the funding of initiatives that deliver health, food and drugs to the needy. Clinics providing life-saving HIV drugs in Africa have had to shut overnight. And, as we know from the 1980s, such infectious diseases can strike anywhere, even if the availability of cheap drugs—courtesy of generic drug-making countries such as India—makes the disease manageable.