India’s Development Diplomacy: Understanding Development Cooperation As A Tool For Strategic Engagement In South Asia

Development diplomacy is seen as the new frontier of strategic studies. It is an arm of economic cooperation that involves a range of actions, from infrastructure building to skill development. It implies sustained and long-term cooperation which apart from ensuring socio-economic upliftment of the recipient country, is used as diplomatic leverage for foreign policy manoeuvres.
The book examines India’s development cooperation policy over the years, in its neighbourhood and aims to fill the gaps in its approach. It compares the practices of traditional donors like the United States and emerging donors like Japan and South Korea, among others, to find the best practices for India. It particularly helps dissect China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a challenge to India’s development cooperation policy in South Asia.
Development cooperation as a pillar of foreign policy is a means to extend India’s influence in its dynamic neighbourhood, an avenue for greater South-South cooperation and a vehicle to counter Chinese economic prowess.
With rich data and analyses of diverse ways and means over the past 75 years, this book makes a systematic study of synergy between cooperation for development and foreign policy of key nations. India’s own contribution via multiple forums of South-South cooperation, including in the South Asian neighborhood, forms its rewarding crux. Author assesses particular strengths, recent dynamism as well as challenges inherent to India’s emerging development diplomacy to suggest way forward.