Technical assistance and economic development

Foreign aid to developing countries is of various kinds capital aid, project aid, commodity aid, food aid and technical assistance. Measured in monetary terms, technical assistance is quite small compared to all other forms of foreign aid. But the benefits from technical assistance could be far-reaching for those developing countries which have the absorptive capacity for technol ogy. Multilateral institutions like the United Na tions Development Programme (UNDP) and the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-opera tion (CFTC) devote themselves fully to technical assistance while international financial institu tions like the World Bank earmark part of the project funds for technical assistance in support of their primary lending functions. Countries like the united kingdom, Australia and Japan extend a substantial amount of technical assistance to developing countries under the Colombo Plan. Technical assistance, both official and private, has permeated various fields of economic activity in India which has received technical assistance from agriculture at one end of the spectrum to atomic energy at the other. This book traces the evolution of technical assistance in its historical perspective, briefly discusses its role in the economic development of four countries, namely, Tazania, Uganda, Iran and Spain and analyses the case of India in some detail with respect to certain selected sectors like agricul ture, agricultural research, fisheries and industry and touches upon an important off shoot of tech nical assistance, namely, institutional building by showing how several institutions in India which were once beneficiaries of technical assistance have today become centres of excellence in the region. The book also deals with issues relating to evaluation and administration of technical co operation programmes. According to the author. if aid funds to developing countries were to face extinction in the long run, the one form of aid which could survive and make the South survive would be technical assistance. A condensed version of this book appeared as an article in two instalments in "the Financial Express" on 10th and 11th May 1993.