“We do not require the aid. It is a peanut in our total development exercises [expenditure],” Mukherjee told the upper house of Indian parliament, during question time, adding that the government wanted to give it up.

India is the top recipient of UK foreign aid, according to the Telegraph expose. The UK has given £1 billion in aid to India in the last five years and has earmarked a further £600 million in aid by 2015.

Projects from Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) are mired in controversy, reports the Telegraph. They include a £118,000 program to install satellite tracking on municipal buses in Bhopal – years before the technology was used in the UK – and program to deliver 7000 televisions to schools despite the lack of electricity.

Amid a surging anti-corruption movement in India, the Telegraph alleges that £70 million disappeared from one DFID-funded project along, and that £44,000 of British aid was “allegedly siphoned off by one project official to finance a movie directed by her son.”

Junior Development Minister Alan Duncan claimed that cutting off British aid to India “would mean that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, will die who otherwise could live,” according to the Telegraph.

The admission by India is significant, implying India’s ascension as an aid donor in the region rather than a recipient, despite its own extremes of poverty and wealth. India now donates almost as much in bilateral development as it receives, according to the Telegraph’s report, of which the Maldives is a key beneficiary.

Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital (IGMH) was donated to the Maldives by India, along with military helicopter, scholarships and copious financial assistance, among other interests. An Indian company, GMR, has the country’s single largest foreign investment in the US$400 million renovation and upgrade of Ibrahim Nasir International Airport (INIA), while the growing mid-market tourism industry is looking towards the huge Indian middle class as a wealthy market for the Maldives tourism product on the country’s doorstep.

“The Maldives is perhaps one of India’s closest partners,” observed The Indian High Commissioner Dynaneshwar Mulay during India’s recent Republic Day celebrations.

Cooperation also extends to the military, with the installation of a coastal radar array plugged directly into the Indian defence network.

More recently, Indian interest in the Maldives has been challenged by rival China, which conspicuously opened its embassy in Male’ last year during the SAARC Summit.