UK will still send £30m of 'expertise' to India after aid cuts In February this year, Pranab Mukherjee, then India's finance minister and now the country's president, suggested Britain's aid programme represented "a peanut in our total development expenditure." Miss Greening said it was time for Britain and India "to move to a relationship focussing on skills-sharing rather than aid." India is successfully developing and our own bilateral relationship has to keep up. After 2015, the contribution of Britain's technical expertise to development programmes in India will cost an estimated £30 million, about one tenth of the current aid budget to the country. New programmes will focus on sharing British expertise in areas such as growth and trade, skills training and healthcare. Private sector projects will also be encouraged with British help, in an effort to benefit India's poor and generate a profit at the same time. In recent years, India has emerged as a major economic power and now has its own space programme as well as an international development scheme providing £328 million a year to other countries. Charities criticised the cuts. Oxfam's director of campaigns and policy, Phil Bloomer, said: "We're concerned that completely withdrawing British aid to India by 2015 is too hasty. It's crucial that we don't cut off money which gives a lifeline to poor families, and a third of the world's poorest people live in India. The scale of the challenge remains huge, as 250 million Indian citizens go to bed hungry tonight.