Does India still need international aid? For an aspiring great power seeking a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, it is a sensitive question, just as it is for donor countries whose businesses and jobseekers face increasingly stiff competition from rivals based in the world's second-fastest growing big economy.

A delicate transition has been under way since 2003, when the Hindu nationalist-led government of the day, irked by the tiresome conditions and bureaucracy associated with receiving small sums of money, announced it was phasing out aid from all but six bilateral donors: the US, Britain, the European Union, Japan, Germany and Russia.