India's development partnership with the Global South has grown far beyond conventional aid, combining grants, concessional Lines of Credit, technical cooperation, capacity building, humanitarian assistance and knowledge sharing into a comprehensive whole-of-society model, according to a report published by the Athens-based publication Directus. The findings underscore how India is repositioning its international engagement around shared development experience rather than transactional assistance.

Scale of India's Development Cooperation

Citing a 2025 UNDP study, the report noted that between 2000 and 2023, India extended more than US$14.7 billion in grants and US$32 billion in concessional Lines of Credit, collectively financing over 600 development projects across 68 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific. These projects span transport, power, agriculture, healthcare, education, information technology and disaster management — reflecting India's ambition to be a full-spectrum development partner.

Africa as a Priority Destination

African nations have emerged as the largest single beneficiary of this outreach. According to the report, India has extended 196 Lines of Credit worth approximately US$12 billion to 42 African nations. Crucially, the emphasis goes beyond physical infrastructure: capacity building has become, in the report's words, 'one of the defining pillars of India's development cooperation' — a recognition that bricks and mortar alone do not transfer resilience.

From Aid to Knowledge: The Shift in Approach

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has described the approach as 'human-centric', with a focus on diversity, sustainable development and the sovereign priorities of partner countries. The Directus report argues this reflects a broader global evolution: 'Development cooperation is changing. It is no longer defined only by financial assistance, infrastructure projects or government-to-government agreements. Increasingly, the real measure of partnership lies in whether knowledge travels, institutions become stronger, communities gain capabilities and successful development models can be adapted elsewhere.'

India's model, according to the report, links its own domestic development journey — spanning digital transformation, climate resilience, healthcare delivery and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — with South-South cooperation frameworks. This integration of government programmes, private-sector capabilities, civil society, academic expertise and international institutions is what the report characterises as the 'whole-of-society approach'.

Why This Model Matters for the Global South

The report stresses that the significance of this evolution lies not merely in scale but in direction. As the UNDP noted in 2025, India's development experience is increasingly being shared beyond its borders through capacity building and knowledge exchange — a process that turns India's own path out of poverty into a replicable resource for partner nations. This comes amid growing disenchantment in parts of the Global South with traditional donor frameworks that critics argue prioritise lender conditionalities over recipient priorities.

Notably, India's approach deliberately sidesteps the conditionality-heavy model associated with Western development finance institutions, positioning New Delhi as an alternative partner aligned with the developmental aspirations of emerging and developing economies. The MEA's framing of the model as 'people-first rather than aid-first' signals a deliberate diplomatic positioning ahead of key multilateral forums.

What Comes Next

The Directus report concludes that India's whole-of-society approach is 'becoming an instrument of international cooperation — one that connects India's development journey with the aspirations of a wider Global South, and places shared progress at the centre of global partnership.' As India deepens its engagement through platforms such as the Voice of the Global South Summit and the India-Africa Forum Summit, the coming years will test whether this framework can be institutionalised at scale and whether knowledge-transfer commitments translate into measurable on-ground outcomes for partner nations.