I spend more time talking to the public than I do to members of Parliament here, although I enjoy this very much. One of my jobs is to talk to the public, and they're interested in poverty. Most of them don't know which country is an LDC and which is a middle-income country and all that. In the public mind, Calcutta is a poor country at one level. So from the public's point of view, it's about people living in desperate situations which they want to see something done about. It is up to us then to talk about what needs to be done and the best way to work. Let's use the case of India. People talk about India being a rising tiger with all its domestic resources. We completely agree that India has huge domestic resources that it should be more effectively using to address poverty in that country, absolutely. But the work that we often are engaged in is in fact working with local groups to engage their own governments, and their policy-makers, to help build up confidence in the marginalized groups, in the castes who feel that by nature they are not destined to live a better life. So you work on those attitudes and things. That's the work we can do that can then shape what happens with domestic resources. A big bilateral aid program may not be what's needed, but working with groups like ours or others in that context might be. I think the public is focused on poverty, and if the government focuses its efforts there and frames it that way, the public doesn't make all the other distinctions.
On May 19th, 2016. See this statement in context.