Arunadho Mukherjee

Russia would hope India continues to buy more defence equipment, another sticky situation, whereas India would look to try and walk that tightrope, because buying defence from Russia would mean causing a fair bit of alarm in the West.

But this is about geopolitics too.

We need to follow our principles.

Sometimes we need to be on the right side of the history and this is the moment that we are on the right side of the history.

It's mainly the International Development Assistance for Health for various countries.

Now, this report says that it has fell by more than a quarter, and that is having a huge impact on various programs.

For example, as you know, once President Trump came to power, what happened to USAID?

That had a budget of $40 billion in various countries.

In fact, I was talking to people in Bangladesh today,

One particular institute there, which was working on infectious diseases, they had to cut down tens of thousands of field worker jobs gathering data on these diseases.

Now, what are the main reasons?

For example, pneumonia, diarrhea, you know, these are all preventable.

But access to medicine is one of the major issues why many children are still dying.

And this is considered as one of the biggest achievements of a global health community is

in reducing the number of child deaths.

But now, according to this report, what they say is if they don't give enough money, then you can see millions of children dying by 2045 if the trend is not stopped.

Now, traditionally, it has always been sub-Saharan African countries and also South Asia.

Now, if you look at these countries, they were all depending on international development assistance, aid.

I mean, it is not only the US, even other Western nations, as you see, you know, many countries are going through various economic issues and they have more domestic priorities.

And that is the reason why they're cutting down on funding.