News that India is to set up its own aid agency and that British aid amounts to 'peamuts' has put David Cameron on the PR defensive over the UK's overseas development programme.

Keeping the moral and media high ground by ring fencing foreign aid after the last election, he now discovers that by far the biggest recipient of UK aid, India, is now planning to give away its own money to other countries. Not only that but Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee dismissed Britain's contribution 'it is a peanut in our total development programme,' he is reported as saying.

The UK gives more than £1 billion annually to India, a country that has its own space programme, its own nuclear weapons and now it would seem that other tool that helps define a successful western democracy, an aid agency.

The Economist reports that the Indian government is likely to set up an organisation such as Britain's DFID or USAid to help enhance its global status.

So where does that leave UK aid? Well many on the right are urging the PM to scrap aid to the sub continent arguing 'why on earth should we continue to support a country capable of supporting itself but chooses not to?'

Remember India has foreign reserves of $300 billion, Britain is running a deficit of $100 billion.

But the whole aid environment is changing poor and rich cannot be easily defined anymore. The vast majority of the world's poor do not live in the poorest countries. They live in China, Brazil and India.

India like the other two is a mass of contradictions at the moment. Like many western countries weight is a problem. But India gets it with both barrels. Sixty million people, the population of the UK, have been clinically diagnosed as morbidly obese. Last year surgeons carried out more than 2000 private gastric band surgery operations. Ten years ago the numbers for this type of operation were so small it wasn't even registered as a procedure.

But this is also a country where more than 43% of children under five go to sleep every night hungry and where just eight states have more people living under the UN subsidence level of a $2 dollars a day - 410 million - than the 26 poorest sub Saharan African countries combined.

So now instead of holding the high ground over his decision to protect foreign direct aid Mr Cameron now finds himself on the back foot.

This latest move suggests India seems increasingly intent on gaining influence by feeding, nursing and educating other people rather than taking care of its own citizens. Gifting opponents of Britain's aid policy the jibe 'and why not, Dave will take care of them'.

Explaining it's people, not countries the Department for International Development is concerned with probably won't get much a hearing from the Daily Mail's headline writers.