The Indian armed forces have spent all the funds allocated in the defence budget for fiscal 2010-11, and asked for more. This hadn’t happened in more than a decade as reported in The Financial Express on Friday. In fact, the state of affairs in our armed forces had come to be defined by large sums returned unspent each fiscal, with military modernisation seriously jeopardised in the process. The inability to purchase the necessary force multipliers, to optimise on time and costs as well as indigenise, had begun eroding the conventional edge the Indian armed forces have had in the subcontinent.
This prolonged stasis in defence procurement was a political failure. The current sentinels at the defence ministry and the UPA government had seemed so scared of an arms purchase scandal that they steadfastly refused to budge on procurement at the slightest hint of controversy. So many trials and tenders had fallen prey to this fear. The result was an armed forces undermined as an institution and beginning to resemble the average sarkari “department”. Therefore, it’s a healthy surprise that the defence ministry has asked for an upward revision of both capital and revenue expenditure estimates. Although this may not mean a full-fledged course correction and making up for lost time, there are substantial goods that have exhausted most of the defence budget — Fifth Generation fighter aircraft from Russia, C-130 J heavy lift aircraft and C-17 aircraft from the US, Advanced Jet Trainer Hawk from the UK’s BAE Systems, and Russian collaboration on developing military transport aircraft.
India’s list of military necessities include new guns — the artillery hasn’t ordered any since the late 1980s; air-defence missiles to protect our naval assets; and fighter aircraft — with the air force having seen a drastic fall in squadron numbers. Without the capability of a sharp and rapid conventional response, our regional diplomacy will be off-balance. This truth holds despite the popular belief in nuclear deterrence as the ensurer of regional peace. Nevertheless, this news is only about spending. We need still greater policy clarity on defence production and procurement.
