By Lt. General P.C. Katoch (Retd) Former Director General of Information Systems, Indian Army

In the next two months, the second defence budget is to be announced by the present government, which will also be the first defence budget under the present Defence Minister. The close interrelation between economy and security of any country is an accepted fact. Both need to be fine-tuned. The rising threats particularly from China and Pakistan too need to be taken into account. We need to take a cue from the record US$ 42 billion of Japan in face of Chinese aggressive posture – that we too face.

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Logically India should have a defence budget of 3 percent or more of the GDP for next few years. The tragedy in India in the past decade plus has been that the economy slumped with deep rooted corruption despite announcement of some high sounding schemes. The economy has begun to look up somewhat under Prime Minister Modi’s government albeit it’s future would have to deal with dynsmics of factors like future like global oil prices, levels of energy security, instability and conflict situations etc that is unpredictable, world economies having become interdependent. But the fact remains that defence has been the most neglected in India despite every government making thunderous announcements that there will be no dearth of money for defence. The Long Term Integrated Perspective Plan (LTIPP) for period 2012-2027 that stood approved by the Defence Acquisition Council headed by the Defence Minister, as also the 12th Five Year Plan, was based on a defence budget allocation at 3 percent of the GDP. But the allocation of defence has always been much below that. Defence expenditure for FY 2013-14 had been kept at 2.04 trillion rupees Yes, the first union budget presented by this government in July 2014 boosted defence spending by 12 percent in 2014-15 over the previous year and further opened the domestic weapons industry to foreign investment to help rebuild the military and narrow the widening capability gap between the Indian Military and the PLA; setting the military budget at 2.29 trillion Indian rupees ($38.35 billion) for 2014-15, 50 billion rupees more than what the previous government had agreed in an interim budget in February 2014. Impressive on first look but this has to be seen in the backdrop of not only the enormous shortages in the military including in ammunition but government website admitting that 50 percent of defence equipment held by the army, navy and air-force is obsolete and CAG reports of last five years pointing out that the equipment provided by the DRDO is sub standard and provisioned at excessive costs besides enormous amount of money and time spent on R&D without even consultation of the user (military) and some even without MoD sanction. Raising of the Mountain Strike Corps itself will entail an yearly expenditure of Rupees 7 to10,000 crores for next seven years, in addition to about an overall Rupees 25,000 crores required for infrastructure to support the Mountain Strike Corps. Then we also have some 60,000 personnel retiring from the army alone and the snowballing effect since pensions are paid through the defence budget, leaving that much less money for military modernization. But allotment apart, there are other aspects about the defence budget that appear to be given short shrift advertently or inadvertently, former being more likely. To start with, how do you work out a 15 year span LTIPP without a National Security Strategy followed by a Comprehensive Defence Review, and ironically the present government too has made no move to initiate these. In the US, a Congressional Committee is formed to which all Theatre Commanders and Commander Special Operations Command (SOCOM) make pre-budget presentation making their projections for the next defence budget. Their presentations cover what their present capabilities are and given allotment as per funds requested what their future capability would be. Why can’t we have a similar system? Surely, from the Parliament you can pick and choose requisite number of parliamentarians including defence veterans to form such committee, notwithstanding the fact that in the past we have had the Parliamentary Committee for Defence even headed by a film star and disinterested members who have little idea about matters military. Then is the issue of actual expenditure in defence. Leaking of the letter from Gen VK Singh (then Chief of Army Staff) to then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh created massive stink but with focused more on how it got leaked rather than the massive shortages. Little would public know that such letters have been written by many Service Chiefs as well as Chairman Chiefs of Staff Committee in the past. Yet the voids were permitted to grow because of vested interests that capitalize on creating criticalities and then capitalizing on imports for individual or collective benefits of the vested interest of a select group. It is this group that would not permit induction of military professionals into the MoD and as users in DRDO-DPSUs-OF other that odd perfunctory post whereas the need is for them to be in the planning / design, management, policy formulation and decision making levels. A former Vice Chief of Army Staff who had a close friend in MoD (Finance) was told by the latter that they have to give a quarterly report as to how much money ‘can’ possibly be surrendered from the defence budget, MoD being the only union ministry that has been surrendering funds barring odd year when complete funds were utilized perhaps on account of uproar over the issue in the media. Jaswant Singh, when Defence Minister, had mooted the idea of carry forward of unspent defence budget to the next financial year but the idea was given the quiet burial for reasons that can be well understood. In the present defence budget, some Rs 98,000 crores were assigned to capital expenditure. As per information emanating from some quarters about Rs 12,000 crores may get surrendered by design. The vested group is well versed in how to orchestrate all this, late allotment through RE stage and pussyfooting files included, putting all the blame conveniently on the military. It will be another sad day for the Indian Military. Well the end of the financial year is still far off. Hopefully the Defence Minister will look at all the issues mentioned herein.