Defence Budget 2017-18 More Of The Same

An incisive analysis of the defence budget for 2017-18, in which AMIT COWSHISH infers that after providing for the committed liabilities, there may not be enough money left to sign contracts for everything that is on the shopping list of the services.

- Amit Cowshish

Mid-way through his budget speech on February 1, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced that he had provided a sum of ₹2,74,114 crore in the union budget for defence expenditure, excluding the expenditure on defence pensions. The allocated sum includes ₹86,488 crore for capital expenditure.

The one-sentence announcement was interestingly preceded by a reference to a centralised Defence Travel System to facilitate online booking of travel tickets by the armed forces personnel and a web based interactive Pension Disbursement System to be established for the purpose of receiving pension proposals and making payments centrally.

This was an improvement on the last year’s budget speech which contained no reference to defence budget, if for no other reason than that it prevented reinforcement of the impression that absence of any reference to defence in the budget speech was symptomatic of the government’s apathy to the issues related to defence services.

But the reference to allocation for defence and the two schemes aimed at ameliorating the hardships the armed forces personnel face did nothing more than preventing this impression from taking deeper roots. It was certainly of little help in inspiring confidence that any paradigm shift in the defence policy is on the horizon.

Restructuring of the demands for grant presented by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to the parliament for 2016-17 and their re-packaging for 2017-18 make it extremely onerous to draw detailed comparisons between the proposed outlay for the next fiscal, the approved outlays for the current year and the actual expenditure for the previous years. But even macro-analysis, based on just two indicators, indicates that the annual growth for the next fiscal is anything but inspiring.