Modi's Defence Budgets A Flat Trajectory

It is not possible for India to sign new defence contracts for more than `50,000 crore in 2018-19. There are hardly any funds for expediting the ongoing infrastructure development projects and capital acquisitions, building up the war wastage reserves beyond the Minimum Acceptable Risk Level (MARL), or giving a leg-up to the Make-in-India projects in defence. The dreary trajectory of defence budget since 2014-15 puts paid to the demand for creation of Cyber, Space and Special Forces commands, which is far below the trajectory of the demand projected by the armed forces and other departments, laments AMIT COWSHISH

- Amit Cowshish

At ₹4,04,364.71 crore the total defence budget for 2018-19 represents 2.16 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and, more importantly, 16.56 per cent of the total central government expenditure (CGE) envisaged in the union budget. This works out to a nearly 44.5 per cent increase over the total defence budget outlay of ₹2,80,202.87 crore for 2014-15 at a reasonably healthy year-on-year growth rate of nearly 9.5 per cent.

But this healthy exterior starts crumbling as one goes down to the granular details. For one thing, the overall growth has been driven largely by the steeply rising bill for salaries and pensions after implementation of the seventh pay commission recommendations and the one-rank-one pension (OROP) scheme during this period, and not by higher allocations for operational expenditure of the armed forces.

The salaries of the armed forces personnel and the civilians working in defence establishments, excluding the entire complement of the Integrated Defence Staff (IDS) and the Military Engineer Service (MES), has risen by 57.60 per cent from ₹75,391 crore in 2014-15 to ₹1,15,669 for 2018-19. Meanwhile, the pension bill has risen from ₹51,000 crore to ₹1,08,853 crore. These two elements account for more than 55.50 per cent of the total defence budget for 2018-19.