Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Indefensible Defence
Poor governance and extensive corruption have such a strong and negative impact on the
way that India's defence establishment operates that it is reasonable to wonder what the
Ministry of Defence and the armed forces, with their annual budget of approaching $40bn
and a vast defence establishment of over four million people, see as their primary role. It
should be to protect India by building up the defence capability with the latest technologies
and efficient well-trained manpower, utilizing the best available domestic manufacturing
industry to produce world-class aircraft, tanks, guns and ships. Instead, it seems to be to
protect jobs for bureaucrats, armed forces officers and other public sector employees, giv-
ing prestige and powers of patronage to those at the top of the establishment, and main-
taining India's position as the world's biggest arms importer, while sustaining extortion and
bribes at every level of government from ministers and top bureaucrats down through the
defence ministry and the armed forces to poorly performing public sector corporations and
ordnance factories.
Exempted from the economic liberalization measures of 1991, the defence establishment
has resolutely resisted attempts to open up the sector, apart from rare exceptions. This has
ensured that it can continue on its jugaad path of mixing expensive imported equipment
with the worst practices and outdated systems, relying on chalta hai to cover its tracks. As
a result, India's defence preparedness for possible conflicts is declining, despite occasional
advances such as the launching, in 2012 and 2013, of the first nuclear-propelled submar-
ine and aircraft carrier built in India, and a partially successful Russia-assisted missile pro-
gramme.
With a capital expenditure budget of some $16bn (2013-14), India has been the world's
largest buyer of foreign defence equipment since 2006, accounting for 10 per cent of global
and other weapons and equipment that it should be fully capable of making itself. Of the
remaining 30 per cent, two-thirds is spent on equipment produced, mostly inefficiently, by
the public sector, which leaves only about 10 per cent for Indian private sector companies.
In the mid-1990s, a committee headed by A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a senior defence bureaucrat
and scientist and later India's President, said that the indigenous content of India's weapons
should rise from 30 per cent to 70 per cent by 2005, but nothing happened.
China was the world's biggest weapons importer till 2006-2007, mostly buying old
