If one scanned through the national newspapers of July 24, one would find write ups on a range of Budget related issues, such as income tax, real estate, social sector, education, MSMEs, reforms, allocations of funds for education, various schemes and release of funds to some selected states etc.
However, there was no write up on allocations of funds to defence forces. Just one paper reported that Rs 6.2 lakh crores had been allotted for defence and nothing more.
This allocation covers the entire range of defence forces and related organisations,such as Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Ordnance Factories, Coast Guard, Defence Estate, Defence Accounts, MoD Secretariat, Border Roads etc.
Out of this allocation of Rs 6.2 lakh crores, Rs 1.7 lakh crores is for capital expenditure. The rest is for a range of other expenses, such as pay and pensions including those of MoD and provision of funds to various defence related establishments.
There has been an increase in revenue expenditure of the army consequent to large scale deployment of troops along the LAC. Though there is 5.8 percent increase in allocation for military modernisation (capital expenditure) but this increase falls below the inflation figures in the cost of defence weapons, equipment and emerging defence technologies.
The necessity to create a country's defence capabilities and their potential till a particular level depends on a number of factors. The more important being the nature and extent of security threats it faces and the time frame in which these can manifest.
India faces threats from across both Western and Northern borders as well as across the sea front. Pakistan and China are in cahoots with each other and are in occupation of large parts of Indian territory.
In addition, there are these claims over other territories. China claims Arunachal Pradesh, Pakistan claims all of Jammu and Kashmir, and of late Nepal is claiming areas West of Kali Ganga, which includes Kala Pani, Lipulekh Pass and some part of Uttarakhand.
With China, our army is in an eyeball-to-eyeball stance, while Pakistan is continuing with cross border terror attacks in J&K, and is pumping drugs, weapons, ammunition across the Line of Control (LoC) and the international border using drones.
China’s GDP is nearly 5 times that of India, and it allocates 3 percent of this GDP for defence. It has been able to acquire high end military technologies. Its military is equipped with state of the art weapons and equipment. It has the largest naval fleet in the world and in other areas of defence capabilities is ranked number two in the world.
On the other hand, the Indian army is still holding on to outdated equipment and defence technologies and is at least a decade behind in acquiring and imbibing contemporary weapons systems and technologies.
For centuries India paid scant attention to national security and consequently became an easy target for even small countries to keep invading it. India is perhaps the only country of such large size to have suffered slavery for such a long period of time.
Philip Mason from the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in his seminal work ‘A Matter of Honour’, detailed the long history of military defeats of armies of India, and laid the blame at the door of politics and the type of governments that had grown up in India.
Therefore, the question: have our politics and governments since independence been any different?
All through history conflict between nations has been one constant occurrence. Trade and territorial gains have often been the underlying themes of these conflicts.
Of late, issues such as geostrategic and geo-economic factors got added in somewhat new form. Besides trade and economic strength, military power continues to be a dominant factor in diplomatic relations between nations.
National interest is and must remain the principal factor in diplomacy and the foreign policy of nations. Military power comes into play in relations, more so between neighbouring countries.
In any future conflict India may have to face the possibility of war on two land fronts as well as in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). A two-front war was the bane of the German General Staff during the two World Wars, across half a century.
So, military capabilities that India must create cannot be in the realm of any philosophical determinism where military prowess need only be, ‘merely a token of power,’ as contended by some so-called ‘defence experts.’
What also needs to be borne in mind is that conflict can often surface without any prolonged duration warning. Often situations can change in a matter of days and weeks. An odd incident can blow up into a conflict, whereas it takes years to build military capabilities.
There has been much talk of the heavy burden of pay and pensions of the military on the country's economy. While the strength of the military is around 14 lakhs, those of civilians as part of MoD is around 3.75 lakhs.
In percentage terms the pay and pension bill of the latter is far more than that of the military. The rationale for introducing the Agnipath scheme as put out by the government is to reduce the exceptionally large pension bill of the military’s other ranks.
Eighty percent of other ranks in the army are retired at the age of 35-37 years and they do not complete 20 years of service to earn 50 percent of their last pay drawn, as pension. Government employees including those in Central Police Organisations (CPOs) retire at the age of 58 years or so.
When a soldier and those from CPOs reach the age of 60 years the latter would have drawn approximately 50 lakhs more than a soldier.
This early retirement of a soldier, and connected financial worries due to increasing expenditure of bringing up children and their education, has brought his life expectancy down to 61-63 years.
The life expectancy of those of civil employees is 67-69 years and those from Indian Railways it is 73 years. Ones who are really loaded with heavy pay and pensions are those from over four dozen civil services who were granted Non Functional financial Upgradation (NFFU) by the 6th Pay Commission.
However, speaking on Kargil Divas at Dras, the Prime Minister put the induction of Agnipath scheme on the military’s high command, due to the compelling need to have a young army! This issue perhaps calls for a separate debate.
The Indian military must acquire some degree of balance against the Chinese military. At present the gap is far too large and rather than closing, it is widening.
The pertinent issue is that the Chinese military has undergone much modernisation and probably has the required level of reserves of ammunition, drones, missiles etc. It has built extensive military infrastructure in Tibet and expertise in cyber warfare and space technology.
To narrow this gap in the coming decade India needs to substantially increase its military’s budget: definitely three percent of GDP if not more.
Three percent is the figure recommended by the Parliamentary Committee of Defence, whereas it did not cross even two percent of GDP during the last decade and more.
In any conflict two contents matter and that being the gun and the man behind the gun. In India’s case, the gun is outdated and men well versed in the art of fighting are being replaced by young inexperienced recruits.
Lt General Harwant Singh (Retired) is a former Deputy Chief of Army Staff. Views expressed are the writer’s own.