At 13.4 per cent of our total budget, we spend much more on buying arms from abroad rather than on education and health.
India is and has been, since 2011, the single largest importer of arms in the world, accounting for 14 per cent of total arms imports of the world and the sixth largest spender on arms in the world, the second largest from Asia, second only to China.
Pakistan our bête noir is much lower down in the arms import scale, making up only 3.3 per cent of the world imports. China, which has the largest number of military expenditure in Asia, however, accounts for only 4.7 per cent of the total world imports, when it comes to arms.
So not only are we spending more on arms but our dependency on foreign powers for defense equipment (not indigenous manufacture) adds another factor to the relationship. India’s imports are twice the second largest importer country Saudi Arabia’s imports, which makes up for 7 per cent of the total world imports.
These figures are irrefutable, coming as they do from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Images: SIPRI
India is the sixth largest spender in the world, when it comes to military expenditure and is second largest from Asia, following China, also according to SIPRI. In 2015, India’s expenditure on military was $ 51,257 million as against Pakistan’s $ 9,510 million. However, South Asian countries are far behind the expenditure of the United States, which is whooping $ 596,024 million and quite behind China’s $ 214,787 million as well, according to SIPRI. (The extensive map by SIPRI showing military expenditure by different countries in an interactive graphic format can be found here.)
And this is while, even according to conservative estimates put out by the World Bank, India accounted for the largest number of people living below international poverty line in 2013, with 30 per cent of its population under the $1.90-a- day poverty measure. Placing the figure of the total of India’s ‘poor’ at a staggering 224 million, the recently released report 'Poverty and Shared Prosperity', also indicated that ‘extreme poverty worldwide continued to fall despite the global economy's "under-performance".
So while we puff up our chests on the surgical strokes against our neighbour and turn a blind eye to the pitfalls of sabka saath sabka vikas paradigm within, maybe its worth taking a deep breath and looking at this, the other side.
In the last two months, Maharashtra capital, Mumbai–a state regarded as being high on both the ‘financial capital’, business, and ‘progressive social values’ index’ has seen at least 12 deaths of infants as a result of malnutrition. Palghar district, situated at a distance of a hundred kilometer from the state capital, has recorded 600 deaths of children due to malnutrition within a four-month-period (April – August 2016), and as per some of the news reports, close to 4,000 children in the district are suffering from either severe or moderate form of malnutrition.
The United Nations (UN) says that in India, 2.1 million children die before reaching the age of five, every year. And, malnutrition is only one of the issues in the country, where 21.9 percent of the population is below poverty line, 68 million people still live in slums and suffer because of the unsanitary and uninhabitable living spaces.
On the other hand, India’s relation with the neighbouring country Pakistan is at its worst after Uri attack, skirmishes that have been taking place since and an anticipated war scenario. Some have been stressing on the need to modernise the Indian military and want the government to spend more in order to strengthen its defence. Many more deals to purchase modern aircraft and equipment for Indian Army are in the pipeline. Beneficiaries as we have seen with the recent Rafael deal are none less than India’s favoured few, the crony capitalists.
India is the largest client for Russia and the second largest for UK and Italy. Several deals to purchase Rafael fighter jets, Apache and Chinook aircrafts, Kamov helicopters and M777 lightweight Howitzer guns have either been signed or are going to be signed in near future, at a cost of approximately 1.5 lakh crore (SIPRI).
These figures pose a serious dilemma in front of a developing country like India, which is the second most populous country in the world, and ranks low on the list of countries with high human development index.
In India’s annual budget this year, however, the government allocated a budget of 2.58 lakh crore to defence, 38,892 crore for health and of 72,394 crore to education. A massive 13.04 per cent of the country’s annual budget, therefore, goes to defence as against the 1.96 per cent to health and 3.96 per cent to education. India’s defence spending spending went up by ten per cent (9.76 per cent) of the budgetary allocations (2.58 crores) as compared to the revised estimates of 2.33 lakh crores for 2015-2016. The finance minister Arun Jaitley had, conspicuously, made no mention of the defence allocation for 2016-17 in his Budget speech, however.
For a developing country like India, which is the second most populous country in the world, and ranks low on the list of countries with a high human development index (HDI), these priorities in focus pose a serious dilemma. As India settles for rank 130 in the list of 188 countries, its neighbours like Pakistan and Bangladesh have settled for ranks 147 and 142 respectively.
Though the budget allocated to the health sector, showed a hike of 15 per cent as compared to the last year’s allocation which had been slashed by five per cent from the previous year, the allocation is not close to what attention and funding that this sector actually deserves. The question one needs to ask here then, is: is the Indian taxpayer’s money going where it’s really required?
As the issue like poverty, malnutrition, unemployment and dearth of infrastructure continue to plague the country, where do our priorities lie? Is the modernisation of the military the only absolute priority?
Will these questions receive any answers?