New Delhi: “One has to be alive to be a patriot,” former Indian health secretary K Sujatha Rao wrote on Twitter on May 13, 2019, referring to election debates that focussed on issues of “nationalism and terror and not health”.

The data back Rao’s assertion of misplaced priorities.

In 2017, terrorism claimed the lives of 766 Indians, or 0.007% of all deaths, while health reasons claimed 6.6 million Indians, or 90% of all deaths.

In 2017, the last year for which comparable data are available, India’s spending on defence was double its health expenditure, according to the 2017-18 budget.

Poor investment in health and education directly impacts the country’s productivity and economic growth. Indians work for six-and-a-half years at peak productivity, compared to 20 years in China, 16 in Brazil and 13 in Sri Lanka, ranking 158th out of 195 countries in an international ranking of human capital, as IndiaSpend reported in September 2018.

8,000 times more deaths from ill-health than terror
There were 9.9 million deaths in India in 2017, with a death rate of 717.79 deaths per 100,000 people, according to the 2018 Global Burden of Disease (GBD), a global estimate of morbidity and mortality published by the University of Washington.

Communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritious diseases caused 26.6% of all deaths in India, and non-communicable diseases caused 63.4% of all deaths, while injuries accounted for 9.8%.

Deaths by conflict and terrorism fall under the “interpersonal violence” category, accounting for 0.007% of all deaths, or 766, according to GBD data.

Terrorism claimed fewer lives, according to another database: there were 178 terror incidents reported nationwide in 2017, killing 77 and injuring 295, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal.

Deaths due to diabetes (254,500), suicides (210,800), infectious diseases (2 million) and non-communicable diseases (6.2 million) put together are 8,000 times the deaths caused by terrorism (766).

Defence vs health vs education spending
“… Hlth [Health] & edu [education] need to be top (sic) & [at] least 8% GDP allocated 2 [to] them,” Rao wrote in her tweet.

India’s public health spending is among the world’s lowest. With a fifth of the world’s population, India’s public expenditure was 1.02% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2015, IndiaSpend reported in June 2018.

While India’s public-health spending was estimated to be 1.4% of GDP in 2017-18, the equivalent proportion of GDP spent on health in the Maldives is 9.4%, in Sri Lanka 1.6%, in Bhutan 2.5% and in Thailand 2.9%.

India is the fifth largest defence spender in the world. The defence budget in 2017-18 was Rs 4.31 lakh crore ($ 72.1 billion, using 2017 rates), or 2.5% of GDP, as per Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, a think-tank. This is double the health budget that year, according to our analysis.

About a fourth of the defence budget, or 24%, goes towards pensions.
 

Source: Economic Survey 2017-18, Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses

In 2017, India’s school education budget, including central and state spending, was about Rs 4.41 lakh crore ($ 73.8 billion) or 2.6% of GDP, more than defence and health separately. However, almost half of India’s grade V students cannot read a grade II text and more than 70% cannot carry out division, according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018, IndiaSpend reported in January 2019.

India had the second-lowest score for quality of education in South Asia in 2016 (66 out of a possible 100, just ahead of Afghanistan’s 64) and behind group leader Sri Lanka (75), IndiaSpend reported on September 25, 2018.

Health and education need more money
While India’s health budget is rising–in 2018 it was double of what it was in 2010–as IndiaSpend reported in January 2019, it is still inadequate, considering that India is home to a third of the world’s stunted children, has the highest number of tuberculosis patients and reports among the world’s highest out-of-pocket expenditure, an indicator of public healthcare failures.

The National Health Policy of 2017 talked about increasing public-health spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2025, but India has not yet met the 2010 target of 2% of GDP, IndiaSpend reported in April 2017.

The National Policy on Education, which guides India’s approach to education, has since 1968 recommended a minimum spending of 6% GDP on education but that target has never been met. There have been “pervasive and persistent failures in implementation leading to sub-optimal utilisation of the resources provided”, the 2016 document said.

(Yadavar is a principal correspondent with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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Interview with S.N. Pathak, C.Srikumar
Interviewed by Gautam Navlakha , Produced by Newsclick Team

Newsclick talked to the representatives of All India Defence Employees Federation on privatisation of defense production. The AIDEF is on strike against the same. Ordnance factories making 87 items, including 39 listed under the weapons section, are set to lose the charge, with the ministry of defence (MoD) directing the Army to buy them from the private sector.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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Barely two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi invoked the “surgical strikes” by the Indian Army across the Line of Control, a fresh controversy erupted over the parity of the armed forces officers with their civilian counterparts.

A circular dated October 18, issued by V Anandarajan, a joint secretary in the ministry of defence, tried to establish a parity between serving officers and their civilian counterparts, by defining a rank equation between the two categories of officers based on duties and functional responsibilities.

Within days of the circular, the ministry was abuzz with protests from serving officers from the armed forces that this was an attempt to downgrade them and equate them with lower ranks.

As the story hit the stands with several media organisations reporting it on the same day, projecting it as the military having been brought a notch down, it was clear that planned briefings had been carried out by serving officers to ensure maximum coverage.

A usually reticent set of serving officers, it seemed, were not happy with the circular.

Conflicts and confrontations

But the build up to this civilian-military clash has to be seen in perspective, for which one has to go back at least a couple of years, when the retired community of military officers started agitating for the One-Rank-One-Pension scheme.

The OROP scheme, as envisaged by the military veterans, proposed the same pension, for the same rank, for the same length of service, irrespective of the date of retirement. The pension was earlier drawn as a percentage of the last drawn pay, as a result of which someone who had retired in an earlier year, at the same rank, would be paid less than someone who retired later. The OROP promised to change that to ensure that even if officers of the same rank retired decades apart, they would still get the same quantum of money.

Clearly, OROP had fiscal challenges and the military veterans hit the streets, asking for its early implementation. However, the agitation saw frayed tempers as the Delhi Police tried to evict the protestors from Delhi’s Jantar Mantar area, when the agitation was at its peak.

The OROP agitation was quickly followed by anger over the pay hikes granted to services personnel by the seventh Central pay Commission. The services felt that their representations had not been heard by the Pay Commission, and in an unprecedented move, the army, navy and air force sent a signal to all serving personnel that they would not accept the pay hike until their demands had been met. The Defence Minister had to step in and request the three Chiefs to accept the hikes, while he looked into the matter.

But while the dust was yet to settle on the pay hikes and OROP, a series of moves by the defence ministry let to another round of confrontation between the armed forces personnel and their civilian counterparts.

Protest at New Delhi . Image: PTI

While the rank parity circular of October 18 had created much resentment, an order issued earlier, on October 13, by the army’s Engineer-in-Chief was interpreted as a putdown.

This stated that a new position was being created to monitor all engineering works by the Military Engineering Services, a body that carries out all civil works for military personnel, such as building and maintaining living accommodation, training establishments and offices for the services across India.

The order appointed VK Rajan, an Indian Estates cadre officer as the new Additional Director General (North), thus handing over command to a civilian, with serving military officers reporting to him. Traditionally, serving military personnel rarely report to their civilian counterparts.

These series of confrontations made the military feel isolated from their civilian counterparts – the OROP and the seventh pay commission had already brought them in conflict with their counterparts in the Indian Administrative Service, Indian Police Service and other services. The circular declaring parity with civilian counterparts in the defence ministry and the creation of a new civil engineering post led to a fresh confrontation.

In addition to that came media reports that on the same day as the surgical strikes, the central government had “slashed” the disability pensions of the military veterans. A furore followed.

Quietly and steadily, the delicate relationship between the armed forces and their civilian counterparts has been under strain, unfortunately to the detriment of the military.

Political surgical strikes

On September 29, as the Director General of Military Operations Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh announced that Indian Special Forces had made surgical strikes on terror launchpads along the Line of Control, the politics of the event were just beginning to take shape. Within days of the strikes, defence minister Parrikar first stated that it was the Modi government which had given the army the freedom to carry out the strikes. A few days later he also credited the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for giving him and the Prime Minister the gumption to order such a strike.

Narendra Modi with VK Singh at Rewari, Haryana. September 2013 Image: PTI

But the use of the army as a political tool had started much earlier, even before the 2014 general elections took place. For the Bharatiya Janata Party, identifying closely with the armed forces helped it shape its message of patriotism and nationalism at a time when far more pressing economic issues were dominating the landscape. In September 2013, Modi, as the party’s prime ministerial candidate addressed a rally of military veterans in Rewari, Haryana, using the occasion to target the United Progressive Alliance government at the centre. This was, in many ways, a strategical use of the military to shape a political message that had not been seen since the 1971 Indo-Pak war.

“The problem is in Delhi. And hence the solution to this problem has to be found in Delhi itself. The problem will be solved only when a competent, patriotic and people-oriented government is formed at the Centre,” Modi told the largely cheering crowd of military veterans.

Naturally, expectations of the military began to soar, in the hope that a National Democratic Alliance government would be far more sensitive to their needs than the UPA.

Not much after the surgical strikes, posters began to appear in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh, highlighting the military action as proof of the good and robust governance that the BJP could provide to the state. At the national executive of the RSS, the surgical strikes were a big talking point, with the understanding that they would be used in the heated election campaign in the coming months.

In 1999, when India was at war with Pakistan in the heights of Kargil, the then DGMO Lieutenant General NC Vij, had been sent to the BJP headquarters on Ashoka Road to brief the party leadership. It had created a big political brouhaha, with the Congress-led opposition claiming that the government was politicising the military. While it was not clear why the government had asked a serving military officer to brief a political party, the surgical strikes this time certainly became a platform to address and re-energise the BJP's political constituency.

Truth as a casualty

To return to the recent media reports, in some ways, the truth about the perceived belittling of the military officers by their civilian counterparts lies somewhere between reality and perception. The story that the military officers had been brought down a notch was partially correct – but only partially. While Major Generals continue to be equated with Joint Secretaries in the government of India, those in lower ranks feel that they have been downgraded.

A Group of Ministers led by Pranab Mukherjee in September 2008 had ruled that officers in the ranks of Lieutenant Colonel to Brigadiers would be placed at a higher pedestal than their civilian counterparts in terms of pay and perks. However, this seems to have been diluted by the recent order of the ministry of defence.

But even if it is so, it does not create any operational problems for either service.

The issue of reduction of disability pensions is also only partially correctfor which, as Major Navdeep Singh, a lawyer and a territorial army officer has argued, “fudged data” given to the Central Pay Commission was responsible.

Lieutenant General Vijay Oberoi, former Vice Chief of Army Staff, who lost a leg as a Captain in the 1965 war with Pakistan but soldiered on bravely for 36 years with an artificial leg, had to approach the courts thrice to get his pension after his retirement in 2001. “From the 5th pay commission the government had accepted a percentage of the last drawn pay to decide the disability pension," Oberoi said. "This time, this was converted to a fixed quantum." Compared to the percentage system, Oberoi pointed out, this shift to a lump sum payment means the soldiers lose out on the amount they would have received under the older system.

Image credit: Major DP Singh on Facebook

However, the government officers disputed this and argued that while officers will partially lose out, the soldiers will get a higher quantum of money. But this will only apply to soldiers who may get disabled very early in their careers. “But that is a rare case," Singh argued, "and the majority are disabled later in service.”

The military, clearly, is no longer prepared to be a silent participant. Armed with a new language of politics and relevance, it is beginning to make noise in the humdrum of politics. Several retired Generals, cultivated by the ruling party, are routinely in TV studios, raising the “patriotism and nationalism” slogan whenever, for example, Dalit and student agitations threaten the party’s narrative, thus sharpening the military and civilian divide.

But lost in this din is the slowly eroding apolitical ethos of the Indian armed forces. As they battle for equal rights and relevance against their civilian counterparts, they are in danger of being exploited for narrow political gains, particularly as elections loom large on the horizon in the immediate future.

(This article was first published on Scroll.in)
 

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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?

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Interview with D. Raghunanda
​
A Golden Raspberry Award or Razzie has been awarded in Hollywood every year since 1981 to the film declared to be the worst movie of the year just a day before the Oscars. If there were a Razzie for the worst public policy in India in the recent past, it would certainly go to the Modi government’s announcement of opening up the defence manufacturing sector to 100% FDI with relaxed norms. Even as muddle-headed policies go, it cannot get worse than this.

The government has recently opened up defence production to 100 % foreign investment, with dilution in conditions those were the pivotal to this policy. The government, in the new rules, have amended the earlier condition of “state of the art” with “modern”, a move that would leave a lot of scope for interpretations. 

Newsclick spoke to D Raghunandan, Defense Analyst, to know the nuances of this policy and its potential implications.

Excerpts from the interview. 

Courtesy: Newsclick.in
 

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^a “Funds will be made available through PPP mode under the National Health Mission, to provide dialysis services in all district hospitals.”

The 2016-17 budget also continues the long-standing trend of ignoring the social sector at the expense of defence:

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