Push for military-industrial complex in India?
By D. Raghunandan
Delhi Science Forum; September 2009
Indian acquisitions of military hardware are the hot topic in the global armaments bazaar.India
is expected to spend around $30 billion on arms imports over the next few
years. India is
perhaps the world’s largest importer of armaments with annual expenditure of
around $6 billion on this count, a sizeable proportion of India ’s
defence budget of $28 billion for 2009-10. Security analysts are fond of
pointing out that this is only around 2.5% of GDP compared to India ’s
neighbours Pakistan
and China whose
annual defence budgets are around 4.5% ($4.4 billion) and 4% ($100 billion) of
their GDP respectively.
Delhi Science Forum; September 2009
Indian acquisitions of military hardware are the hot topic in the global armaments bazaar.
While the merits or otherwise of India ’s
defence spending are beyond the scope of this article, it rather addresses an
aspect that has largely escaped scrutiny. The nature and scale of India’s
massive defence imports, the recent and growing involvement of large Indian
corporates and global armaments manufacturers, and the government’s policies in
general and those governing the defence industry in particular are all coming
together to lay the foundation of what may be a military-industrial complex in
India coming up in place of a staid, some would even say dull, inward looking
and mainly state owned industry.
Three distinct but inter-related trends are visible in India ’s
defence sector. First, there is a steady trend of rising defence budgets
related to substantive modernization of India ’s
military as well as a new strategic outlook. Second, large-scale procurement of
new high-value military hardware is a major element of these modernization
plans, due to a combination of flawed and delayed procurement of equipment in
earlier decades, obsolescence of current hardware and failure of indigenous
efforts to meet the military’s requirements. Third, a major proportion of this
procurement is from foreign suppliers but with offset provisions under which
domestic firms should be substantially involved in execution of these orders.
These trends put together reflect a significant shift in Indian military,
industrial and science and technology policy with noteworthy implications for
the Indian defence industry but also for the global arms industry at least in
the short to medium term.
Rising imports
Indian capital expenditures in defence have been on a steady
upswing since 2004-05 when acquisitions went up from around $3.5 billion in
value to around $7.5 billion in each of the following three years and then rose
to around $11 billion in 2008-09. Aircraft, naval vessels and accompanying
communications and weapons systems are of course very expensive and their
acquisition has involved big-ticket orders. Adding to the need for, and cost
of, the military modernization programme has been the so-called “Revolution in
Military Affairs” (RMA) - a term applied to the qualitative jump in hardware
capabilities and development of “force multipliers” - due to rapid advances
in electronics, satellite-based communications, computers and networking
systems, along with the sharp increase in use of missiles, other airborne
systems and precision-guided munitions.
In India
