Make in India: An Unfulfilled Distant Dream

Traditionally, India has been plagued by highly unstable neighbours, with whom she has fought several high intensity wars and is currently involved in an unconventional war with non-state proxy players of her Western neighbour. These two taxing concerns have greatly hindered India’s mission to attain peace and tranquility not only along her borders and hinterlands, but across her primary areas of interest.

The security threat to India is omnipresent and is growing manifold, as regional players rub shoulders in an effort to gain regional supremacy. As India’s economic growth witnesses’ a steady rise and her role in the contested Indo-Pacific region grows, both as a regional power and net security provider, there is an increasing need to strengthen her military power to increase the preparedness of the Armed Forces to take on the emerging and future security challenges of the region.

At the heart of this mission to prepare the country’s military forces for future threats is the requirement to rapidly modernise the Armed Forces. This daunting task involves infusion of newer technology and more powerful weapon systems to arm the world’s second largest Army, the fourth largest Air Force and the fifth largest Navy.

To realise India’s military power ambitions at the earliest, successive Governments have been constituting countless measures to add traction to several of the multi-billion dollar high-stakes acquisition programs, which have been hanging fire for decades. Progress with the agenda, though, has largely been insignificant.

One of the most haunting reasons for the sluggish pace with which the modernisation programs have progressed has been the increasing budgetary concerns.  Adding burden to these financial concerns have been the half-baked half-thought out procurement policies.

While newer policies with more robust procurement models are being introduced, little has been done towards addressing the financial woes. While various quarters have advocated for a drastic increase in the financial outlay for the country’s annual defence budget, the hands of the Government, though, are tied as various other critical developmental agendas are running the already overburdened state coffers bare dry.

 With an allocation of INR 3,05,000 Crore, the Annual Defence Budget already amounts to about 11.0% of the country’s total annual government expenditure. The Capital Head, which handles the acquisition program and thus the modernisation agenda, with an allocation of around INR 1,03,000 crore amounts to about 34% of the total budget. But, this figure is still considered largely insignificant and sparsely enough to take forward even the already committed liabilities, let alone sustain efforts to launch any new high-stakes tender.

As the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Armed Forces contemplate actions to extract bang for the buck, at the centrality of its vision forward is to drastically trim the country’s dependency on foreign imports to meet the country’s military requirements. While India gained her Independence from the colonial British rule 73 years…