Standing Committee on Defence’s Prescription for increasing Capital Budget May Not Work

The Thirty-first Report of the Standing Committee on Defence (SCoD)1 was submitted to Parliament on 9 March 2017. The report examined the capital outlay for the defence services for the year 2017–18, procurement policy of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and defence planning. A glance through the report showed that, apart from a rather sketchy analysis of these issues, the committee has only ended up making hackneyed observations and recommendations that have been made repeatedly in the past without much success. This detailed perspective looks look at five of the 17-odd recommendations made by the committee, which relate primarily to allocation and utilisation of funds for capital acquisitions, and indicates that these recommendations are unlikely to produce any perceptible change in the current or the coming years. Further, it makes some suggestions as regards the role the committee could play in channelising the current narrative into a result-oriented plan of action.

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