Defence Budget

Like in the past several years, the defence budget for 2018-19 also grew marginally, with much of the growth being cornered by rising manpower cost.

• Laxman Kumar Behera
• February 02, 2018
• Issue Brief

Innovative ways will have to be examined and existing systems, practices and procedures need to be questioned for finding optimum solutions to relieve budget stress.

• Vinay Kaushal
• January 29, 2018
• Issue Brief

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.

• Amit Cowshish
• October 2017
• Journal of Defence Studies

Achieving the intended outcomes of the 13th five-year defence plan is critically dependent on the ability of the Ministry of Finance to increase the defence budget by at least 100 per cent from next year onward.

• Amit Cowshish
• July 31, 2017
• IDSA Comments

Indian industry, which is the intended beneficiary of this preference policy, needs to play a proactive role in facilitating the smooth implementation of the order.

• Amit Cowshish
• July 07, 2017
• IDSA Comments

Speaking at the United Service Institution on May 4, 2017, the Chief of the Army Staff said that India needs to spend much more on military modernisation to ensure that economic growth continues unhindered.

• Amit Cowshish
• May 08, 2017
• IDSA Comments

It is important to restore the functional self-sufficiency of the finance division of a ministry which handles 17-18 per cent of the total central government expenditure so that it could discharge its responsibilities without real or perceived pressures.

• Amit Cowshish
• March 21, 2017
• IDSA Comments

The basic challenge for defence economists is to demonstrate that there are other feasible ways of skinning the cat during budget formulation. But the challenge is also inextricably linked with the need for rationalisation of defence expenditure.

• Amit Cowshish
• March 14, 2017
• IDSA Comments

There is a strong case for abandoning the present approach of looking at the defence budget through the narrow prism of allocation and utilisation, and instead focus on outcomes.

• Amit Cowshish
• February 28, 2017
• IDSA Comments

The objective of asking these question should be to elicit information that generates a well-informed debate on, and facilitates the result-oriented monitoring of, the MoD’s handling of matters related to the defence budget.

• Amit Cowshish
• February 13, 2017
• IDSA Comments